Computer nostalgia - Post your relics!

[OVERKILL]

Meant to say too that you really have some RISCy aspirations

I had it in my head too after I got the Sun to get an Alpha as I had PowerPC, MIPS, and SPARC covered. One never quite materialized for a price I wanted to pay.

I do have some older x86 DECs. I actually have a personally owned one with a 200mhz PPro. I bought it as part of a lot of spare parts, manuals, and tools for Hewlett Packard 5890 gas chromatographs(which I’ve run a now mostly inactive business serving and maintaining). The computer came from someone else in independent service, and he had it set up as his test bench computer for HPIB computers. It has licensed software on it to run the 5890/6890, the 1050 and 1100 HPLC, and the HP UV-Vis specs. I have it at work now running an HP 8452b UV-Vis.

On the RISC front, one of my others on my want list is one of the PowerPC IBMs. They’re not at all common and there’s not much in the way of real software for them, but they’re the only computers I’m aware of that can run NT 3.5 for PowerPC. Incidentally, I’m at a loss as to what MIPS computer can run Windows NT, as SGIs can’t.

When I was in grade 9 in the early 90's I got sent to the local uni's CS department, which was a program arranged by my HS computer teacher. The room I was given access to had a 486 DX2/66 with OS/2 Warp, a few other PC's and a pair of DEC Alpha boxes with massive (probably 21", but they seemed huge) Trinitrons that they fed in greyscale. That was my first ever exposure to a *nix GUI and X and I remember it fondly to this day, hence the desire to own one.

When I did my network engineering programme at college, we had an SGI O2 and I was the only person who knew Unix in the whole class, lol. So I'd use that for a good chunk of the day. Of course the Octane is a more powerful box, so I'd prefer one of those.

Mid-to-late 90's, my dad's department at the uni he taught at had a decent computer room and when I first walked in to mess about, there was my old friend digital! Though it wasn't an Alpha box, it was x86 (Pentium 200 MMX IIRC). There was also a MASSIVE 486 DX4/100 tower, thing hand to be over 3ft tall, remember those huge full tower cases? Classic.

 

[spasm3]

I wish I had saved my Texas Instruments TI-99/4A

 

[SammyChevelleTypeS3]

There was also a MASSIVE 486 DX4/100 tower, thing hand to be over 3ft tall, remember those huge full tower cases? Classic.

How things change! In the early 1980s I was operating the CCR in a major chemical plant power house & high pressure reactor unit. We had just transitioned from the ancient pneumatic control rooms/boards to what they said at the time was state of the art (real expensive) Honeywell control systems. We had an army of contractor Techs and IT people crawling all over the place for initial start up.
This CCR had three different field processing units that three operators ran things with from three separate control board monitoring stations. You sat at the desk with actually 6 to 8 stacked 13in tv screen monitors with one main 25in screen at top each that were scanning the unit outside asyou operated it. Each monitor had about 300"pages" you had to memorize or you had a book to find what was found on what monitor page! Tough at first. Each "page" had about 12 separate item displays for one to control or monitor.
The thing I will never forget is even in the hottest summer time, you had better bring a heavy winter coat with you to work in there for a 12 hour shift. I was tasked as "building owner" in addition to running one of the units on my crew and was trained to operate the boiler + HVAC room that controlled the temp for the control room + all of the offices in that building. Talk about wacky system. We had A/C system that was designed and set to blow full on, ice cold 24x7. The temp was controlled from that boiler room with a hot water system with pumps, expansion tanks that supplied steam or condensate to the heat exchangers mounted inside the duct work. If for any reason that heating system went down for repairs or even scheduled work, you had to be on the ball and get it turned over ASAP because it really could get down in the low 40dg temps. That wild system had nothing to do with the central command/control center room. The CCC was a giant glass enclosed room that was the exact same size as the control room the operators worked in and adjacent to the control room for easy 24hr monitoring. CCC room was full of the 8ft tall computer controller banks that ran from one end to the other end of the room. It kinda looked like a library's rows of shelves with books. I cant recall just how cold but that room itself was at least kept somewhere between 45 to 50dg! They had the biggest HVAC system just outside to control the temperature of the control center. We had emergency phone and pager numbers for 3-4 contacts in case any little thing went wrong with that temperature controlled room. There was even temperature controlled alarm and interlock systems on the equipment that was powered and controlled from that control center. In event of HVAC system failure or temp spike to certain degrees within so many minutes the entire plant would start to go into emergency shutdown safe mode. Glass walls & doors, specially controlled temp systems and piped in Emergency Haylon systems for fire protection all for those controller banks. You had to put on not only the coats hung by the doors but you also had to put on special face masks with 5 min breathing air escape packs to enter the room. What is real eye opening on the leaps and bounds technology has made in the years since is that those same chemical units today are controlled by a equipment control center a fraction of the size of that first command/control center of the early 1980s. It makes one wonder just how far AI + all the latest , almost daily new innovations we keep being told about (plus the confidential ones) are going to take modern man. Plus just how dangerous some of this stuff we are inventing can be.

 

[bunnspecial]

Mid-to-late 90's, my dad's department at the uni he taught at had a decent computer room and when I first walked in to mess about, there was my old friend digital! Though it wasn't an Alpha box, it was x86 (Pentium 200 MMX IIRC). There was also a MASSIVE 486 DX4/100 tower, thing hand to be over 3ft tall, remember those huge full tower cases? Classic.

The DEC you're describing I'm pretty sure is the same one I have. I'll get a photo of it when I go into work next week.

A lot of our analytical capabilities I've financed/bought out of my own pocket(with zero institutional support) and both the computer itself and in the instrument it's running are things I personally own.

I only have a single full tower in storage, but it's an interesting one it its own right. As such things go, it has to be pretty new to be the full tower FF, and I think it's ATX, not AT. It actually has dual PIII Xeon slot CPUs. I forget what OS it's running-I think some flavor of Linux(maybe an ancient version of Red Hat?) and has 68 pin SCSI on the motherboard with a pair of 10K drives in RAID. It's definitely not your garden variety Wintel box of the era!

The same room that I salvaged that computer from had a couple of older systems that I would have loved to save, but ended up parting out($5K inventory, again). The one I parted out had quad PII CPUs, something that from what I can find was pretty much unheard. I also understand that you had to special order dual or quad PII sets from Intel pre-matched. Those systems were the size of a mini-fridge. They also had an almost ludicrous 2gb RAM in a set of 128mb 50ns FPM(I thought I'd hit the jackpot on those since high end 90s Macs use the same basic type of RAM, but these were 5V modules and Macs need 3.3V, or maybe I have that backwards). I also salvaged 6 MASSIVE fans from each system. Before parting them out, I booted one and, let's just say I understood why there were boxes of earplugs on a shelf in that lab!

 

[Carmudgeon]

Seeing the Sun sparks memories of using them for a Fortran class in college, at the computing center.
(When PC ownership was not the norm, even for college students. But most did have floppies, to take their work there, as well as use the printers.)

The Suns had large monitors for the time, and early optical mice, which required the special metal mousepad with the grid pattern to function.

Also reminds me I gotta clean house and get rid of the PPC G3 Mac in the closet at some point. Don't need two of them, and the G4 gets the call.

 

[OVERKILL]

My old 486 laptop:

My cleaner of the two ThinkPads, doing a fresh install of 98SE on this bad boy, just downloaded the ISO for Plus! so I can theme it up!

(don't mind the filthy basement table).

 

[blufeb95]

Did I show the Latitude D610( 2.13ghz Dothan Pentium M + ATI Radeon X300 )that I installed Windows ME, probably among the last hardware that will support Windows 9X also I had to install Windows without PnP support otherwise it was resource conflict hell, but after the reinstall I managed to get everything working and have working DMA on a 40GB 4200rpm HDD it would boot super quick, I also bought 2x256MB modules so the RAM was still dual channel and to avoid the issues when using more than 512MB on Windows 9x.