I'm not dead, yet.

I may have a couple PCMCIA network cards in a box.
When I was in high school we used Commodore PETs then got a few Apple ][+ I think we had one trash80 too that no one used.

Back when Inacomp was a small store in our small city, I was asked by him to help him in the store. Oh well, I was too busy a high school kid to do that. Wish I had more of a "work" mind. That company grew quickly, move to the next city with a LARGE (walmart size) building and later doubled it. woulda, coulda, shoulda ....
 
Yeah, the Quadras weren't the best looking, nor were they the worst.

I had owned three 950s at one time, two with PPC upgrades and one had a full GIG hard drive from like 1993. I sold two that were working with a for $200 each several years ago. Late 2022 I sold one that was broken for over $500.

I still have a working SE and Quadra 950. I also have a IIsi and IIci in the garage along with a brace of external SCSI Hds. My favorite was the B&W tower. Its over under the desk, still works so far as I know.

There's also a white ibook in the closet and a Core2 macbook upstairs.
 
There's a thriving community of folks that use "vintage" computers. It's a hobby. It doesn't need a reason.

If we're talking Macs, probably the least common is the 20th Anniversary Mac. The Macintosh TV is probably a close second.
 
pete said:
There's a thriving community of folks that use "vintage" computers. It's a hobby. It doesn't need a reason.

If we're talking Macs, probably the least common is the 20th Anniversary Mac. The Macintosh TV is probably a close second.
Click to expand...
I'm glad I stayed away from the mac world for decades. I tend to buy a computer (and phone) and use it as long as possible.
Although I have an iPhone XR. I think the only thing that is going to make that more obsolete is when Apple stops supporting the OS and works Duo software needs an update but won't work with the OS. I remember when employers used to provide a work phone.

Of the few macs I've owned the browser became so quickly out of date and unsupported the machine became useless even though my PC's continued on. My Mac Mini from 2008 is still around as I used it for ripping music CDs but I haven't turned it on in years now. The browser became useless a while ago. It needed a memory upgrade, which required a 2nd harddrive and an OS upgrade, which that macmini didn't support at all. It was my app programming mac for the original iPod touch and iPhone.

anyways, 1 yr, 3 days later I'm still walking albeit with issues.
 
Last edited:
I remember playing Zaxxon on my Timex-Sinclair TS1000 home computer with membrane keyboard with black and white output to a TV. Also played Flight Sim. Loaded software from an external cassette tape recorder.

Added a 16 KB memory card module pack to speed it up. Internally it came with 4 KB memory. Replaced keyboard with one I custom wired and placed in a universal keyboard case that I had to cut the holes to fit keyboard, fasten the TS mobo to the floor with screwed stand-offs.

Then moved up to the Radio Shack Color Computer II. Then a member of the Sacramento Color Computer Club in the mid 1980's, the president notified us that one of the local RS stores had the Coco-II's basic model with 16 KB memory on clearance for only $20 each. I bought 2, gave 1 away. Opened it up, following instructions from I think it was a home computer magazine article, upgraded it to 64 KB by unsoldering the 2 RAM chips, then custom wiring the 64 KB by adding a few soldered jumper wires and cutting a few traces. Replaced ROM with an EPROM burned by the club with extended Basic into a socket that I replaced the soldered in ROM with trace cuts and jumper wires.

Was working various local bulletin boards with Mickeyterm modem software and RS 300 Baud modem using the CoCo's native 32 character wide by 16 line screen. :p

Replaced the ROM with a socket for EPROM on the floppy disk expansion module card, cut a trace or two and added a jumper wires soldered in, purchased A-Dos, made custom changes I wanted saved to floppy (prior to EPROM mod). Club burned me a new EPROM, installed it for enhanced commands.

Bought a surplused 4 inch wide thermal printer from an electronics store in Sacramento, CA, made a custom serial cable to the RS 4 or 5 pin DIN connector. Used a PNP transistor and two resistors as a primitive digital inverter to flip the READY line so it would work with the RS. I paid under $100 for it. This was when printers were going for upwards of $500 used to thousands new.

Also added some circuitry and a toggle switch using a quad XOR chip to the CoCo's Motorola 6847 video controller chip, to enable enhanced color modes and invert color not otherwise available as it was hard wired.

Also played around with the Tano Dragon II, a Taiwanese RS clone that I bought on reduced clearance price from a computer electronics surplus outfit west of Long Beach, CA (Torrence?) that now escapes my mind as to name. I think I paid $100 for it.

Then I moved on to better things in the late 1980's.

Late 1980's, people were falling in love with MS-DOS. Computers started in the upwards of several thousand dollars. The Xerox Surplus Store in East LA were selling on clearance all their older computer stuff. I bought an 820-II with dual floppies for $300. Bought an aftermarket Centronics parallel printer expansion card for my Oliveti daisy wheel typewriter for $150. Cut a slot in the case per instructions, wired it to its circuit board. Now I had a letter quality printer.

From Xerox Surplus, I purchased the hard disk expansion chassis for the 820-II for several hundred dollars. Also bought generic MS-Dos 2.0, CP/M-80 and CP/M-86 from them for a song. These came with very nice padded leatherette bound 3 ring binder manuals. Also bought their assembler listing for the BIOS and schematics.

MFM hard disks were expensive then. From a BBS forum friend, purchased a used Miniscribe 10 MB half height 5.25" MFM HD for a little over $100. The Xerox expansion chassis was hard coded for a Shugart 4 head 360 cylinder HD. The Miniscribe was 2 head 720 cylinders. After installing the HD, used the disassembler (Xerox came with nice programming tools) on the format and partition programs, patched both for the Miniscribe.

In the BIOS listing, found where it was counting the heads, inserted 4 NOPS after read heads 1 and 2, changed cylinder count from 360 to 720. In monitor mode on power up, I could manually patch these 5 locations. Then boot one of the 3 operating systems. (Expansion chassis came with a 80186 processor, so it could also run 16-bit MS-Dos and CP/M-86.)

Got it all to work. The Xerox became my home computer for a couple years, until I moved up to PC clones.
 
Last edited:
Steve said:
a Xerox with 16 inch floppy discs ?
Click to expand...
No, this one had the then more modern 5.25 inch double sided disk drives that could use/read single density disks. But, I purchased a used Xerox 8 inch dual floppy unit, so I could read their 8 inch software disks and copy files to 5.25 inch DSDD floppies on the 16-8.

I still have an 8 inch floppy laying around somewhere. Could use it in the community band, to tell them that if they want an MP3 recording of how a particular song we're playing should sound, then show them the 8 inch and tell them I have them available on 8 inch floppies. ;)
 
Last edited:
I worked for Memorex back in the day. When 5.25 floppies came along the young lady who handled media sales was delighted to get an order from a local university for 2500 floppy dicks. Somebodies freudian slip. When the order was delivered she had a call from a very aggrieved person at the uni because they had all failed. I went out to investigate and found that she had carefully stapled them to student folders.
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top Bottom