Computer nostalgia - Post your relics!

[OVERKILL]

Figured I'd stop hijacking @Pablo's thread and make a new one.

I have a considerable amount of old computer stuff. I know @bunnspecial has a whole legacy Mac collection. Would love to see some old SGI, SUN, DEC...etc equipment if people have it. Only post what you have though, no internet pulls.

I'll start, these are some old video cards I have:

 

[blufeb95]

I took my brother's old Packard Bell system from when we were kids and upgraded it to the max for humourous effect last year, Took it from a Celeron 300 (non-A) all the way to the max supported Celeron 533, stuck a Radeon 9250 PCI in there, a Gig NIC, 384MB of RAM, I put a 40GB HDD in there so I didn't delete the original 98 install even though I do have a backup. It runs XP decently well, takes about 2 minutes to boot but stable enough, plays games that are appropriate to the system well enough. I loaded up Vice City on it just for s&g's and it wasn't entirely unplayable, I wouldn't want to play it that way but it wasn't a whole lot worse than when I played it on AXP and P4 systems on S3 and Intel IGPs.

 

[OVERKILL]

I took my brother's old Packard Bell system from when we were kids and upgraded it to the max for humourous effect last year, Took it from a Celeron 300 (non-A) all the way to the max supported Celeron 533, stuck a Radeon 9250 PCI in there, a Gig NIC, 384MB of RAM, I put a 40GB HDD in there so I didn't delete the original 98 install even though I do have a backup. It runs XP decently well, takes about 2 minutes to boot but stable enough, plays games that are appropriate to the system well enough. I loaded up Vice City on it just for s&g's and it wasn't entirely unplayable, I wouldn't want to play it that way but it wasn't a whole lot worse than when I played it on AXP and P4 systems on S3 and Intel IGPs.
View attachment 185498

I see that board has integrated Rage Pro Turbo graphics! lol. Is that a Socket 370 to Slot 1 adapter?! Man, I haven't seen one of those in ages!

 

[atikovi]

Sold my first computer a few years ago on Ebay for $400,

 

[OVERKILL]

Old sound cards:
1. Aztech modem/sound card combo:

2. The venerable SB16 w/CD-ROM controller (top) and an FM-3485 combo card (bottom):

Sound Blaster Live! 5.1:

ASUS TV and FM Tuner card:

 

[OVERKILL]

Sold my first computer a few years ago on Ebay for $400,


View attachment 185503

Now that's a unit!

 

[blufeb95]

I have a Packard Bell Pentium 60 stashed away somewhere that came with an Aztech card with Sony, Panasonic, and Mitsumi compatible CD interfaces, mine had a double speed Panasonic drive with it. I think I borrowed it to put in my Texas Micro ISA backplane system, I might be able to dig up some pics of that somewhere.

 

[OVERKILL]

I have a Packard Bell Pentium 60 stashed away somewhere that came with an Aztech card with Sony, Panasonic, and Mitsumi compatible CD interfaces, mine had a double speed Panasonic drive with it. I think I borrowed it to put in my Texas Micro ISA backplane system, I might be able to dig up some pics of that somewhere.

Do it!

I might dig out my IBM Imagination Station if I feel sufficiently motivated, lol.

 

[Pablo]

I had a SB AWE 32 at some point. One of them you could add RAM to.

No EISA cards?

 

[OVERKILL]

I had a SB AWE 32 at some point. One of them you could add RAM to.

No EISA cards?

The SB16 and Aztech cards are EISA, the FM-3485 is ISA. Not sure if I still have any EISA video cards kicking around. I thought I had an old Trident, but I can't seem to find it.

 

[OVERKILL]

I had a SB AWE 32 at some point. One of them you could add RAM to.

No EISA cards?

The AWE 32 and AWE 64 cards were great!

 

[Pablo]

The SB16 and Aztech cards are EISA, the FM-3485 is ISA. Not sure if I still have any EISA video cards kicking around. I thought I had an old Trident, but I can't seem to find it.

Yeah, I missed that! I wanted more EISA boards, but that was a dead end branch

 

[Rmay635703]

My oldest machine is a circa 1976 CASI Apollo VP2 computer portrait system
S100 Bus
Dual 4kb Digital music memory cards
Digitizer
Centronics wide carriage printer

Does ASCII text photos and t-shirt transfers

My folks used to run a vintage computer portrait booth.

 

[OVERKILL]

Yeah, I missed that! I wanted more EISA boards, but that was a dead end branch

I have a 3COM 3C-509 EISA NIC in my 486 SX/25

 

[blufeb95]

Here it is the Texas Micro case with the 2x Panasonic drive installed, that's a 1.2MB 5.25 drive, when I got the backplane it had a 286 card in it that I didn't test because I needed to solder on a new BIOS battery so I could even boot it because it would instantly loose any drive settings after configuring them. It had a 40MB conner drive in it I never tried. I had a 512MB DOM in it, a 386SX-40 card with 16MB RAM, I think I borrowed a 512k Tseng ET4000 from the Compuadd 316S pictured above, I had a Realtek 8019 NIC in it, I think I ran Windows 95 on it shortly since that was already on the DOM, I used that to copy over disk images so I could write 5.25 install floppies for DOS and WFW 3.11 because this is the only machine I have with a 5.25 disk drive.

 

[OVERKILL]

My oldest machine is a circa 1976 CASI Apollo VP2 computer portrait system
S100 Bus
Dual 4kb Digital music memory cards
Digitizer
Centronics wide carriage printer

Does ASCII text photos and t-shirt transfers

My folks used to run a vintage computer portrait booth.

Well, you've got me beat, my oldest is a Hewitt-Rand 8088. I even have the original manuals that came with it. It has switchable video between Hercules 80 line monochrome and CGA.

 

[blufeb95]

I always wanted to try a 32-bit MCA or EISA system but at this point that stuff is like unobtanium, and I don't see the point in paying the price of a decent new computer just to play with some hardware that you know you'll get all setup just to say "huh, neat" and then sit in the corner for all eternity.

 

[Rand]

I had an IBM PS/2 386 sx20 was a dog played startrek 25th anniversary on its non standard 640x400
it also had mca slot and a front upgrade ram slot that took a 4MB card. (came with 2MB ram and 42MB hdd)
looked like this

Didnt come with windows but some sort of shell.. and basic IBM programs for word processing etc.

First computer was something 8088 based IBM with upgrades IIRC 512kb ram, dual 5.25 floppies and a 10MB hdd.
monitor had buttons to turn everything green orange or white.. and would get tv channels 2-13
it also came with joysticks played some mean 18 golf on that one 16 color IIRC.... DOS 2.0 or 2.1

That was lost in the dumpster fire that was my early teen years.

 

[blufeb95]

I tried upgrading the RAM in the CompuAdd system from 4MB to 16, but I couldn't get it to rcognize more than 4, either the BIOS is limited, or they shaved off BOM cost by leaving a few address lines disconnected with was apparently a common thing on 386SX systems as they were sort of the "Celeron" of their time frame.

 

[OVERKILL]

I always wanted to try a 32-bit MCA or EISA system but at this point that stuff is like unobtanium, and I don't see the point in paying the price of a decent new computer just to play with some hardware that you know you'll get all setup just to say "huh, neat" and then sit in the corner for all eternity.

Yeah, I think I only ever came across MCA one or twice? On a couple of PS/2 systems, which, IIRC, was the only place you could find it. EISA was totally backwards compatible with ISA, as it was just a deeper slot with a 2nd set of pins, it was more common, but not like super common.