I have an HP all-in-one desktop that was originally purchased in 2010. I’ve doubled the memory, upgraded the hard drive and DVD drive, replaced the keyboard and mouse, and installed Windows 10. For the most part it works well, although it’s useless for the first five or ten minutes after you turn it on. If Windows 10 gets to be too much for it, I’ll switch it to Linux.
I have an iPad Mini from 2012 that still works okay, but I don’t use it for much beyond playing music, podcasts, and audiobooks. I also have my Dad’s old first-generation iPad, but I only use that for simple games like Freecell and sudoku. Seems like every time I fire up one of those old iPads, I get a message telling me that I can’t continue using this-or-that app unless I upgrade iOS, which of course I cannot do.
I wonder what happened to all the Kaypro 2s out there. Those things were built like tanks (but that keyboard was no picnic).
Add me to the list of people with a C64, plus the disk drive, but I have no idea if it still works as it’s been decades since it’s been plugged in. As for modern era PCs, my oldest is a win 98 laptop, but not sure if that one will boot either. I wish I had kept mt TI99 and Sinclair, but those got trashed while i was still a kid.
My oldest is my IBM Thinkpad 701C with 486-75Mhz chip, running Windows 95. It’s the model with the expanding keyboard. Next oldest is my PC-110, and old palm top they didn’t officially release outside Japan.
I have a pair of Macintosh SE computers in my “computer museum”, running System 6.0.8; they date back to 1987. I have them one of them on my LAN although I’m having TCP stack issues with it — sometimes it links and sometimes it doesn’t. AppleTalk over the same hardware (a Dayna SCSI to Ethernet bridge converter) works reliably.
This was the first computer that I owned (bought it used around 1992). Neither of these physical specimens, but the model, I mean. I had preserved backups of the HD all these years and so I’m running the environment (mostly) that I ran back then.
I still have a vintage 1994 PowerMac 100. I use it on occasion for some old database stuff and a couple of arcade games. The 500 Mb SCSI drive is failing but I might try and replace it. System 7.5.3.
A simple, original IBM PC (128kb memory with 2 160kb floppies) is almost mundane here - still use it occasionally for the hell of it as it runs WordStar and prints to a daisy wheel printer so excellent print quality - even if the ‘x’ stalk has broken off the daisy wheel
Instead, a little wonder provided by work in 1989 - The Poqet PC.
Runs MS-DOS 3.3, is 7 inches wide, has a full width, slightly more than half height screen (25 lines rather than 40) and can run any standard PC DOS application of the time. It still works perfectly and is in use every couple of months when a particular maintenance schedule comes up.
… and, in normal use, it’ll run for over 2 weeks on 2 AA batteries.
Whenever I upgrade I give my old computer to someone in need so I don’t have any old stuff that I previously bought.
But…my stepmom recently gave me a 2000 era Mac PowerBook that belonged to my late father. Unfortunately it doesn’t have a power supply and those are hard to come by. None of the local computer repair shops have them. At some point I’ll get one on eBay and look at what’s on there, delete anything personal and sell it to a collector.
Haha, nice. Actually, I had the PC-5 variant, which give you the advantage of a useable keyboard, but it folded up and was quite compact. It was otherwise essentially the same machine, but some attention had been paid to ergonomics.
The top keyboard was a membrane affair and didn’t offer great feedback, but it was better than the cheap-o Sinclair membrane keyboard. The bottom half was a rubbery chiclet affair that was pretty good.
(The weirdest old computer I had was the aforementioned Nabu development system. Mainly because Nabu itself was pretty weird.)
I’m proud to say that the oldest computer in my home right now is an i5-4590 system I refurbed and my youngest took a like to so we decided to keep it rather than resell it as I intended. I’m proud to say this because I just unloaded several older systems that had been hanging around including a 2009 i7-860 and a Xeon x3450 of about the same age. I’m finally down to only systems that we’re actively using in the house.
The oldest computer anyone in my family has got is the tower PC I built for myself back in 2015. The case is new enough that I could swap out the Mobo, HD etc. with newer hardware and declare it a “new” PC. What makes it “old” is the fact that it’s running Win 8.1 and has only a 1 TB hard drive, which is feeling a bit crowded these days.
My son and I built him his first PC about 3 years ago and it’s going strong. Win 10 and a 2 TB hard drive. Mysteriously, his hard drive went bad and we needed to replace it. I bought him a new 2 TB drive and we rebuilt his OS and apps there. He can still copy files over from his older drive, but it could not be used to boot the machine up. I don’t see hardware failures of that type very often.
But my friend Bill beats many of us here. He’s still got an Apple computer from the late 1980’s. Not sure if it’s an Apple ][ or what. He’s still got the old floppy disks, old drives, old green monitor. I remember when we were roommates in about 1990 he used this for typing his term papers, etc. How / why he kept it is beyond me; kudos to him for still maintaining it (in his current basement).
I still have the installation 3.5" floppies for Windows 3.1 and DOS 6.0 from my first x86 PC I got in 1993, a 386 DX40. Sadly, I don’t have the machine anymore, I gave it to my girlfriend when I got a Pentium 3 years later. I’d love to still have it.
I have an 8" IBM Floppy from a System 38 OS install. I keep it as just an oddity.
Actually, I might not have it anymore, somehow it may not have made the move. So I had an 8" Floppy up until about 6 months ago. I might still have it somewhere.
I recycled most of the older computer equipment I had about 2 years ago. Zip drives, a 386 from AT&T/NCR, lots of floppies and parts.
I used to have a 286 with 3.11 until an idiot stole it out of a storage locker. It’s only been about 12 years since it was last fired up, though. I needed to pull some data off of a five-inch floppy and get it onto a 3.5-in. which, in turn, was put into the Pentium I was using then for transfer onto a thumb drive.
I have a 2001 Apple iMac G3 Indigo in the storage unit. It has all the upgrades to the operating system that were available, and Wi-Fi. I probably put as much memory into it as it would take, but I don’t remember.
Also in the storage unit, I have my first laptop, circa 1997 or 1998. As I recall, it has a 233 mHz processor.
