Who here has the oldest functional computer?
 

I've been reading about the history of the development of the Internet lately and it got me to thinking about refrigerator-sized computers of the late '60s, mainframes, and even the first PCs connecting to nascent networks.

It led me to consider buying an ancient PC just to mess around with it, and in that regard, I wondered who among us has the oldest working machine and what they use it for.

Didn't we have someone not to long ago who was asking about upgrades from a Windows 98 machine? Otter maybe?

I'm not nostalgic, and I'm impatient. I have a ~2012 laptop that I use as a media server. My main home laptop is ~2017. So I'm not much help in this discussion.

My parents had a million year old 8088 my grandpa built about the time I was born. It still ran, I forgot the DOS commands, but it always amazed me that after I clicked enter the application would load faster than any contemporary computer until I moved to SSD.

All I used it for is to play games. Similar shitty ass games morons play on their phones these days.

I think they kept it around because my grandpa had a bunch of 5.25" floppies with some financial shit on there.

I went down a pretty deep rabbit hole on old computers once upon a time and the fledgling PC industry is an interesting study.

I'm ~90% sure I have a Commodore 64 packed away somewhere that "should" still work. Not sure what it would work for, but still.

IBM 286

let me fire this bad boy up

I'm going to have to hook up a VGA monitor

I know there are collectors of games and such that still have commodores and atari st's.

Don't have one, but I watched something on Youtube that had the Windows 95 startup sound.

Nostalgia was overwhelming.

I have a Timex-Sinclair with the 12K RAM expansion module from around 1981 that still works. I mostly keep it around to show people how terrible it was.

Also, fwiw, the refrigerator sized computers weren't confined to the 1960s. I was a computer operator for a bank from 1985 - 1992 that used a new (when I started) Burroughs mainframe. The main computer was bigger than a full-sized chest freezer. One side of the room was also covered with a bank of magnetic tape readers (the big reels of tape that you see in old sci fi movies), a couple of dishwasher sized hard drive banks (the hard drives were 50MB and were made of stacked disks) and several other cabinets that i don't think I ever knew what they were for (I believe one was a very large power converter).

This is similar equipment, though ours wasn't this spread out.

https://i.pinimg.com/originals/c2/42...3aeb5ea21c.jpg

Here's one of the hard drives. We had four. They were removable, though I don't know why other than easy replacement when they inevitably went bad.

https://i.pinimg.com/originals/b1/89...e5607c7a27.jpg

I've got a couple Windows 98 machines that are still running. Good for old Data I/O 29s that need a real serial connection.

Ah yes, the mainframes. I remember those 60 degree computer rooms well. The company I worked for had a room full of CDC 6600s, Cyber 170s and a Cyber 205. Also had a Cray-1 and later a Cray-XMP. IBM 370s were used to handle communications to the outside world. Water cooled. I've got one of those disk packs like above at home. I think they held about 250mb. They had a bad habit of crashing. The drives were the size of a filing cabinet and when certain programs ran, would shake like an out of balance washing machine. Memory was measured in KiloBytes instead of GigaBytes, systems were started by loading a tape on a drive and pushing a big button on the panel.

And everyone wore ties to work...

My dad was a farmer. He kept a lot of shit. We’ve got an Apple IIe sitting in an out building that he used for his farm accounting. I’m certain it will fire right up.

Those were the days where he programmed his own spreadsheet for the entire farm account. I did my own spreadsheets for Nintendo baseball and Tecmo Super Bowl records.

It was a 12 year old computer that was running Win7 and shit the bed when I tried to upgrade to Win10. Actually tried to get more mileage out of it but the issue was Win10 drivers vs. 12 year old hardware that wasn't worth the time it would have taken to resolve.

Entered the IT world in 2000 right at the Y2K scare and fresh out of college with a shiney new bachelors in computer science. The oldest technology I've worked with were the IBM AS/400 which I actually enjoyed working with as there were no bells and whistles. They just worked. The AK47 of information technology at the time.

I still cringe at the old CRT monitors and wonder how the hell we worked around those monstrosities every day.

But to answer your question, my oldest PC was custom built from NewEgg back in 2007 and went tits up with the installation of Win10 a few months ago. I do have a IBM ThinkPad T61 from 2007 as well which runs a bare bone version of linux that I use once a year for those lacking for fantasy football drafts.

My first computer was a Tandy 1000ex like this below.
http://www.computinghistory.org.uk/u...DTHM-37124.jpg

My first windows 95 computer was a IBM Aptiva. like below
https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikiped...Ibm_aptiva.jpg

Im pretty sure both are stored away in attic and probably would still fire up today.

When I was in the military industrial complex, we had an early Apple computer. Every night we had to remove the operating system and all of the files onto disks and lock them in a safe. And then every morning we would load it back up and start working again.

I threw out a Packard Bell from 1993 a year ago. Man the memories of that piece of crap.