Oldest daily use computer?

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OVERKILL

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I got thinking about this today. My main desktop is, by IT standards, absolutely ancient at almost 10 years old now. It's now been "obsoleted" by Apple, not officially supported by the latest version of OS X (per my recent thread). However, it is still perfectly suitable for what I use it for. I just upgraded to 32GB of RAM the other day, as I do a fair bit of virtualization and I was swapping a lot.

I strongly doubt that this is the oldest daily use computer on here though, as I know some of you folks have some seriously old rigs! So, post up what you are running, vintage and OS, let's see who has the oldest box on BITOG that they use as their main PC.

[Linked Image]
 
Daily use machine is a Mac I had Apple custom build mid-2011 around a quad-core i7 and 2T drive. Supposedly cannot upgrade to latest OS but works great for me.

Bit of history: I raced Porsches with Phil Ray in 1972 in San Antonio TX when he, Gus Roach, Vic Poor, Brenda Flowers and a handful of others took the Intel 4004 processor they designed, added it to their company Datapoint 2200 terminal and invented the personal computer.
 
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It stopped being relevant after everything came with multi-cores and gigs of ram, which is plenty to do everyday tasks most people do besides modern gaming.
 
Not my "daily driver"; but just yesterday I had to crack open a 2006 MacBook Pro to open a Logic Audio project. I believe both laptops I use around the house for personal use are from 2010.
 
Not my primary computer, but my desktop at work(owned personally) is a Mac Pro 1,1 from 2006.

I've thrown a fair few upgrades at it-I put dual quad core 3.0ghz processors in it, which make it equivalent to Mac Pro 2,1(in fact the 2,1 was-arguably-a special order build of the 1,1 with those specific processors. Support officially ended at 10.7, but with a GPU upgrade it can run up to 10.11. I'm currently running 10.9. I have a flashed(to give boot screens) Geforce 8800 in it. It has 16gb of RAM by 8x 2gb sticks with the odd looking huge heatsinks because-for whatever reason-the RAM runs really hot in these computers. I don't know if it can go higher-it's not really necessary for what I would use it for, and if it could I doubt it would be economical. It boots off an SSD.

Also, I actually have an internal ZIP drive in the computer. These computers have two bays for optical drives-there's a standard DVD-RW in the top, and a ZIP in the bottom bay. It works perfectly. I put it in primarily because I have one instrument computer(for an HP 5890/5971) on Windows 98, and ZIP is the easiest way to get data off of it.

My work web browsing needs are not great, and I do a lot of typing on it. For the latter, I have a Unicomp Spacesaver M.
 
~10 years old W10 PC

Dell XPS Tower
Dell MB (original)
Rosewill 750W PSU (year or so old)
Core i7 920 (original)
12GB DDR3 (original)
1TB Samsung 860 SSD (few months old - OS disk)
-----original disk failed due to corrupted OS partition; was able to save all data using Linux Mint on a stick, luckily
2TB WD Black HDD (1-2 years old - data drive)
NVIDIA 1070 ti 8GB GPU (purchased here from member Beercan)


I'm able to play new games on high settings with no issues. The first-gen core i7 still keeps trucking and the MB with PSU can handle the mid-tier GPU I recently installed.

With the new PSU and drive I'm hoping to get another five years out of this rig before I need to actually upgrade. The GPU is more than enough to keep me gaming until then, since I'm not against playing my backlog of games on ultra settings or newer games on high settings.
 
2012 Dell Desktop. Started out as a Windows 8 - then upgraded a few times to the latest Windows 10.
Runs as fast as-in 2012 and operates like new, despite seeing three hours daily of heavy use.
Always use Firefox browser. Both Windows & Firefox are set to auto-update.
Dell is simple to maintain and we remain smart on where we surf and what we open.

Life Is Good
 
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5 months ago my 2005 "gaming rig" failed, blew a cap on the motherboard and BIOS is dead.



Ran a Athlon XP 2500+ with 4 gigs of RAM and Windows XP with a BFG Nvidia GeForce 6600 GT OC 128MB AGP video card.

I used for retro games, hacks,cracks, ham radio tools, and pirated software, p2p and all sorts of "goodies" over the past few years viewing websites was very difficult. Opera 6.06 web browser still worked for Youtube! w/ 100% cpu usage, it could not play 360p+ video without lagging.

Ran a old program(freeware) called "Game Booster" by IO Bit. I could play in 2018 360p video on Youtube in Opera 6.06.
laugh.gif
 
Originally Posted by maxdustington
Mac's don't count. A ten year old PC would be a lot worse.

Was going to post the same thing. Well, their life doesn't "age" the same as Windows-based PCs at least.
 
Up until 2 years ago my main system was an HP 733mhz Celeron with Windows 98se.

Ive owned many newer machines over the years but the massive proprietary set of software on it meant I could do all the business and graphics arts stuff I needed without starting over with a hacked cludge. Many of my high end devices, scanners, etc were stuck in time on Windows 98 (or lower) keeping me partially frozen in time.

Sadly email connectivity, ebay and printer support did me in. Even many forums are finally starting to break on the old rig.

I still make much of my stuff on it then transfer the completed work to a new machine to print when needed.
Many vintage games will only run 🃠n a machine of this vintage as well

The sad part is the speed I could put something together on the old machine is still faster than a more modern solution, some of the software I have has never been duplicated into a more modern version

Ah well
 
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Originally Posted by Rmay635703
Up until 2 years ago my main system was an HP 733mhz Celeron with Windows 98se.

Ive owned many newer machines over the years but the massive proprietary set of software on it meant I could do all the business and graphics arts stuff I needed without starting over with a hacked cludge. Many of my high end devices, scanners, etc were stuck in time on Windows 98 (or lower) keeping me partially frozen in time.

Sadly email connectivity, ebay and printer support did me in. Even many forums are finally starting to break on the old rig.

I still make much of my stuff on it then transfer the completed work to a new machine to print when needed.

The sad part is the speed I could put something together on the old machine is still faster than a more modern solution, some of the software I have has never been duplicated into a more modern version

Ah well


You may be the winner
lol.gif
 
Originally Posted by Vern_in_IL
Opera 6.06 web browser still worked for Youtube! w/ 100% cpu usage, it could not play 360p+ video without lagging.

Ran a old program(freeware) called "Game Booster" by IO Bit. I could play in 2018 360p video on Youtube in Opera 6.06.
laugh.gif



That sounds awful!

I had an old netbook that would run at 100% CPU (AMD E-350) for just about everything, and maxed out at 720P video due to its display only being 720P. I used to watch a lot of things @ 480P, but that was rough and I eventually gave this thing away for free. I replaced it with a 1080P gaming PC for about a grand, but that was a splurge. Laptops costing 1/3 the price would have been night-and-day better than the netbook, to be honest. I like being able to play games from my comfy chair in the living room, though.

I don't know how anyone, especially if your eyes ain't what they used to be, can stand looking at any sort of ancient monitor day in and day out. I can understand if some of you are hanging on to old machines for very specific purposes, but things are so cheap nowadays, it makes no sense to choose to stick with ancient tech if you can afford a few hundred bucks for something new.
 
Originally Posted by mattwithcats
128K Apple Macintosh, circa 1983, with ImageWriter printer...

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Macintosh_128K

Got an SE too, but that's got a 68030 overdrive and network card in it...


And you are posting from this? I assume not
wink.gif
That's the theme of the thread, not what's the oldest rig you have (I have an 8088 here as well as a Mac Plus) but what the oldest one you use for your daily computing tasks; your posting rig so to speak
grin.gif
 
Originally Posted by OVERKILL
Originally Posted by mattwithcats
128K Apple Macintosh, circa 1983, with ImageWriter printer...

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Macintosh_128K

Got an SE too, but that's got a 68030 overdrive and network card in it...


And you are posting from this? I assume not
wink.gif
That's the theme of the thread, not what's the oldest rig you have (I have an 8088 here as well as a Mac Plus) but what the oldest one you use for your daily computing tasks; your posting rig so to speak
grin.gif



I have a 128K also...or actually one old enough to not even say "128K" but that just says "Macintosh."

AFAIK, there's actually no way to even 'fake" one into getting on the internet.

You can sort of kind of do it with a 512Ke or Plus if you want to put in the effort.

An SE/30 is about as old/basic as you can go(if you want a compact) for very limited web browsing.
 
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