Fun and Profit With Obsolete Computers 186
An anonymous reader writes "C|Net has a story about the value of aging computer hardware, and the subculture of people who collect them. The story details some of the more enthusiastic collectors currently participating in the hobby, as well as their old-school beautiful hardware. '[Sellam Ismail] recently brought a quarter century-old Xerox Star computer back to life to be used as evidence in a patent lawsuit. The pride of his collection is an Apple Lisa, one of the first computers (introduced in 1983) with a now standard graphical interface. Such items sell for more than $10,000. In an old barn in Northern California that also houses pigs, Bruce Damer, 45, keeps a collection that includes a Cray-1 supercomputer, a Xerox Alto (an early microcomputer introduced in 1973) and early Apple prototypes. '
Old DEC gear (Score:5, Interesting)
...used to sum up my job. We used to get spare PDP/11 parts from people like the those in the article. The DEC maintenance guys at the time told me about a factory they knew about which relied absolutely on a PDP/8. Service calls there were a challenge, to say the least.
Towards the end of my stint at Vic Roads the foam padding stuck to the top of the slide out boxes on the 11/84's had turned to dust and collected around the base of all the mux cards where they go into the backplane. Swap out a card and spend the next couple of hours vacuming out the backplane to get it working again. Installing a SCSI card was a challenge. You slide out the CPU box and get yourself organised by lying flat on your back underneath it. Like taking the transmission out of a car. The you identify the wire wrap cable for the slot which is going to take the card and repatch the appropriate interrupt line. On some of them you were lucky, there would be little shorting patches which you could pull off, like on the back of an IDE disk. Don't muck up the backplane in the process because people need traffic lights, you know.
I've got an ohio scientific superboard 2 in my spare parts cabinet. As long as I can still find a TV which listens to an RF modulator I am free to run up the micro assembler and hack away. My son is 5 now. In 7 years he will be the same age as me when my dad built that machine up.
Demo scene (Score:4, Interesting)
Although reportedly, even in the demo scene there is an on-going shift to PC hardware. The Amiga and Atari lovers are getting smaller.
On another note, he told me that when his group returned from a recent demo party by car, they noticed the little mileage markers (marking every 100 meter on European highways). They drove and counted 133.5, 133.6, and then saw that 133.7 was gone
Re:Oldies (Score:3, Interesting)
I still enjoy many of the Spectrum games. This month, by the way, is the 25th anniversary, and I bought a T-shirt for the occasion
http://www.alioth.net/tmp/25YrsOfSpectrum.jpg [alioth.net]
I'm such a geek...
Re:Best for learning programming (Score:5, Interesting)
To learn system programming, it is a bad deal compared to a microcontroller with an emulator, or even a refurbished GBA with a flash card:
With only 15 interrupts lines, cascaded into 2 8-lines banks, the IBM PC is quite limited, and you still have the trouble to handle the cascaded handlers.
But if the 8086 processor understands a subset of the complete assembly language from the current PC, the timings constraints are completely different: the cost of an instruction for a 8086 accessing directly the main memory completely changes as soon as you have cache, which is essential for modern computers. And with the mess that x86 assembly is, I'd prefer dabbling with ARM assembly instead.
OK - but it is not alone on that segment.
Disk structures ? The cylinder/head/track abstraction that come with the floppy disks is compulsory on old IBM PCs. The LBA method is much more straightforward. No one should need to learn a complex, obsolete abstraction that doesn't even correspond to the reality anymore.
Re:Best for learning programming (Score:5, Interesting)
Similarly, from Pentium 3 onwards the APIC has changed drastically so the interrupt controller handling is no longer the same. Granted, you can run it in backwards compatible mode, but it is not the same.
Similarly, IO on PCI devices is clearly nowhere near the original IO on x86. While there is some backward compatibility present, you have to go and do at least some bridge programming to get anywhere. That was not the case with any of the 8 and 16 bit IO on systems all the way up to the early 486-es. You could manipulate every device separately ignoring most bus issues.
Overall, nowdays if you want to teach anything low level you have to go to a simpler architecture like one of the 32 bit MIPS architectures. x86 in its current form is too complex to be useable even for an advanced college level architecture and drivers class.
Re:Old DEC gear (Score:1, Interesting)
Reminds me of the time I was working on a major defence radar site. The main array was steered by an ancient 6800 microprocessor based system built around a backplane. A couple of hours before the airforce was due to do an exercise I made the mistake of pulling a card out of the backplane (we were reverse engineering it to modify the software, whose source had been lost in antiquity). It turned out the backplane had hairline cracks all though it due to the flexing caused by plugging and unplugging cards over the years. When I put the card back in the system failed to boot.
I was frantic as the radar was absolutely cactus. This microprocessor routed *every* signal to and from the main antenna array and a front line early warning radar system spanning a continent was dead in the water. I ended up fixing it by simply inserting and removing the card lots of times. With minutes to go, I fluked it that the system booted (meaning the hairline cracks were closed). I then *very carefully* put the front panel on and walked away from it. A few minutes later the airforce people walked in and started their exercise. As far as I know the system is still in that state.
The joys of ancient backplanes.
Re:Old DEC gear (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Use them around the house. (Score:2, Interesting)
Yeah, that all fun... I do the same thing, but this is not the category of machines that these people collect. Wintel machines aren't even in the picture. Sure, I had a P-166/256Meg RAM functioning 24/7 as a home server. I decomissioned it when motherboard/cpu combos became so cheap that I could replace it with modern components for pretty much no money. Today my home server is an AMD64 2800+/512Meg RAM. It also doubles as a space heater ;-)
Today, I wouldn't even spend money on such a machine because I started to find very capable computers in dumpsters. P-III 1GHz become very common (my parents server is a P-III 800MHz, which was my old desktop). The occasional Athlon and P-IV can be found too. x86 machines are so ubiquitous that they are not worth collection in any way. If you still have one, it is either your primary computer or you have a small home server.
The newest computer in my household is a laptop: barely 3 months old and bought before the release of Windows Vista. Why? Because it was on sale ;-) My wifes desktop is from late 2003 and mine from early 2003 (though I invested in a workstation class machine, not a consumer-end machine) Neither machine is even planned for retirement. I maxed both out on RAM and they shug along just nicely for all our tasks. Mine runs Debian, my wifes machines runs Windows XP Pro.
I know as a matter of fact that Windows XP Pro runs fine on a P-III 600MHz/512Meg RAM for mundane tasks. That's what my mother in law uses and that is what my last laptop was.
My baseline for "old" in the x86 world is a P-II class machine. Not that they are not capable of doing any worthwhile work, but because there are faster machines available for 0€. Those machines and below are only worth to be deposited in a dumpster. Now, non-x86 machines... Those are pretty much all collectible ;-)
Re:Best for learning programming (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:I Haven't Got The Patience (Score:4, Interesting)
I used to collect Commodore and Nintendo stuff. I have a pretty good collection of Nintendo hardware; NES, SNES, N64, a handful of games, extra controllers, light guns, the works. I even have the beginnings of a Sega collection. It's all operational as well after a lot of cleaning and TLC. It takes a lot of time to resurrect the older hardware and make it functional. If you don't have the tech skills to replace fried components or even repair damaged PCBs and connectors its really not worth doing. You often buy two or three dud machines to turn them into one functional one.
There's no point having a machine if you don't have a decent collection of software to run on it. Sure, you can often download the software illegally but for cart-based systems then you need to find a working cart emulator, assuming one existed for your platform and you still can't play anything with SuperFX-type addons on cart emulators.
Collecting the retro stuff is also time consuming. You have to be on the lookout everywhere. Ebay is good, but there's a lot of crap on there that people are trying to flog off for more than it's worth. I see a lot of stuff that says "condition unknown" then with a min bid of $50. That could mean it's totally fried but you have to decide whether to take that gamble. There's always stuff advertised in the local trading rag and the local news, as well as other websites and swap meets that come and go. If you don't keep abrest (all you nerds tremble before the breast) of current prices you're lialbe to get royally screwed.
I sorely miss being able to play some of the games that I played as I was growing up, but I remember back to when I used to play. We'd sit up all night hammering away at the game. That was the only way. When you're on a limited time budget (as you are when you're working for the man and have other commitments) you can't do that anywhere near as often as you'd like.
Good luck to those who want to get into the collection hobby. It's fun and rewarding. If you just want to hoarde junk stay for the sake of being able to say "i have that" without ever actually doing anything with it then you should probably find another hobby; there are some of us who like to restore hardware and it's difficult to do unless you can get enough bits. If they're getting snapped up by hoarders then it takes the fun away for a lot of us.
Re:Best for learning programming (Score:5, Interesting)
As an industry we're now finding it very hard to employ people who know this kind of stuff. Most graduates are taught Java or C++ and have no decent experience at the assembler or hardware level. Now I'm not saying that we spend all day hand-crafting assembly code - games are just far too big nowadays - but every now and then you'll get an unusual crash which can only be debugged using knowledge of the hardware. In my experience CS graduates just freak out when you show them a disassembly of their code!
Re:They're not worth the space they take up (Score:3, Interesting)
Well, for certain limited purposes they can be useful. I've got a Mac SE/30 running as my vanity page webserver [homeunix.org]. What exactly are the odds of somebody writing an automatic exploit for an obscure httpd running on a (relatively) obscure OS on an obscure hardware platform? The only way someone's going to break into that thing is with a custom exploit, and there's no point in spending that kind of effort.
Re:For Our Retirement (Score:1, Interesting)
Sun Sparc pizzaboxes are still quite useful (Score:3, Interesting)
Oh, and they'll run Linux or a few of the BSD's just fine..
Here is the uptime of one of my production Sparc 20's hosting a bit of email and DNS:
[matt@darkside]$ uptime
9:43AM up 953 days, 16:03, 1 user, load averages: 0.11, 0.11, 0.08
It would be well over 1,000 if a UPS hadn't needed replaced 953 days ago.
So, what's an HP-150 with Touch Screen worth now? (Score:2, Interesting)
TIA
Lesson #1: missing the point (Score:3, Interesting)
The profit comes when you discover this stuff 30 years later, in good condition, by chance - and everyone else threw theirs out. Not that you stored it personally, yourself, all this time.
Incidentally, you can rent climate controlled storage space large enough for a computer system for maybe $5/month. $60/yr * 30 yrs - $1800. Much less than $10,000. You'd be stupid to, because no one knows what will be rare and valuable in 30 years time.
In short, your rant was more of a "well, no shit sherlock" kind of post.
Re:Best for learning programming (Score:2, Interesting)
We had projects like, take this assembly and produce the C it came from (graded with diff), and the "bomb" which was an executable we had to trace through to figure out what number it wanted as an answer to a random int. If we guessed wrong it "exploded" (i.e. emailed the grader).
Hire people from CMU.