Those were the days!
I go back to DOS 5.0. Came on, what, 3 or 4 floppies? Maybe 2?
Would love to read an update if you ever fire up those old boxes!

Lols

Yes, I’ll update! Yes, 2 or so 3.5s or like 10 5.25 floppy discs. So fun, lol!

But they don’t want us fooling around with that stuff anymore.

Just for nostalgia and to play Star Wars Rogue Squadron 3D, further down the line from your generation of hardware and DOS. The CD drive sounded like a hair dryer and my PSU’s capacitors proceeded to literally melt down and go up in smoke after a short while. I forgot about the electrolyte capacitor drama from back then ha. Wish my dad and I had kept his even older hardware over the years.

The BIOS CMOS batteries are probably easy to swap with new CR2032’s, just be careful of the other more fragile component ages and the strain you put on them. Bad caps can also be upgraded or swapped too but I know I can’t really solder yet, my generation grew up with more standardized plug and play components.

Sounds good on the batteries, thanks... I remember over clocking the CPU, so hopefully all the little fans and stuff works. I used to play King’s Quest and Hero’s Quest, Sierra games. It was good times sitting with the kids trying to figure out puzzles. I remember actually calling their 800 numbers for hints! Lol

And those hint lines billed by the minute I think, kind of funny to think about now.

I still have all my old games on my hard drives. Caesar 3, Pharoah, and Emperor. Oregon Trail, Age of Empires... The list goes on. Some still have good entertainment value and gameplay compared to some of the new microtransaction-hobbled stuff. Learning to beat the old AI bots in tactical games was a fun challenge. I’ll dip my toe back into something new eventually.

Hm and yeah the fan bearings may be another point of failure. Guess it depends on how much wear or dust they were exposed to.

I remember those ones. Some are collectible now, lol. I got a CD off eBay with all the King’s Quest games. They were good fun and you had to read to play them, so good for the kiddies too. Oregon Trail was good. Then Myst came out and we were, whoa! The graphics, man...

and your spouse for living with all of that stuff. My husband had saved all of that stuff too, it took me quite a while to get him to part with it. I just couldn't stand the disorganization and mess.

We have a storage garage we’ve paid on for years. We’ve probably paid 10 times what it’s all worth, but just can’t get rid of it. When we go, stuff will show up at Goodwills.

Have been in the industry over 50 years, learned to program in 1963. Have a little stuff older than that. Few of my systems were ever in my home. Almost all the systems were still functioning when retired.

DEC PDP-8, PDP-11, VAX, Alpha, Pro-350

At least one of most Unix suppliers: Sun, SGI, Intergraph,
HP, DG, DEC Ultrix, ...

Unisys, Bendix LGP-30

And lots more. Plus all the software, docs, and millions of lines of proprietary code. Have video games from 1969.

What a mess

Before my time, but I like it! I’m a Ham, so would probably call those Boat Anchors, lol.

That sounds like museum quality stuff!

That hardware really did last too, even if some of the bigger mainframes took up entire rooms.

I’ve seen a few samples of 60s era graphics but not the actual code. My dad learned programming just a little later than you I think. I’m still just starting out in programming despite some minor Windows/Linux admin know-how. All of that documentation and unique code is pretty special though, some of that is lost to history otherwise.

Of course I have plenty of smaller computers.

One of my favorite computers is one I built in 1979 using an 1802 processor. That was built using parts from a previous 1802 computer I'd built.

I also have an 8 inch boat anchor floppy drive. It worked last I turned it on, but I'm a little wary of turning it on now. No doubt rubber and plastic bits have gone brittle and big electrolytic capacitors would fizzle or explode.

The Fortran class I took in college was still using punched cards and processing the jobs overnight. From then on all my computer classes were on BSD systems. I wasn't really interested in the Apple II, or later, the IBM PC labs. I was happy that other people used those -- it meant they wouldn't complain about me hogging the Unix terminals.

I once was excited to get a job with a major mainframe manufacturer just as they were shutting down. Everyone was abandoning that sinking ship, which was the only reason they were hiring guys like me. Three quarters of the factory floor was dark. The 1950's decor cafeteria was a ghost town. It was so creepy in the cafeteria, with dust on the tables and flickering fluorescent lights, that no one would eat there.

My boss would let me take home damned near anything I wanted, which often confused the security staff. Eventually the place closed, the building was knocked down, and all that cool stuff inside, including some very expensive tools I'm certain, went to a landfill which was later declared a Superfund site.

I have various Atari 800 computers, which are still my favorites, and an Amiga that was used in local television production.

My current desktop runs Debian. Most of my old computers are emulated on it. I have an Atari icon on my computer desktop that takes me directly to an emulation of my significantly upgraded Atari 800 XL, just as I last used it.

I didn't build an IBM clone until 1990. That computer is emulated in DosBox.

Whenever I build a new computer these days I simply copy everything on the old computer over to the new computer. My oldest files go back to the 'seventies. Some of these were downloaded from my university's computers using a 300 baud modem.

Maybe I don't need to keep all this old computer hardware, but one never knows. The day after I've dumped my eight inch floppy drive will be the day I find some long lost treasure on eight inch floppy disks.

Also have my AST Premmia 486, w/ Windows 3.1, 66MHz, with a 350-MB original hard drive, and a500-MB added drive. That machine was a BEAST!

Ah, the memories! (I even still have my 16th-birthday present, a steel Pickett slide rule! What a nerd I am!)

Those 486 speed demons, lol.. and $50 for a 1meg stick of RAM. I have some old Computer Shopper “magazines”. Big catalog of goodies.

was the fastest machine they'd tested up to that time. But within six months, the Pentiums were coming out, and since they were running on a different bus technology, AST never produced their Pentium upgrade for it. Bummer. But I ran that computer into the ground for seven years. Within four years, AST sold out to someone (Samsung I think).

My first real computer was a Tandy, from Radio Shack. It had proprietary DOS which sucked. It couldn’t be upgraded.

It used to drive me up the wall

having to manually set those, and just about everything. New mouse, irq... lol