[techmind]

My main computer is nine years old (ten in a few months). Pentium 4 / 1.8GHz and upgraded to 768MB RAM. It runs Windows XP just fine. I haven't bloated it with MS office (which'd be the death of it), but it's fine for some programming and web-browsing. Many anti-virus progs would probably be too much, but it works just fine with NOD32 which is a decent antivirus which is lightweight on resources. It'll even (just) allow me to watch standard-definition TV via a USB satellite receiver. I open it up every year or two and hoover the dust out, so it doesn't get clogged and risk overheating.
The biggest limitation is that because it's only single-core, one processor-intensive operation (like converting RAW photos to JPG) causes everything else to grind to a halt until its finished).

The original hard disk failed years ago, but I replaced that, and since supplemented it with a second HDD.
The computer did go totally dead about a year ago. I tried swapping the power supply, but it made no difference. I then swapped the CMOS battery coin-cell for the one in my calculator (it turned out the original had gone flat)... and the PC came back to life (with the original PSU) - and has worked ever since.

I did buy a new laptop last year, so I wouldn't be stuck if the old PC failed again - and of course the new one lets me watch HD TV and Blu-ray which is nice. It'll also find optimal solutions to arbitrary states of Rubik's cubes in a few 10's of seconds and all sorts of other tricks the old one wasn't up to.

[techmind]

The BBC micro in the cupboard still worked the last time I tried it (less than a year ago). It's rather weird using it with a LCD TV monitor though  []
(And playing tape data to it from my modern PC or mp3 player)

[techmind]

My parents' printer is still a trusty HP LaserJet 4M+ (probably about 15-16 years old) ... they were built like battleships (and weighed as much!!!), though my dad has had to make a few small repairs to the mechanics.

[chris]

My sinclair zx spectrum (bought about 1986?) still works - tried it about 6 months ago; took me far longer to find a working cassette deck to load the programmes than anything else.  I just could not get my copy of elite to load though!  Its a very neat book-end most of the time


Could I download an mp3 of elite perhaps and load from my ipod?

I had lunch - and dinner - with David Braben who wrote Elite the other day. What a lovely guy. We discussed the Elite story; I still remain gobsmacked how he got that software to work with about 20k of memory to play with (on a BBC at least). That game was a legend and, in my view, has never been beaten.

[Bored chemist]

I think that some bits of the GPS system are more than 10 years old, so lots of us use 10 Y O technology.

[Geezer]

My sinclair zx spectrum (bought about 1986?) still works - tried it about 6 months ago; took me far longer to find a working cassette deck to load the programmes than anything else.  I just could not get my copy of elite to load though!  Its a very neat book-end most of the time


Could I download an mp3 of elite perhaps and load from my ipod?

I had lunch - and dinner - with David Braben who wrote Elite the other day. What a lovely guy. We discussed the Elite story; I still remain gobsmacked how he got that software to work with about 20k of memory to play with (on a BBC at least). That game was a legend and, in my view, has never been beaten.

Not to brag or anything, but, I wrote a two person interactive "Battleships and Cruisers" that would not allow any cheating. It ran in 1K of 16 bit memory, AND I made the computer myself [8D] (This was before microprocessors.)

[peppercorn]

My sinclair zx spectrum (bought about 1986?) still works - tried it about 6 months ago; took me far longer to find a working cassette deck to load the programmes than anything else.  I just could not get my copy of elite to load though!  Its a very neat book-end most of the time

Could I download an mp3 of elite perhaps and load from my ipod?

I had lunch - and dinner - with David Braben who wrote Elite the other day. What a lovely guy. We discussed the Elite story; I still remain gobsmacked how he got that software to work with about 20k of memory to play with (on a BBC at least). That game was a legend and, in my view, has never been beaten.

Meeting Braben sounds amazing! ... Can't get him on the show I suppose?

Frontier (Sequel to Elite) was the first PC game I ever bought; for our family's first PC. Although there were games of equal ingenuity coming along by then I still list it in my top ten.

And even that only came on a Double-Density floppy disk, which seemed pretty incredible to me.

[Geezer]

And even that only came on a Double-Density floppy disk, which seemed pretty incredible to me.

Floppy disks! How high tech is that! I had to do everything in paper tape on an ASR-33 at ten characters per second.

(While working, I might add, in my office which was cardboard box in middle o't road.)

[peppercorn]

And even that only came on a Double-Density floppy disk, which seemed pretty incredible to me.

Floppy disks! How high tech is that! I had to do everything in paper tape on an ASR-33 at ten characters per second.

(While working, I might add, in my office which was cardboard box in middle o't road.)

.... By 'eck!


Even with the undreamt of quantities of storage today's programmers have at their disposal I still think it would useful for them to occasionally spare some thought for cleverer memory management.  The, apparently unnecessary, bloated nature of many applications these days (not to mention certain operating systems!) gives one much to nibble quibble about!! []

[Geezer]

And even that only came on a Double-Density floppy disk, which seemed pretty incredible to me.

Floppy disks! How high tech is that! I had to do everything in paper tape on an ASR-33 at ten characters per second.

(While working, I might add, in my office which was cardboard box in middle o't road.)

.... By 'eck!


Even with the undreamt of quantities of storage today's programmers have at their disposal I still think it would useful for them to occasionally spare some thought for cleverer memory management.  The, apparently unnecessary, bloated nature of many applications these days (not to mention certain operating systems!) gives one much to nibble quibble about!! []

Hear! Hear!

As soon as the H/W guys figure out how to make the memory larger and the processors faster, the S/W guys figure out how to piss it all away. That's a slight exaggeration of course, but there is some truth to it.

[lightspeed301]

I regularly use my old PIII Compaq Armada E500 at 800 mhz. It was designed for Windows 2000 but it came used with XP.

Down in the basement I cached an 8088 that probably still works. Two large floppies and no hard drive. DOS 2.6 at best. Word Perfect 4.0.  Has an add-on board for memory. Might total 1 meg. Could use it for word processing and even have a carbon ribbon daisy wheel printer for high quality stuff. Thirteen characters per second.....and until very recently I also had one of those HP LaserJet 4s.  Lightning finally fried it. It might have worked on the 8088.

I am probably the only person on the planet who ever surfed the WWW with an 8088. It had a 10 meg hard drive and I ran a DOS browser called Arachne.  Took about ten minutes to load a single page. But I did it!!!!!

[lightspeed301]

Pepper

High density floppies! I actually forgot about that. One point two megs on the five inchers? Back in about 1970 my cousin took me to his UC Irvine IT lab. He proudly showed me an early version of Space invaders. Not very much more then Pong, really.

PS I still have my original AOL account from when it was strictly DOS. Had a four digit password. No WWW but a fair number of publications were available. I remember reading The Atlantic.

[syhprum]

I have a vintage 1980's 8085 computer complete with two 5 inch floppy drives that runs CPM software (also with cassete tape input) .
It comes with circuit diagram that shows every chip.

[syhprum]

I have a home made device for displaying weather satellite pictures that I built out of TTL chips to my own design in 1984 which really amounts to little more than a video card but of which I am inordinatly proud and keep connected up and occasionaly run pictures from my mini disk recorder.   

[polytope4d]

I have a 10+ year old ECS motherboard, P4 1.7GHz processor, the Samsung 40 GBhard drive and the case (all are 10+ yrs old)). The CD-RW drive (7+ yrs old), PSU (1 yr, 3rd replacement) and CRT 15"Monitor (6+ yrs) and DDR2  400 RAM (5+ yrs)were all upgraded. Yes, the computer still works on Win XP, there is Office 2003, Foxit reader and Irfanview and an old ver. of Avast AV, and nothing much. To boot it, sometimes you've got to clean the RAM, put it back and it works fine. Replaced the CMOS batt a few yrs ago.

[grizelda]

I have a bunch of old Toshiba Tecra 8000 laptops 300 - 400 mhz Pentium 2 which I use with Audiograbber hooked up to a tuner to take radio programs and mp3 them to burn on cd for later listening. Been doing it for years. They never die. Probably because they don't use the new politically correct solder instead of lead.

[Ethos_]

Actually, I just purchased a new Gateway because my 10 year old XP recently bit the dust. All good things must come to an end,............ RIP old XP.

[Bored chemist]

Sad to say that I just tried to power up my Commodore Pet and it no longer works.

It's possible that the roms have lost their memory but it's more likely that, if I were to replace a few capacitors, I'd still have a working computer from about 1980 (judging by the date stamps on the chips).

[neilep]

I got one of these in the loft

Amstrad PPC640 (UK 1988)



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[Airthumbs]

Elite was the best game ever once you managed to dock for the first time that is!