Oldest Computer, still functioning (pissing contest)

  • Thread starter LoudMusic
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My parents picked up a commodore from a garage sale a few years back. That was my oldest ever still functional pc.

In the house, my oldest is a 333mhz laptop. Only thing it needs is a new hard drive b/c the old one is completely dead. I can still run linux off of cd though 👍
 
My old laptop is a 200mhz MMZ machine that runs windows 98, and Office XP (granted, it's only Excel and Word).

2 gig hard drive, with 64 megabytes of ram.

Yes, it's fully funcational as is, and can be booted up on a daily basis. 3 1/2" floppy, and a PCMCIA slot. 9600baud modem and a 12" screen.

I've done notepad HTML encoding on it for my webpage. Transfered it to 3 1/2" uploaded it at work.

Circa 1995. Yes, newer than yours, but mine boots up ;)

If I ever wanted to.

AO
 
mine does too... as long as it's not using the onboard hdd.

I can't believe that the manufacturing process back then was so bad. Right now, all the screws on the bottom are completely stripped bare and that laptop has NEVER been opened. I couldn't take it apart if I ever wanted to :(
 
Ooohhh, old laptops are cool. "Luggables" we call them now. A friend of mine had a Toshiba with an internal power supply. It used one of those standard base powercords like you use on desktop computers. My dad had an old IBM ThinkPad that ran Windows 3.11 'For Workgroups'. It didn't have a CD Drive so I imagine it was pretty old. 486 for sure, pre-Pentium.

The oldest computer I've ever layed hands on was an Altair in a plywood box.
 
I still use a Micron 180 Mhz Pentium Pro dating back to the mid/late-nineties for some testing.

It has a 3 gig hard drive, 96 MB ram, and runs Fedora Core 2.

Before that, I had a Zenith 386 with a 800 MB hard drive running Windows NT 4.0. Computer was from 1990-ish, but I got rid of it in 1998. I actually remember writing C programs on that thing.
 
We had/have an awesome PC from Tiny. 120Mhz, 16 Mb ram, 1 gig HDD, 8x CD-ROM. 'Aftermarket' 4.5 gig HDD, CD writer and 56k modem :D

We had a 486 before that running 3.11. Classic games such as SpeedBall and Civilisation would be regularly played. We've also still got our old Amstrad in the house somewhere. A classic machine to be true. Couldn't do anything, but we had some sweet games such as Indiana Jones, BTTF, Turtles etc. Had a tape driven BBC before that too. Loved that machine.
 
I can deploy no less than 5 working Mac IIcis, each with 25mhz 68030 processor, 8mb of RAM, a 40mb hard drive, 800k floppy, a 13" color monitor driven by a 1mb NuBus video card, System 7, and Word/Excel 3 for Macintosh. These were built in 1989.

I had a working Mac II with 16 mhz 68020 processor, 2mb of RAM, and a 100mb hard drive (bought new in 1987 at well over $6000 for the package) until last year when the power supply crapped out.
 
VTGT07 -- Does it boot? Can you "use it"?

sUn -- Your computer has more memory than most of the computers in this thread have for hard drive space. You are disqualified (:

Duke -- Hot damn, you're looking good so far.

I suggest you all play with some old crappy hardware at some point in your life. Learn to appreciate "plug and play", PCI, AGP, lots of memory and plenty of CPU cycles. Large full color displays and fast internet connections. I think the youth today are missing out on that. They take too much computing power for grantid. The same can be said for cars, I suppose. People are born into a world where a 200 HP car can be had for less than ten grand. If you go back twenty years a 200 HP car not only cost more than ten grand, they were RARE.

And laptops with batteries that last more than an hour? HA ha ha haa ...
 
LoudMusic
And laptops with batteries that last more than an hour? HA ha ha haa ...
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My laptop is 1 and a 1/2 years old and the battery lasts about 15 to 20 minutes (depending on weather the computer is just sitting there or if i am using it....) :grumpy:
 
skip0110
My laptop is 1 and a 1/2 years old and the battery lasts about 15 to 20 minutes (depending on weather the computer is just sitting there or if i am using it....) :grumpy:
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DUDE! That's horrible! I assume it's a Windows / Intel computer? You may want to reinstall everything from scratch - possibly even purchase a new battery. Something is causing it to loose power prematurely. Most likely you have all kinds of spy / ad ware running and it's making your machine use more power than it should be.
 
LoudMusic
VTGT07 -- Does it boot? Can you "use it"?
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Yes it does boot. All the applications and everything still work, however, just about the only thing it is good for is playing Dangerous Dave. Even the printer which came with it still works.
 
That's freaking amazing. So what's it do on a regular basis? Just collect dust? You could box it up and store it for another decade or so and it might be worth a bunch of money.
 
LoudMusic
That's freaking amazing. So what's it do on a regular basis? Just collect dust? You could box it up and store it for another decade or so and it might be worth a bunch of money.
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Yeah its currently boxed up in our attic. I took it out two weeks ago when I was home for spring break and ran an extension cord up there and powered everything up, played around a bit on it, and then put it back in the box because it's so freaking slow. I was pretty surprised that it still booted up being 23 years old.

edit:
2005-1982=23, not 13 :dunce: :ouch:
 
the_cobbinator
A Commodore 64 :)

Thank you, spring cleaning.
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Same here, what are they like Mid Eighties? I mean i've had it since I was well very young. Also I still have my old apricot 386 with 2mb of ram and a 40mb hdd, with cga monochrome screen. Although it could play prince of persia like a champ. I also cut my teeth on dos with it, although I couldn't get hold of a version of windows for it well any software for it because I didn't have any money to buy it.
 
LoudMusic
DUDE! That's horrible! I assume it's a Windows / Intel computer? You may want to reinstall everything from scratch - possibly even purchase a new battery. Something is causing it to loose power prematurely. Most likely you have all kinds of spy / ad ware running and it's making your machine use more power than it should be.
Click to expand...
I think the CPU throttling (laptops are supposed to do this when running on battery, right?) never really worked right because the ACPI/software interface is not right somehow.

In any case, it is an Alienware, they are not know for their reliability or their convenience...
 
Similar to Duke, I have a Mac IIsi that was apparently the cheaper alternative to the IIci. It still works and is used every once in awhile to print address labels. It's currently the oldest computer in the house. I'm surprised that it still works considering we purchased it around 1992ish (well over 13 years ago).

We also have a Beige 233 mhz G3 that runs that dreadful operating system known as Mac OS 9.2.2. It crashes so much that I bought my own computer because I was sick of dealing with the crashes. It'd probably be a little more stable on OS 8.5.
 
My mom works at home, as a Medical Transcriptionist, and even though most people in her field use better computers, She still uses WordPerfect 5.1. A very basic word processing program made in 1985. But her computer is pretty old though. Still has ISA slots!

Anyway, these are her computers stats:

Pentium 166 (Socket 5)
48mb of RAM
32X CD-rom that dosent even work.
2 gig HD
ATI RAGE 4mb PCI video card
Windows 98SE

But, We did have and older PC that crapped out on us a year ago...

Intel 486
20mb of RAM
No CD-Rom
Some old graphics card
700mb hard drive

Yeah, that old 486 was good for Wolfenstein. :)
 
Have an OLD 486 up in the attic somewhere, I should go dust it off and see if it will run Windows.

It would take like 10 minutes to open a game of solitare, and wouldn't boot into windows unless you told it to.

Good times...
 
Pfft. You lot all suck.

My father uses an IBM PC AT. Oh yes. An 8086 device running at an awesome, and quite incredible 8MHz. With 512KB RAM, and a 20MB hard drive (of which 11MB is still free). Purchased in, I believe, 1982. It's not his everyday machine, but he still has recourse to fire it up to reference old material that we never bothered converting. Strangely enough, Windows 2000 Pro isn't too keen to run the dodgy DOS apps.

Internally, it has a hard drive with external electronics. Oh yes, this sucker pre-dates IDE! It weighs about 15Kg as well. It rocks. Screen is a 12" green jobbie. Don't talk to me about graphics cards - it pre-dates CGA.

My Dad rules this competition!

My oldest computer that's still functioning is a Compaq ProLiant 800 server with a single Pentium Pro processor. Runs Red Hat Linux 8 quite happily.
 
You lot are way out my league. My Dad updates computers often. The oldest one he hasn't updated is an Dell Inspiron 7500, 800mhz (I think), 128mb ram, 20gb hard drive, 8mb graphics.

I thought this computer was as slow as hell. What about yours!
 
GilesGuthrie
My oldest computer that's still functioning is a Compaq ProLiant 800 server with a single Pentium Pro processor. Runs Red Hat Linux 8 quite happily.
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Gotta love those old Scumbaqs !... We have a Proliant 1500 here at wrrk. Quad P.Pro 166Mhz w. 768 megs of ram.. That would've set you back a pretty penny back in they days.. It's running SCO OpenServer 5.0.5 - and I'm fairly sure I can do a complete re-install in less than an hour**.. God I'm ancient...

**IF I can find the media that is...
 
Not the oldest in this thread by far, but I've got the stuff to build a working P2-450 (everything is verified working, I just have no reason to keep it assembled), I've *got* a working 466 Celeron in a Gateway prototype board, I could put the dual PII-Xeon (dual 400s) back together, I could also put a working dual 450 PIII together, and I'll have a working 550MHz AMD K7 ES when I get around to changing the caps on the stupid Abit Slot A board I've got.

Oh, and I've got two 667MHz Itaniums sitting in boxes in my dorm room. They were $15 each. I couldn't pass up a deal like that... $30 to own two of the worst chips in the history of computing. It's just a pity I haven't been able to find an Itanium board and VRMs on Ebay... I'd like to get those things running, if only so I can laugh at how slow it is.

One of these days though... one of these days when I'm feeling less sane than normal, I'm going to buy a quad Xeon (PII or PIII... there's nfw I'm paying the admission fee to join the quad P4 Xeon or quad AMD Opteron club) or P-Pro machine.
 
My dad has 2 Pentium 166MHz comps from 1996 that have been used on a daily basis since he got them (one of them was my old comp). And if we still had it, I guarantee you the old Commodore 64 would still be running.
 
Geeky1
Oh, and I've got two 667MHz Itaniums sitting in boxes in my dorm room. They were $15 each. I couldn't pass up a deal like that... $30 to own two of the worst chips in the history of computing. It's just a pity I haven't been able to find an Itanium board and VRMs on Ebay... I'd like to get those things running, if only so I can laugh at how slow it is.
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I thought Itaniums were one of the first CPU's to have 64 bit processing...I thought they didnt sell all that well because they were too expensive, or the Pentium II/III Xeon was better.
 
The fact that they are 64-bit doesn't make them better. The Itanium is a piece of s**t. It is not x86 compatible, which means it can't run off-the-shelf versions of Windows, Unix, Linux, or any of the programs that they run... Microsoft actually created a special version of Windows XP Pro that would run on the Itanium, but they recently stopped development and support for it.

And, to top off the proprietary architecture and the insane price, the Itanium is slower than hell. Een though it's 64-bit, a 667MHz Itanium will get its ass handed to it on a platter by 400MHz P2. And a P3. And the P2 Xeon. And the P3 Xeon. And the K7 Athlon... And the Celeron, etc. etc. ad infinitum.
 
GilesGuthrie
Pfft. You lot all suck.

My father uses an IBM PC AT. Oh yes. An 8086 device running at an awesome, and quite incredible 8MHz. With 512KB RAM, and a 20MB hard drive (of which 11MB is still free). Purchased in, I believe, 1982. It's not his everyday machine, but he still has recourse to fire it up to reference old material that we never bothered converting. Strangely enough, Windows 2000 Pro isn't too keen to run the dodgy DOS apps.

Internally, it has a hard drive with external electronics. Oh yes, this sucker pre-dates IDE! It weighs about 15Kg as well. It rocks. Screen is a 12" green jobbie. Don't talk to me about graphics cards - it pre-dates CGA.

My Dad rules this competition!

My oldest computer that's still functioning is a Compaq ProLiant 800 server with a single Pentium Pro processor. Runs Red Hat Linux 8 quite happily.
Click to expand...

*Gasp*

Hands down your father is the victor. All he has to do now is post to the forum from that machine and I will ship the trophey (:

On to this ProLiant 800 with a Pentium Pro. I beleive I had two of those nasty things at work. They were Compaqs with P Pro 200mhz and about 128MB of memory. I don't remember the model number but 800 seems about right. I think the first one got flung into the dumpster a good three to four years ago. The last one got tossed just a couple months ago. Good riddence! Compaq is evil. The only thing good coming from Compaq / HP these days are their laser printers.
 

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