All old geeks turn into museum curators for obsolete tech.

Post #434,772 by malraux 6/25/20 11:45:58 AM 6/25/20 11:45:58 AM Reply	All old geeks turn into museum curators for obsolete tech. Glancing briefly around my den I can lay eyes on 4 way-too-old machines gathering dust, including an original MacPro 1,1 and the old IWETHEY server from pre-DigitalOcean days. Regards, -scott Welcome to Rivendell, Mr. Anderson.
Post #434,773 by mmoffitt 6/25/20 11:52:32 AM 6/25/20 11:52:32 AM Reply	There's a TRS-80 in the box, with manuals in one of our closets. bcnu, Mikem It's mourning in America again.
Post #434,800 by malraux 6/25/20 3:23:35 PM 6/25/20 3:23:35 PM Reply	This is just the den. I have an Atari 5200, Atari TT030, Mac SE, a Mini, and an iMac down in the basement. The first 3 are truly museum pieces. Regards, -scott Welcome to Rivendell, Mr. Anderson.
Post #434,825 by static 6/26/20 6:05:10 AM 6/26/20 6:05:10 AM Reply	I have a '4A in a box upstairs. I also have a hobbyist Z80 dev board somewhere (from outfit in Melbourne called Talking Electronics). I used to know how to hand-assemble Z80 code... This was the sort of thing that predated the Arduino by several decades but attempted to teach much the same thing. Wade.
Post #434,845 by Another Scott 6/27/20 12:26:46 AM 6/27/20 12:26:46 AM Reply	My grad school prof had an S-100 bus computer... (This was in the mid-80s.) He often talked like he was eventually going get back to it, but I doubt that he ever did. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/S-100_bus He managed to get a few HP Integral PCs for his lab. Neat machines, but ungodly expensive at the time (~ $4000, IIRC). Cheers, Scott.
Post #434,846 by Andrew Grygus 6/27/20 2:01:48 AM 6/27/20 2:01:48 AM Reply	Yes, I still have my S100 machine . . . . . taking up space in the garage. Mine was an 8/16 (bits, that is).
Post #434,848 by crazy 6/27/20 7:30:52 AM 6/27/20 7:30:52 AM Reply	So did I Multiuser turbodos which ran cp/m programs. Each s100 bus board drove a single Televideo 910 terminal over serial line. Single 20mb Minnie Winnie hard disk that everyone shares. Ran wordstar, multiplan, and dbase, as well as a variety of language compilers. My simple favorite was pilot. Multiplan had linked spreadsheets 10 years before lotus 123. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/PILOT
Post #434,886 by a6l6e6x 6/28/20 11:45:36 PM 6/28/20 11:45:36 PM Reply	I built one in part from scratch. Well at least the control panel and CPU board. That included laying out and etching the circuit cards and soldering on chip sockets. The CPU board had Z-80 processor and the EPROM with a "borrowed" 4 KB BASIC interpreter and what is in effect a BIOS. As I recall, besides the S-100 board which has nothing but connectors, I bought an 8 KB memory card and a display card which attached to a TV. The control board had umpteen switches for setting up addresses and loading data into memory. It was possible to step through one CPU instruction at a time. Also, I had circuitry to write and read data to an audio tape recorder. Biggest problem was it was extremely noisy RF wise. You could not watch a TV anywhere in the house. I bought a TR-80 and retired the S-100. But, I even modified the TRS-80 so it could display lower case characters. Alex "There is a cult of ignorance in the United States, and there has always been. The strain of anti-intellectualism has been a constant thread winding its way through our political and cultural life, nurtured by the false notion that democracy means that "my ignorance is just as good as your knowledge." -- Isaac Asimov
Post #434,896 by crazy 6/29/20 8:19:14 AM 6/29/20 8:19:14 AM Reply	You win Hell, you beat Mel
Post #434,774 by pwhysall 6/25/20 11:56:13 AM 6/25/20 11:56:13 AM Reply	I'm much better than I was I had at least a half-dozen shitty old PCs and laptops lying around, back in the day. I refurbed and gave away some, scrapped the rest. It really was just occupying space. I seem to be the keeper of all the USB-MicroB-to-USB-A cables, though. I've got zillions of those fuckers.
Post #434,781 by drook 6/25/20 12:38:29 PM 6/25/20 12:38:29 PM Reply	I just trashed a G5 cheesegrater I got it specifically to run Final Cut Pro. Since then, other apps with way simpler interfaces have come up that do 90% of what I was using it for. Also, a cat pissed through the front of it and it won't boot any more. -- Drew
Post #434,780 by drook 6/25/20 12:36:10 PM 6/25/20 12:36:10 PM Reply	Ooh, can you do me a favor? Fooker was hosting my personal website back in the day. I lost a hard drive a while back, taking my un-backed-up photos with it. Is that old IWeThey server the one that had the other personal sites on it? If so, it's got the only photos from my oldest daughter's first year. -- Drew
Post #434,801 by malraux 6/25/20 3:24:36 PM 6/25/20 3:24:36 PM Reply	I'll see if I can get it running over the weekend. The main problem is that I'm not sure I have a monitor or keyboard for it. Although now that I think about it, I have my MIL's old PC in the basement too. Those might work depending on the connectors. Regards, -scott Welcome to Rivendell, Mr. Anderson.
Post #434,806 by drook 6/25/20 4:50:34 PM 6/25/20 4:50:34 PM Reply	Thanks, and sorry for the rat hole I know I'm sending you down Unless you have far more self-control than I do, once you get it running you're going to wonder what else is on it and how to back it up "just in case". -- Drew
Post #434,813 by malraux 6/25/20 6:58:33 PM 6/25/20 6:58:33 PM Reply	That's the main reason I keep some of these machines. Too lazy to back them all up in a central place, too neurotic to just let them go. Regards, -scott Welcome to Rivendell, Mr. Anderson.

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