Who else is into vintage IBM and vintage Mac computers?

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ibmat5170
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28 Jan 2018, 5:22 am

I find myself obsessed with vintage IBM and IBM compatibles from the 1980s and very early 1990s as well as high-end vintage Macs of the day, such as the Macintosh II fx, the Macintosh SE / 30 and the Quadra 950. My favorite IBM of all time is the IBM Personal Computer AT 5170. I can't actually afford any of these machines as if you look on eBay its an expensive hobby and these things are rare to find. I often find myself fantasizing (non sexually) about what it must have been like to be involved in the computer industray during this booming time. I absolutely LOVE 5.25 floppy disks and I even put a 5.25 floppy drive in my computer that runs windows 7. I just cannot help but wish that technology had stopped progressing in 1990 and we were all still using dial up modems and floppy disks and this horrible "cloud" fad where you don't own anything had never started. Anyone else feel the same>?



Eurythmic
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28 Jan 2018, 7:32 am

Various things stir up a sense of nostalgia and at times catch me unawares.

Boot-up sounds of an old PC, the POST beep, the hum of the floppy drives. The sound of a dial up modem doing it's handshake stirs up a feeling of excited anticipation. The uh-oh sound of an ICQ message.

On the other hand I'm very grateful for what we have now. Gigabytes of RAM, terabytes of storage space, no messing about with slow floppy drives with limited capacity. Ultra fast wifi and mobile data means I can sit on the couch with my laptop, out and about with the iPhone or lying in bed with the iPad. The internet is now a very powerful tool, unlike when I first got 'net access in 1994 when it was mostly text and accessed through an infuriatingly slow 300bps dialup.

So while I appreciate the old stuff for nostalgia's take, I'm very grateful for where we're at now and wouldn't want to go back!!



SH90
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28 Jan 2018, 9:19 am

I still use IBM, now only Lenovo branded ThinkPads... But I strongly despise Windows downhill departure since XP that I may switch to Mac this year. Considering I already have iPhone, iPad, and Apple Watch.



ibmat5170
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29 Jan 2018, 3:01 am

Lucky you SH90, that you can afford those things.

I have to say that the older computers did it better. I had more career options then. If this were 1989, there would be no YouTube showing people how to replace a hard drive or add RAM to their computer. People would still be scared to break their $3,000 + machines and I could get away with charging an arm and a leg for labor for tasks that are relatively simple.

That's not the only reason though that I long for those days. Desktop cases were built much stronger and there is no argument that IBM made a strong keyboard with the Model M. Adding hardware used to be so much more fun as well. And who doesn't miss floppy disks. I hate digital software distribution. I don't like the idea that Google or Amazon can just shut down my account and prevent access to everything, if I say... violate their terms of service. In the good old days, you'd have disks. Good luck prying disks out of my cold Kung-Fu grip. About the only thing I don't miss is dial-up. If I could have had a 10 Mbps connection on my Tandy 1000TL, MEOW MEOW MEOW I would have been happy.



LegoMaster2149
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15 Feb 2018, 1:28 pm

Vintage stuff is one of my obsessions.

-LegoMaster2149 (Written on February 15, 2018)



Ichinin
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15 Feb 2018, 2:22 pm

No, but i have a tonne of Commodore home computers. Have been thinking of expanding to Commodore PCs and maybe get a Mac Classic at one point. There is a Commodore 286 laptop for sale right now on eBay really cheap that is even WORKING, shown running Norton commander on it.

I'm not very interested in actual IBM machines, they were beige and boring, couldn't do anything except run lotus 123 and go *beep* while Amigas could play small frame videos and play sampled music.

But before i expand into collecting another brand/type of computer, i need to recap all my machines (replace capacitors that usually go BOOM or leak electrolytic fluid onto the motherboard) and also fit heatsinks to the Chips/CPUs to make these old computers last longer. I've only done a few heatsink fittings things yet, dunno how recapping will work since my hands are rather shaky at my age and surface mounted caps are REALLY small, it's hard even with a magnifying glass.

A tip for any vintage computer collector is to future-proof your boxes like that. There are people who do it regularly so if you can pay a few bucks for the caps and the time, you can get it done safely. It will add around 30 more years of operation to your computer, until the capacitors need to be replaced again.


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30 Mar 2018, 11:09 am

Still holding out with old Pentium 4 PCs and Windows XP here. I bought a couple of spare boxes second-hand when everybody else was moving on to "better" things. It's mostly for functional rather than aesthetic reasons - I've developed a lot of skills with XP, and don't want those skills made redundant. Nor do I want to pay a second time for programs to replace my legacy software. And I don't want an operating system that's programmed to stalk me and target me for ads.

A big dealbreaker for me is the loss of the old BIOS on many of the cheaper new machines. That bothers me a lot because it nobbles all traditional 3rd-party backup / restore boot discs, and they're brilliant at fixing practically anything that can go wrong with the OS or software. But now we're getting this UEFS thing shoved onto us, and the ability to switch to legacy booting is quietly being withdrawn. Windows purports to provide its own system restore, but it's not complete, and if the OS gets corrupted, it might not work at all, while an external 3rd-party method such as Norton Ghost does the trick every time. When you know you can fix ANY non-hardware problem, you can try anything you like without fear of wrecking your computer permanently.

Of course XP won't be able to surf the Web forever, or run new software and hardware. Hopefully by the time it's become a significant issue, I'll have found a new one and somehow stopped it from being a liability. But there's a lot to know before I get there.



Eurythmic
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07 Apr 2018, 6:40 am

Ichinin wrote:
But before i expand into collecting another brand/type of computer, i need to recap all my machines (replace capacitors that usually go BOOM or leak electrolytic fluid onto the motherboard)


It's been my experience that about 90% of failures in desktops has been due to electrolytic caps failing, either as a fizz or a full on mini explosion with the resulting distinctive smell which I disturbingly find somewhat nice. Then when replacing the failed cap I find that most or all of the others are also bulging on top " capacitor plague". I replace these at the same time. I've never had to solder surface mount components, I suspect it would be just as difficult as it looks if not more.

Like Tough Diamond, Win XP was the last MS OS I got to know. Windows really lost the plot after this and released a series of horrors (Win 7 is an exception). I can certainly do without the dramas and insidious stalking that goes with Win 10!