Your oldest piece of hardware

[Lindy]

Like a good many other geeks I put together my own computers. Over the years, and after several reiterations my machine has become a real frankenstein. Bits from here, bits from there, bits from everywhere! In it's current form the oldest component of my computer is the keyboard. It's one of those big heavy IBM jobs that was made in 1994. So fellow geeks what's the oldest component of your computer?

[sailor]

I have a Seagate 8 gig harddrive that I rescued from one of the compurters at work which is probaly 5-10 years old...it is the HD that I installed FC1 on....I still have all the computers I ever owned...3 and all still run....

[PeTzZz]

I have one working 3½" floppy drive in the cupboard that has a sticker with numbers 02.01.91. Is it possible that it means date? I bought it some time ago to put it into my sister's computer where the floppy drive is broken. It really looks very old.

[Prometheus]

I got a old 1 gig i got from a friend. They stopped making things smaller than that in like 96-97, so its at least that old. I cant remember what the QC date is, and im too lazy to unscrew it to look. Thats gotta be the oldest though, since i completely revamped the system in like sept.

[Jman]

I have a Gateway 2000 tower manufactured 9/3/93. It has a 83 MHz processor, a 400 MB and a 2.5 GB harddrive, a couple CD-ROM drives, a loud 250 MB tape drive, a 10 Mbs ISA network card, and the original keyboard. Just about every component has been upgraded. This system cost my family thousands of dollars (US) in its day.

It still runs. It ran Windows 95 for a long while and then 98 barely. Then I tried Redhat. It has run a webserver for more than a year now on 7.3. It has the longest uptime of any of our computers. 86 days is my personal record to beat.

I should get around to upgrading to Fedora one of these days.

[Prometheus]

That reminds me, my dad has an ancient 30 mhz laptop that was used by the city for the surveying team i think. A whopping 500 meg hard drive, a touch screen (the pen broke so we have to use a mouse now) and it takes about 3 minutes to load 3.1. Ahh, those were the days. Oh yeah, the original clock battery died, so the default date is august 23, 1991. Its gonna be an antique someday, and the only thing i ever use it for is to play solitare on long car rides.

[Ug]

*would like to place an objection to the term "fellow geeks" - I am not a geek*

Anyway, the oldest piece of hardware I have must be this CPU, a 450 from 1997. Mind you we've got an Amiga 600 still kicking around somewhere...

[i686]

I have 2x 250mb (yes MB) hard drives and 1x 120mb (yes MB) hard drive on the shelf..

Warranty expired way back in 1992 on them..

All 3 are in full working order, no bad sectors or anything..

i686

[sailor]

Ok, if not geeks then nerds...heheheh
I did have a Radio Shack/Tandy Mark IV...two 5 1/4 floppys and a whoopping 240,000 kb of memory
no hard drive...ran the OS off one disk ...and used other disk for programs...It worked fine...but I could not find software...I tried ordering it through Radio Shack..but they never could get anything although it was listed in the catalog...I don't know where it ended up...someone is probably using it for a doorstop...I think my ex-wife has it...

[hugo]

I have a Gateway 2000 with a 25MHz 386. I fire it up once and a while. It runs Windows 3.0 like a dream. I'll even play a little Kings Quest or Wolfenstien 3d once and awhile. A long while.
I also have one of those Macs with the 8inch b&w screens in a closet somewhere.

[ezeze5000]

I have an old 286/16mhz tower with 4mb of ram
mfm full size MFM 80mb hd, 1.2 mb floppy and a 360k floppy. This unit was once a server for a company. It now runs DOS 5.0 and a lot of old DOS games. I don't think I could get a useable version of linux to run on it.
I upgraded the video card to an isa vga, so some of the games would run. The original was a hercules.

[GallComp]

I have a 20 MB hard drive that I bought somewhere in the late 80's... That darn thing still working... I have it in a shelf but sometimes I jsut hook it up to see if it still runs...

Yeah I'm a geek...

[ckr]

As a hand-me-down I recently received a 486 processor computer with 16MB RAM that I believe had a 584MB hard drive. Got rid of most of that computer, but the hard drive is in one of my extra computers as a slave. It was running Win 95 first edition.

[fjleal]

I still have an old Spectrum, by Sinclair. Does anybody here remember the ZX Spectrum, with 48 KB ram? Now, that was computing!

[Jman]

We did have a 286 around for a while before we junked it. 20 MB hard drive and less than a meg of memory. Dual floppy drives, both old style and modern 3 1/2 inch. No idea when it was built.

For those feeling nostalgic, dosbox is a DOS emulator. Ironically it requires a fast machine to emulate a slow game, but at least you don't have to dual boot.