I have a Commodore 128D, a couple of CoCos and a Tandy Model 100 (a laptop that runs on AA batteries!) lying around gathering dust, but the last ancient machine I used for practical purposes was an Atari 800. I lucked up and found a teacher who was so excited to hear of one still working that he let me turn in a term paper printed on the plotter. 
Only the black worked though. It would’ve been cool to use all four pens.
LM
I have an old Pentium 75 notebook that I’m trying to find a use for. The battery is long since dead, the onboard mouse doesn’t work, its only got 8 megs or RAM, and its only working bay is filled with a 3.5" floppy drive. Still, after an hour of fiddling I managed to get and old Slackware version of Linux running on it. Any ideas?
Packard Bell 486SX-25, 4MB on board RAM, one SIMM RAM expansion slot, 260? MB HDD, on-board video, no sound or CD, 14" Monitor, running Win 3.1
It sure boots fast. I use it for budgeting and finance with MSWORKS spreadsheet application.
My computer turns seven this Chanuka. It was state of the art for exactly nine days, until they came out with Pentium II.
With its blazing 133 MHz Pentium I chip, it takes me 23-25 seconds to boot up Netscape, which I can’t run at the same time as my word processor without the computer getting positively glacial. (Yes, this causes my computer to slowly melt and slide down my desk, crushing papers into sand beaches as it goes ;))
I’ve got an old 486 in my office that I still use for papers and stuff.
Got a 586 as well. I’m on a Pent2 right now and fixin to beef up.
BUT…again BUUUUT I’ve got some old fossils around here I can’t seem to discard. My favorite is this old 8" tape drive IBM :eek: and an original Apple.
Also, Got a couple 5" floppydrive 186 & 286
anybody need any of this…I called a PCtek the other day…he allowed it was pretty worthless…damn shame.
The lab I work in is still tied up in a bunch of elderly computers. I am down to only one P-133, but we have some hardware piggybacked onto a mac 2CI and a 14MHz 286 that still gets used on a regular basis.
I have a Difference Engine in my basement that I mainly use for playing Quake and minor spreadsheet tasks.
Oh yeah, well I’ve got a slide rule in my desk drawer!
Hmmh…:p…beat that!
Before I bought a new G4 Power Mac in June 2000, I was still using my Mac IIsi bought in December 1990.
The day I shut it down for the last time, it still performed as reliably as it did the day I bought it. What finally made it obsolete (in my mind) was the web. I had no need of upgrading before this. It ran Mac OS 7.5, Word 5.1, Excel 4.0, and printed to a laser printer.
In 1996, I upgraded the hard drive from 80 MB to 500 MB, and increased the memory from 5 MB to 17 MB. There was no particular need to do the upgrade; but the cost was practically nil.
By the way, a slight nitpick, jjtm. The IIsi had a 68030 processor and ran at 20 MHz. Unless you had a huge monitor, it should have displayed “millions” of colors.
Ah, you must be running Linux on that. In Quake on timedemo 1 whats your fpd (frames per day)?
Maybe not counting because we barely use it but we have a really old IBM. No mouse, 5.25" floppy disks. However is could display up to 6 colors!! Maybe 10mhz, and about 11kb of ram. The only reason we haven’t trashed it is because we have the old text based Hitch Hiker Guide to the Galaxy game on a disk. So if I’m really bored I’ll go and play.
Wow! You have a slide rule?
I only gotta log table - and I had to build it out of a real log.
sniff
Not currently set up, but waiting patiently until I do so:
Mac SE/30, 16 screaming MHz, 9" mono monitor (last made some time in 1989)
I still have my old Apple IIGS. NO hard drive, 8mb Ram. I think it still works, it must date back to 1986?
