Vintage PC's: anyone collecting them?

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petek

petek

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I'm always wondering if I should bother picking up any old pc's such as the Radio Shack Coco's, Texas Instruments, Coleco Adams etc for their vintage value while they're still easy pickings. Anyone else collecting them.. I grabbed this Zenith the other day for a couple of bucks including the carrying case, it works, it's heavy, it's not that early because it uses 3.5 diskettes instead of 5's floppies, I think from 1983 and probably sold for thousands when new. Nah I don't think I'll bother,, by the time there's any value to them I'll be in Shady Pines or under one. LOL
 
I've got the old Commodore 64 that my Dad got me when I was 10 years old back in 1984. I spent many hours playing games on that computer, and even used it to do some school reports with it's dot-matrix printer. I also got pretty good at writing my own programs for it in the BASIC language.

When i got to college, I needed an IBM based computer because that's what everything was at the school. I picked up a genuine IBM PC/XT at a computer show for $100. The computer is all original, and the only thing that's ever been done to it was that I installed a 2400bps modem to log into the school's mainframe (yes 1993 was pre-internet!) I even got a whole bookshelf full of manuals with it...how many computer companies still give you that much literature! That computer now sits in my garage and still works. It sort of operates as a "dumb terminal" to the linux computer in my office room. The old XT sounds like a window air conditioner when that huge 5.25 inch double-stack 10 megabyte drive spools up to speed!

I've got a few more vintage computers too. Like one of those old Texas Instruments computers that would hook up to the TV set. They were very similar to a Commodore computer in their day. I also have some game consoles: An old Maganavox Odyssey II (was previously my aunt's), Atari 2600, and Atari 5200 (both yard-sale finds).
 
Hmm, the TI 99/4A. Pete, I wish you or I could sell those for a ton of $$$. Maybe I'd regain some of the $$$ I lost in stock options that year LOL. BTW, TI corporate rumour folklore went around for years TI buried THOUSANDS of 994A computers when the "home computer" market plummeted. Supposedly the hilly landscape around the old TI Plant in Lubbock (where they were produced) were all those 994As. Bryan, maybe ya should start digging around lol.
 
vintage computers

I have an Odyssey fame console my Grandmother bpught as a Christmas gift for my Dad in the 70's. And I still have my first "practiacal" computer,a Commodore XT clone with the "WOW" for the time CGA color monitor. It still workds perfectl
 
I had my C64 as well until the hurricane. I wish I'd kept my Amiga 2000 and I'm looking for Pentium II machine so I can play all my DOS games (Doom2, Descent, Duke 3d, etc.). I have both a C64 and MS-Dos emulator (YES, you need to emulate on a Windows XP system). The c64 emu works and sounds just like it's 1984. The Dos emu isn't so great. I think my CPU is too fast for those oldies.

My idea for an OS is a stripped down version of DOS and ALL the games work with it. But this new OS can read FAT32 or NTFS partitions so you can create a huge space for your games. Windows is already a system hog and try to play games ON TOP of it just doesn't make sense.
 
The TI 99/4A computer was pretty nice for it's time. We had one and used it all the way up to 1984! It was a great design, but horribly executed. If they would have had a hard drive or floppy disk option rather than cassette storage out earlier in the product run I bet they would have had stronger sales. There also was no room for internal expansion, you needed one of those "expansion housings" to do any kind of expansion of the system, and even that wasn't that much.
Almost everyone who was into computers back then had a "CommodeDoor" lurking somewhere. Fun little machines!
 
Vintage computers are very neat...although I'm more into the professional machines and laptops versus the early home computers such as the IBM PCjr, Tandy TRS-80's, Commodore 64, and TI 99/4A. Very cool Zenith Data Systems laptop...such a big screen on an early machine, and too bad they don't make pop-up drives today!

I used to be really into vintage computers around 6 years ago, but I don't have that much stuff left now. Just boxes of parts, an IBM 5150 with two 5 1/4" floppy drives, "Austin" 486DX (that's in my room now paired with an IBM ProPrinter II...Microsoft Windows 3.1 and MS-DOS 6.2 are the PERFECT pair...boots in 30 seconds!), and two IBM PS/2 model 30's (early 8086 versions with the ISA bus instead of the later Microchannel; one a 720K, 3 1/2" dual-floppy and the other with a "clackety" Seagate 30 MB HDD).

DOS is really fun to mess around with (especially the early versions...I have a copy of version 2.11 for my IBM), and after using Windows 3.1 you will be amazed at how horrible Windows became in the last 10 years. Windows 95 was the absolute worst...EXTREMELY trouble-prone and took me some getting used to. Windows 98 and XP I can tolerate a little better. IMHO, the mistake was where they removed the separate MS-DOS and integrated the two. It loaded a hell of a lot faster with it and didn't hog memory and HDD space like the 95 and later versions do (this is really the only reason we need the multi-gigabyte hard drives...DOS could run on a 360K floppy!). Plus, you had the simplicity and control of the wonderful command prompt interface.

Jason, I can't believe you have to use a DOS emulator for XP, and even then you can't play the early-90's games! How insane on Microsoft's part...

--Austin
 
Ummm its called DOSbox XP

My dream vintage PC is an apple II :-0

But I do have a few such as an old Mac classic and a powerbook 150 XD and my dads first PC a 38620. That machine cost my dad $2000 at the time but it had TOL parts in it.

I also noticed that a 3 12 floppy drive cost $40 in the early 90's now thats how much a CD-RW drive cost today.

Luckily I have an old 166mhz with 16mb of ram and a 1gb HDD, I put windows 3.1 on it and an old SC2000 sound card so I can run all my old dos games, including the best FPS of all time DOOM!

Jason you dont need a dos machine to run DOOM there is an awesome source port for that, see the link at the bottom.

There is also a source port for duke3d. But I cant it.

For those of you people who have played DOOM deathmatch back in those days you still can with SkullTag! www.skulltag.com

Loading…

www.zdoom.org
 
Cory, thanks for the link. Dosbox XP is pretty darn cool. Problem is now most of my dos games were on cd and I hope I can salvage them because they got flooded out.

Duke3d had the greatest quotes
"Nobody steal our chicks... and lives!", "Who wants some", "Suck it down heh heh heh", "Hmmmm... Don't have time to play with myself"

There was this Duke3d look alike game that I had that featured a Chinese guy named Wang. I can't remember the name but it was funny as heck. And one of his lines, "Whoo wanta wang?"

The games you could run on a 486.
 
I still have....

The Osborne 01 computer that I won in a sales contest in abouy 1982, right as the manufacturer was going under. I run it every once in a while, it's in my toy room.

A friend gave me her dad's mint, and I mean mint, Texas Instruments TI-99/4A computer, in a perfect box. It is showroom new.

I have an old Compaq portable 286, a 386 laptop, etc.

I have an original IBM PC. This is BEFORE it had ROM upgrades to support a hard drive. What they had on this very early model was a PC Expansion Unit. This was the same size and weight as the huge PC unit, but had just a 10mb hard drive in it, a short PC bus board, and a special interface card both in that unit and one in the main PC. They were connected by a black cord that was about 3/4" thick. The card in the PC was not the same in the expansion unit.

You turned on the expanion unit first and let the drive come up to speed. Then you turn the PC on. The PC would count up, then boot the external drive. It is wierd.

I still have it and the standard monochrome IBM "green screen".
 

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