Back in 1985, my honorary grandparents bought a brand-spanking-new 486, with 64 megs of memory, solely for the purpose of running a specialized machine that deals hands of bridge (the card game), as they run a bridge school.
I had to fix it last year, replace a power supply and hard drive… and the darn thing is still chugging along. It cannot function on a computer that is any quicker - anything more than a 486 computes too fast for the machine to run.
They use that machine three times a week. For 20 years.
The LAN guys here at my work have an old Macintosh in thier office, circa 1983 or so. I think they tried to set it up on the network, but it couldn’t handle it. They keep it around because it’s funny to put it on the new guy’s desk before they set up his real computer.
I just replaced our NT4 PDC with a Debian/Samba box. It was running on newer hardware, however - IIRC, a P4 2.6.
We’ve got a couple of RS/6000 F50’s being used as everyday development boxes. They’re hooked up to a couple of 7133 model 20 SSA drawers, with 4.5GB drives. I think they’ve got Power 2’s, and they’re happily running AIX 5.1.
At work, we still have full NT 4 domain - NT4 servers with banks of 4 GB HDD RAIDed, a couple of hundred NT4 workstations etc. Not for much longer. At home I’ve got an old 386sx I drag out every now and then to play Wing Commander 2.
That’s wrong; the loss of ability to read 400K floppies is in the software (of Macs that were born with floppy drives; external USB floppies are like PC floppy drives and probably won’t read 800K or 400K diskettes).
I have a 7100. It can boot System 7.x and in that mode can read or format 400K diskettes; reboot in 8.1 or 8.6 and it spits them out contemptuously.
400K diskettes are formatted MFS (hi-level) while 800K, 1.4 MB, and hard disks are formatted HFS or (nowadays) HFS+; MFS had no true folders! It was a flat-file system!
AND you can format a hi-density diskette in a 400K drive. It won’t be as reliable as a true 800K or 400K (as if you could find a box of those!) but the drive itself, being ignorant of HD diskettes, will obligingly write track and sector info. To use those in later HD-capable Macs you’d have to tape over the hole that indicates its HD-ness.
I keep a 286 laptop around to program my older Motorola radios. I’d say it sees infrequent use but every once in a while, it does just what I need it to.
My first notebook, a firewire PowerBook from 2000, is still in regular use. I keep that one at home most of the time, sometimes running big downloads, and I occasionally SSH into it to grab some files from home. I’ve got an older computer, one of the first iBooks, that I got from my mother in law, but I don’t use it that often. I loaned it out to a friend for work when he needed a portable computer.
If I hadn’t moved around so much, I’d still have my Quadra 610 and my Commodore 64. I stupidly sold those. The Quadra went in 2000 when I moved to Japan.
Check here.*
September, 1986
Compaq Computer introduces the first 16-MHz Intel 80386-based PC, the Compaq Deskpro 386.
Apple Computer introduces the Apple IIGS, with the Apple 3.5 drive, for US$1000. It uses the Western Digital Center W65C816 (65816) microprocessor, operating at 1-MHz or 2.8-MHz.
Apple Computer releases AppleWorks 2.0.
Apple Computer introduces the Apple 3.5 drive for the Mac and the Apple IIGS. IBM announces the IBM PC-XT Model 286, with 640KB RAM, 1.2MB floppy drive, 20MB hard drive, serial/parallel ports, and keyboard for US$4000.
Quarterdeck Office Systems ships DESQview 1.3. *
The 486 wasn’t commercially available (and reasonably priced) till about '90.
Oh yeah, well, in that case my home computer is from 1998, as long as we define “computer” as the chassis and the floppy drive. Everything else has been changed out.
If you do all your grandparents IT work, check out Mo’Slo (or something similar). It’s purpose is to make the CPU appear slow for programs that run too fast on the new equipment.
The oldest system I actively use is a Sun Ultra 1. I think they were introduced around '97. As for PCs, my daughter has an old Gateway laptop with a P-II 233 & 192MB RAM.
If I waited until this afternoon to answer, I would have to say, “About 4 hours.” But at the moment, it’s probably about 3 years since I did a motherboard and CPU upgrade (as opposed to a CPU upgrade I did a few months ago). But I still have a floppy drive that’s probably close to ten years old. It’s going into my new computer, along with my DVD-ROM drive, which is probably five years old. Everything else will be replaced today. YAY! New computer!
Yeah, that’s the one. I recently cannibalized a friend’s early white iBook for the RAM and HD. Now it’s got 512MB RAM and a 20GB HD. Much snappier than the 320MB and 6GB it had before. The battery is basically non-existent, but it still chugs along just fine connected to an outlet. That was my only computer until about two years ago when I got my G4 PowerBook, so it provided perfectly acceptable performance for over 4 years. When I first got it, benchmarks had it as one of the fastest laptops around, which may help to explain the longevity. I expect the thing to still work for another few years.
Depends how you define the age of a computer, maybe even how you define the identity of an object. My desktop machine, which I use daily (and from where I’m typing this message now), went through it’s last major upgrade a few years ago, but I first bought it in 1992. Back then it was originally a 25mhz 386 with 2 megs of RAM and a 130 meg hard drive. It’s a real-life Ship of Theseus, almost every single part has been changed at some point, piece by piece. The only original components remaining are the floppy drives (it still has a 5.25" drive, though it’s only a curiosity at this point) and the floppy cable.
I think it’s reached the end of the line, though. So many parts have to be changed at it’s next upgrade that I think I’ll just buy a whole new computer. I’d like to build it into a MAME cabinet.
No, no. Same mother board too. As soon as the mother board changes, it’s a new computer in my mind. I think that’s the dividing line to me. Like a car … same body, same engine = same car. You can change out the car’s computer, radio, battery, tires, etc., but it’s the same car.
It occurs to me I ought to mention it’s current configuration. It’s presently an AMD Athlon, 2.1 Ghz, 1 gig RAM, 120 gig HD, and running Win98SE. It’s interesting to note that it has about double the video RAM (256 MB) as it’s first hard drive.
I bow to your wisdom. I would have sworn that I was fixing that machine earlier, but it could have been 87 or 88. They DID pay a fortune for the little bugger, though… something like $3,000.