Collecting Vintage Computers You Grew Up With

[93Flareside]

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. Yet I got rid of a bunch of stuff a couple years ago because I deemed it useless and a waste of space. Does anyone here also feel the need to collect old machines that they either used and want to relieve some old memories or just liked the look of them? most of the PowerPC era of Apple machines are some that I adored even if they weren't the most useful. I need to find an iMac G4 before they're all gone or priced sky high for sure...

Share your own, or something.

 

[CraigB]

I'd like to have an Apple IIe and possibly a Coleco Adam, as they were the earliest computers I remember using. The Apples I used in school, my grandmother owned the Coleco and we'd okay games on it.

There's two things that stop me though, space and money. Looking at vintage Apple equipment is a bit pricey. At least on eBay.

Funny thing about the Coleco, they used tapes for storage and were known to create enough magnetic interference they could erase their own tapes if anywhere near the computer.

 

[Matt2000]

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...

 

[Labcoatguy]

In the year or so after college I went on an eBay buying spree of weird laptops and portables from the 90s that had caught my eye in PC Magazine from those days. They included:
-Dell 320sli
-IBM Thinkpad 701c "Butterfly"
-AT&T Globalyst 250, a rebadged NEC Versa V/70
-IBM P70
-HP Omnibook 425 and 800c

Like a bad collector I sold all of them as part of a move, which is a shame because the Butterfly and the Omnibooks are worth a fair amount more right now.

 

[Momentum57]

So I remember an IBM computer that I wanted to bad when I was young. I have no idea what it was but it was crazy big trinitron monitor and the CD and Floppy Drive were in a separate device that would raise up and lower out of sight.

I had a Mac and then after that just clone towers till I got a dell laptop. Most of them were cannibalized into the next.

 

[Perc]

I had an Amiga 500 as a kid. A decade or so back I found a 600 that was about to be thrown away so I took it... sad I didn't grab the monitor as well.

The 600 is the compact version of the 500 with a slightly more modern design and no numeric keypad. And my example has a hard drive! First thing I did when I started it up was to check the "DPaintIV" folder and sure enough, there were some pictures of a scantily clad Samantha Fox and whatnot in there. Awesome.

 

[93Flareside]

While I never had one, I still want to have the first gen iPod with the full-size FireWire port and physical rotating wheel. If I had to sie one, I’d get the 3rd gen iPod because the touch sensitive “buttons” were like magic to me.

I will still look on eBay for old Apple Performing 6400/180’s. it was the first computer we as a family had after moving from Round Lake. Bought it at a Circuit City in East Dundee that closed down in the 2000s, became a Big Lots, and is now a Firestone mechanics shop. The only thing special about that was it had a woofer built into the tower and speakers in the monitor it came with. That monitor was shit because about 3 years after, the red in the RGB crapped out and you had a blue tint to everything.

We kept that until purchasing an eMachines T2080. That wasn’t as special, but it was the first pc to do school projects on and play 3D games. It was also the poor machine to discover the internet.

These days, I enjoy looking at the odd PowerBook G3-G4’s specifically the Pismo and Titanium versions. While I never had one when they were new, a friend of mine’s father worked for a school system and I used to get old iBook Clamshells. Wonderful toilet seat looking things. The hinges on those were so strong I remember riding my bike around town with it partially open while I rode with headphones.