/retro/ - Retro Computer General

Friendly reminder to check your local Library/College tech bins!

Rescued this guy from my local school. i386 - no idea the clock speed or anything specific, not even certain it turns on yet.

Recommended thread listening: rcrpodcast.com/

Other urls found in this thread:

dl.dafont.com/dl/?f=atari_st_8x16_system_font
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/S3_Graphics
twitter.com/SFWRedditVideos

I still wish they had those half-vertical cases

I don't think I know any school that keeps those things? Where do you live?

I wish that I had a horizontal chassi so I could have my monitor on it and get more comfy.

The UK. Probably part of some science thing that was taken apart. I need to turn it on and see if it doesn't burn my house down.

We used to hurl those things into the skip.
Some staff wanted to give them to the poorer kids so they could have a PC. But that would result in some sweaty truck-driver in a wife-beater demanding that we "fix" his free 386 so it could run his hacked copy of Crysis.

Just turned it on. No house fire, but sadly:
a) monitor doesn't pick up any signal (it isn't a CRT so it might not anyway)
b) doesn't sound like it's -doing- anything. The HDD gives a couple of customary clicks, but after that, nothing. No beep from the mobo either. Not sure how to proceed.

Make sure the PC speaker is connected
Pull the RAM

You should get beep codes.

You need the key

Picked up these two shitboxes for $5 each today, the Millennia looks like a pretty reasonable near-top end 1998 vintage box and I don't know much about the other one, probably an ex-486/33 or 66 with an AMD 5x86-133 upgrade. Hopefully it's got better shit in it than the 486/66 turned budget Pentium-133 shitheap I grabbed last week.

Post some guts shots, curious to see what's in it. Always loved those minitower cases.

It should output a signal to any run of the mill VGA LCD, it just might look like shit until Windows loads up. Try doing what the other guy said and pulling/testing the sticks, might need to do multiple sets of two or four if it won't work with one in it. It's also a good idea to disconnect extraneous shit that isn't needed for power-on like IDE controllers, sometimes conflicts or storage fuckups can prevent systems from POSTing for whatever reason.

That just locks the keyboard, doesn't stop it from booting. Really easy to pull it anyway.

Nicely done, they include the HDD too?

I've always kind of wanted to rip out the insides and put modern hardware in there.

I have a Thinkpad T23. Don't know what to do with it. Should I try eBay?

Found a server with a case like pic related two months ago. Decent case with shit loads of space (enough for 2 PSU's) and has that great 90's aesthetic. All solid steel minus the front facia. It'd use it as my main case had I not already bought one.

you trying to trigger us ?

Wasn't expecting it, but they both did. The newer box has presumably the original 6/8GB drive in it plus some 40GB piece of shit they threw in later on, just cracked open the older one and it's got a 540 MB dark-age Maxtor drive in it they must have thrown in as an upgrade along with a new clock chip and a sound card+optical drive in 1994.

It's a pretty good time to be looking out for candidate boxes. Don't kill anything cool though, of course.

What's the machine type? Should be an XXXX-XXX number/letter string next to the barcode on the bottom of the system. PIII laptops can be fun little toys.

Look wat I picked up in the woods for free

did I do good Sup Forums ?

anything good in it? gotten some pretty good shit in full tower beige boxes

The fuck was that doing in the woods?

A lot of models back in the day were shit.

I'm not advocating destroying the cooler ones, just the useless ones. Even then you're hardly destroying them.

What, how? Tech bins or garbage bins?

>What's the machine type?
TYPE 2647-2F3 S/N 78-XFL9C 06/02

there is a very small "village" garbage pile near my home in the woods and there was this thing, which is possibly the last thing you expect to be there and very few locals visit it.

I had to hide it until I came back with my wheelbarrow to roll it home thru the woods and the thing is in mint
and Is probably worth a LOT of money !

(one is selling on Ebay for over $1000 !)

probably the best score ever

A sony wega crt tv?

I, well my uncle had the very same box at least if not the guts inside. that one was 16Mhz, 33 when turbo was on

Like the dump in animal crossing?

Its actually a Sony FW-900 which is the best CRT monitor ever made, that user did good !

it looks so natural like that... you should have left it.

Unrelated but what's your guys' favorite "retro" feeling font?

This:
dl.dafont.com/dl/?f=atari_st_8x16_system_font

Nothing on that type in either the personal systems reference or Google, sure that's what it is?

Just curious exactly which T23 you've got, though really any of them are probably decent for messing around. I've got a bunch of P6-era laptops including a couple T22s running Windows 2000, still just fine for the textual web and the tons of applications you can get for them.

Did a fresh install 15 years ago and never touched it till now. Works nice but it can't find any repo...

lmao

Lucky fuck. This is basically the kind of thing I'm looking for but months of searching have been fruitless.

I wish old Linuxes were still usable, KDE 1.x is really nice and I've always wanted to really experience the early days of the free software scene.

Running Red Hat on a Pentium Pro box at the moment and it's basically fucking useless, considering sticking NT4 or Solaris on it instead.

Don't give up yet, they made millions of them.

Honestly don't really think you're missing out on much, though, those old tower cases and AT boards were god awful, I prefer OEM gear.

Sup guise i need a cool old pc case with alot of space, recommend me one plesae

If you find a copy of Unixware, give it a try. It's also useless, just like NT or Solaris... But it's a really nice System.

You can try CDE right now if you've got *nix.

That's a pretty good idea, I like Solaris' CDE implementation (other than the fucking World Wide Meme clock) a little more than vanilla but it really is absolutely fucking useless on x86 except for maybe development.

NT's actually surprisingly usable though, run it on all of my good 1996-1999 era stuff, NT4 is practically a more enterprise-y feeling Windows 95 with shit DOS/games compatibility but a rock solid foundation, I like it. If only stuff like wireless networking and USB weren't kludgy hacks.

not bad

It's dual CPU board but for old Socket 603 CPUs (only one CPU installed). Had 2GB of ECC DDR RAM which was nice. Some SCSI and RAID cards but they're old and have no drivers for anything after server 2003. HDD's were SCSI but they drilled them. The best bit was the Ultrium 232 tape drive but it appears to be broken. Diagnostics software reported some calibration error with the tape head.

Picture of it. Forgot that all drive face plates are missing too. The other huge case is the Proliant G5 ML350. Found that mofo in another skip. Could probably sell it for a good price but it weighs a ton.

sucks about the missing stuff but still sounds pretty nice especially if that board has an AGP slot, could have a bitchin' early 2000s workstation setup with that stuff

kek

...

PC Pentium 4 2.4GHz, ATI Radeon AX800 Pro
IBM Thinkpad 600E Pentum II 400MHz
Compaq Presario 1200 AMD K6 450MHz
Compaq Armada 7750MT Intel Pentium MMX 166MHz
Aristo FT4000 Intel i486DX 66MHz
what do you think about my little collection?

...

Also got this pretty thing the other day!

Really nice, what are the specs?

The PC is a BLUE CHIP (Hyundai rebrand) XT clone from the mid 80's, I have messed around with it a little, like adding a NEC V20 and 8087 math co-processor and EGA graphics card, with Hercules and CGA emulation and monochrome EGA, had an Hercules board originally, replaced the 5.25' drive with a black 3.5' one, it also has a working ethernet NIC to use with mTCP stack, still has original MFM 20MB hard drive and runs DOS 3.30. Want to find a memory expansion board for it in the future, right now it has 1MB with 512KB usable for the system, also a 8-bit ISA Sound Blaster or clone if I see one for cheap.

The little laptop is a Compaq Contura 430C, a 486DX4 with 8MB RAM, I had a visually exactly similar machine ages ago, a Compaq Armada, but that had a Pentium.
I also ordered a RAM upgrade for it, just happened to find one for cheap on eBay.

Pic related is the A600, too lazy to type.

That's a really cute one!

Man, I always wanted an Amiga.

Thanks! Yeah, they are awesome!

Also added a little fan the other day to the A600, cold as ice now!

Keep em cool and going!

Have you tested it already?

Topkek

I wish my PC could read my 5.25" drive.

I honestly don't know how I missed this thread, sorry guys.

IBM 5511. I found one for $60. Just the computer, no peripherals, not sure if it works past POSTing.

Would it be worth getting even if it's broken? I really like the case design. Would probably restomod if the internals are no good.

There are ways to accomplish that

If you really really want it, sure, it's not that expensive.
Unless the internals have corroded it's really hard for that old stuff to break.
Any more info about it?

I feel like I'd be fine having a retro machine around for the nostalgia if it were a laptop.

Get one?

From the ad:

"IBM jx(5511) 1984 vintage. When powered on POST beep sounds and fans spin up. Comes with keyboard cable. Front two clips that hold the front pannle on are broken. Floppy drives are untested."

Not much to go on, but I know that shipping is probably going to cost another $30-40, and I don't know if the guy will even want to bother.

So around $100 total? That's quite pricey, I know it's quite a rare one thought.
I usually only buy local ad's that go for a few bucks, not that crazy about rarity.

I'd say if you want exactly that machine, then you're probably going to have to get it.
If you want just a PC compatible from that time, I bet you can find better.

On another note, these guys arrived today.

Pentium I, 166 MHz, 24 MB RAM, 8 GB hard drive, just waiting on a PS/2 to 5-pin DIN adapter to arrive so I can use a keyboard with it. Should have Windows 95 running on it currently, along with a few classic games.

That's nice, great retro gaming machine!

Forgot the picture.

I'm more interested in the case than the guts, honestly. That aesthetic really appeals to me, though I'd like to find something in a similar style that's totally black. I might see if the guy will ship it.

Thanks, I got it for about AU$160 including the shipping with about 5 minutes left on the auction. It was stressful as fuck trying to get my old paypal account working.

Pic related is the graphics card, I honestly don't know what it is - up until now I've only known about nVidia, ATI, and a bit of VooDoo.

That's fucking brilliant!! I love the look of the early versions of KDE. Those fonts are great too. Really cool that it's been preserved untouched for so long.

Should i dig up and post my Pentium MMX laptop or my older still Toshiba laptop? Both still work BTW.

And here's the sound card. I think it's an ESS ES186X? Not sure if it's good, bad, or average. I'll just have to see how it sounds once I've got it hooked into my dad's old Marantz setup.

Yeah, KDE 1.x and 2.x where amazing in looks.

>Thanks, I got it for about AU$160 including the shipping with about 5 minutes left on the auction. It was stressful as fuck trying to get my old paypal account working.

You should really start looking into local stuff if you're interested in old computers like that, thrift stores, local ad's, places people bring their old shit to be recycled, ways to get those things for mere pennies.

>Pic related is the graphics card, I honestly don't know what it is - up until now I've only known about nVidia, ATI, and a bit of VooDoo.

Nice! It's a S3 Vision 968, written on the chip right there!
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/S3_Graphics

>Toshiba laptop
Does it have a orange monochrome LCD? I loved those! I used to have one when I was younger!

It's a SB compatible card with "meh" quality, nothing bad though.

nope, I think its a 16-bit color screen. I have no earthly clue what CPU the thing has, only that its about 2 inches thick, looks like a grey brick, and runs windows 95.

Just rescued a NEC PC-9821 laptop. Everything works great except the external 3,5 floppy. It tries to read them then this error message pops up. Any ideas what it means? Sorry for the godawful picture but I can't get a better one.

Is this really a thing now? Shit I got a fuckton of old parts. Do people pay money for this?

Ah, nice, but I already got my hopes up!

You must be new here, these threads existed for years, they were just gone for a while.

Those were the original plasma tech screens. Probably not many exist today due to burn in.

...

well, I dug it up anyways, its a Toshiba Satellite Pro 425CDT. I'm charging it now, and it should have sufficient charge to allow for startup in a couple of minutes.

Shockingly enough, the battery still holds charge, and a good amount (4hrs) of it too.

Try cleaning the drive and the drive cables with contact cleaner!

Yup, burn in used to be a quite big problem with them.

That's a cool looking thin!

>Shockingly enough, the battery still holds charge, and a good amount (4hrs) of it too.
That's amazing!

Heh a coprocessor socket? is that a 386 or 486 SX?

I though the 968 was just a GPU that S3 distributed to various vendors? I can't find much about the card with google, is all.

As for the thrift store stuff, pretty much everywhere has a policy of tossing out computers in this state. I might be able to find stuff at an e-waste centre, though.

Considering I'll be using this to play a wide range of 90s games, would it be worth looking at upgrading, or is it good enough for the job?

I also have a 5.25" floppy drive coming for this build so I can transfer files to whatever 80s-era computers I collect.

Oh, that's a cool looking laptop.

I'm doubtful of that 4 hour battery charge, though. I used to have a Dell Inspiron 4000, when the battery started to die it would state that it had ~3 hours of charge at 100%, but as soon as it went below about 80% it would crash hard. 80% to 0% took just a few minutes.

If it uses standard NiCad or LiPo cells you might be able to restore it, if it needs it.

>I though the 968 was just a GPU that S3 distributed to various vendors?
The card's all the mostly the same properties and drivers, same like a 980 Ti, does not matter if it's GIGABYTE or ASUS.

>Considering I'll be using this to play a wide range of 90s games, would it be worth looking at upgrading, or is it good enough for the job?
It's SoundBlaster compatible, so yeah, it's fine for old games.

>I also have a 5.25" floppy drive coming for this build so I can transfer files to whatever 80s-era computers I collect.
Smart move!

Here's the beast BTW. Aside from the drained battery it works fine. Sadly it has no USB ports, and since I have no fucking idea where the external floppy drive went I cant really move stuff to and from it.
I have no proper idea what the CPU is only that it is an old as shit Pentium and that the system has 40MB of ram.

4hr charge is tried and tested, and the battery is Li-Ion. I have 2 more batteries just like it floating around here somewhere and those also hold a pretty significant charge as well.

Pics of external floppy drive?
Might be PCMCIA drive?

See

Nope, its this wierd-ass port between the serial port and the PCMCIA slots. The external floppy plugs into there.

Gotta hate proprietary shit

Thanks a lot guys. I need to get some contact cleaner and I should try to learn some Japanese before using it more. The previous owner was about to send it to the scrapheap because the soundcard was 'dead' but it turned out he had turned the volume knob down....

Did I

how does it look ?

You could still probably get a PCMCIA floppy drive to work and transver USB update and drives to it and use a USB PCMCIA card.
Also one way would be to use Ethernet/Wireless PCMCIA card to transfer stuff.

There are also those really cheap USB multi adapters, then you just can transfer things directly to the hard drive, cheapest option.

That's fucking awesome!

>The previous owner was about to send it to the scrapheap because the soundcard was 'dead' but it turned out he had turned the volume knob down....

TOPKEK!