The DU Lounge
Related: Culture Forums, Support ForumsAuggie
(31,184 posts)Major Nikon
(36,827 posts)Just to see the look on their faces.
EdwardSmith74
(282 posts)onehandle
(51,122 posts)I've donated several newer than that one to charity.
The Velveteen Ocelot
(115,829 posts)waiting to go to recycling.
Maybe I should take it over to the Apple store, just for giggles. (I'm old, too.)
hunter
(38,325 posts)By the time I'd end up with them (clients asking me to take them away, please!) they were useless. A PC of the same age could often be inexpensively upgraded into something useful. Not those.
I've kept my Atari 800s, my Amiga, an Apple IIc, an Apple IIGS, and a Macintosh SE/30. But all the heavy Macintosh boxes went to recycling long ago. Some of these machines are not even worth the electricity it might take to run them today.
I don't bring out my "museum" machines often because they are all emulated, just a double-click away, on the desktop of my current computer. I used to make some beer money transferring data on old floppies to newer formats. I could read anything, even old 8 inch floppies but that little side business evaporated a long time ago. Some of my old machines I'm afraid to fire up because I've had bad experiences with old electrolytic capacitors popping like firecrackers.
But it's really amazing how far computers have come. A $35 Raspberry Pi or most any modern cell phone has more computing power than most of the computers I've ever worked with.
In my first computer programming class we wrote fortran by hand on paper coding sheets, fought for time on the keypunches, and left our punched cards on a shelf for overnight processing. We'd pick up the results in the morning, many times multiple sheets of printout documenting a single typing error.