Something I've thought about lately, now that I've been on my own for close to 5 years now, I've floated the idea of collecting old computers that I fawned after as a teen.
Admit it, you secretly want to be LGR. Me too.
I'd love to get hold of a machine identical to the first one I got in 1998. Just a Dell Optiplex GL5100 with a P100 and 64Mb of RAM but we had it for 5 years and I never got to dig in to it. I don't have space for it really.
I have my Dolch PAC 62 here in the cupboard next to me, a really quirky portable from 1994 that was designed as a portable packet sniffer and diagnostic tool for network techs (and probably hackers too). Example pic:
Like the old machine I had it's a P100 with only 32Mb of RAM this time, it does have a nice early LCD though and a great mechanical Cherry keyboard. The biggest snag has been that the onboard disk controller is SCSI only and few add-on IDE cards behave, it does run Windows 98 though from an SD card. I plan to buy a SCSI2SD but the import costs are crazy at the minute and someone is bound to bring one out in this country as soon as I get it. Blame for getting this falls on
CuriosMarc with his series on his PAC 65. That's a later machine and it would be nice to get one of those too...
Something I could make space for is an IBM PC XT, I'd really like to create a replica case for modern hardware and it's just a nice, big, old machine. Going for high prices though now. LGR is to blame for me wanting one of those, the new Checkmate case he showed made me realise that there might be a market for replica cases for modern hardware and I think I could pull off an IBM...