Retro thread?

Retro thread?
Retro thread.

Picked this up (amongst other things) from a class A weirdo in Illinois a couple months ago. Finally fired it up tonight to see if it worked. Pentium 200 w/ MMX, 32 MB RAM, 3.8 GB HDD, 2 MB S3 Virge, Win95 B. All original. MSRP $2200.

Dude lived in a teeny tiny apartment that was crammed wall to wall, floor to ceiling with retro hardware and it was all up for grabs. He was literally pulling parts out of his bathroom to show me. But he had obvious mental issues and within about 15 minutes of being there his demeanor entirely changed and I felt like I was gonna get stabbed. Bought what I could and left.

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Other urls found in this thread:

imgur.com/a/pDOH9MR
macintoshgarden.org/apps/power-mac-g4-quicksilver-2002-restore-discs
macintoshgarden.org/apps/mac-osx-mac-os-10-ppc
twitter.com/SFWRedditGifs

Bumpity. Been waiting all night for a retro thread. Nice system OP.

Not bad.

I picked this up last weekend not far from me. Currently waiting for a converter cable to come into the mail but it powers on, which is more than what I could say for my Indy.

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I know little about those beyond an LGR vid. Are they still viable for anything other than pure collector value?

Thrift store find a couple weeks ago. Totally mint, with manuals and everything. When REAL laptops were $2 - $3,000, you could get one of these bad boys for like $700.

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IRIX is still usable and as far as I know can go online fine enough.

I would say its far more viable than the NeXT I have, trying to get online with only 8mb of RAM is not at all easy.

Hmmm.... kinda sparked an idea. The retro community is only growing, perhaps a "retronet" is in order.

Well, there is BBS which is still around and more or less hosts that kind of community after everything is said and done.

Most people with systems too old can not use anything but BBS, so they are still in use to this day. Hell I think there was even talk of a Jow Forums BBS.

Yeah but BBS's, imo, are rather hit and miss. See I was brought up on the infancy of the internet but never actually used BBS in it's heyday. I've tried joining a few these days and they seem overly complicated and redundant. Maybe I'm just not hitting the right ones but they don't seem appealing at all. Something that looks like mid-90's WWW, however, would be right up my alley.

Is it just me, or has it become increasingly difficult to find electronics in thrift stores lately? I used to check thrift stores pretty often (here in southern VA/northern NC) back in 2011 - 2013, and I would often come across pretty nice stuff. I mean I got an old Thinkpad, a generic buckling spring keyboard, a few CRTs, and loads of other stuff that I refurbished/upgraded and sold. I recently got back into it, but almost all of the thrift stores I used to go to now have absolutely no selection, save for some shitty mice, keyboards, LCD monitors, and speakers. What are my alternatives? I really don't care for Ebay.

How much did you pay?

It's not just you. This is becoming a niche market and people are buying shit up, myself included. Your alternatives are craigslist and word of mouth, not much else.

FYI - don't ignore the old computer speakers you find at thrift stores. You'd be surprised at how hard they are to find, and they sound a fuckton better than the modern garbage. The old Altec Lansing setups were fucking GOLD.

I mean its not impossible, but that kind of effort would require more than the people in the community would probably be able to do outside of any grant.

$40
Hell the converter cable I just bought costs more than it by 6 dollars.

Considering the fact that mid 90's web was designed for 5 kb/sec at best, almost anyone with a modern broadband connection could host & handle a substantial load. I'm going to explore this...

Does anyone have any experience with external Apple floppy drives? Are they SCSI or do they use something like serial port? They had some weird format (besides HFS) which is unreadable on an industry standard 3.5" floppy drive. I wanna say all 5.25" external floppies were serial port, but I can't remember.

Anyone know what this is? 1/2

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I would say SCSI since that is what their CD drives used.

>This is becoming a niche market and people are buying shit up
I figured this was the case, but I can't see how people are going to make money off of the generic stuff though. Old tech, with the exception of collectibles, isn't that valuable considering that businesses no longer use it, and there are very few hobbyists that maintain a workspace filled with old stuff like you sometimes see here. Where is the value in it? Is hoarding this stuff really that attractive?

2/2 (sorry had to compress)

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One word: Hipsters

Looks like some kind of ISA controller card for some kind of machine that communicated with it.

I want to say SCSI, but that sure as shit doesn't look like any SCSI I've ever seen. That's an ISA card so it's a dinosaur. What does it say on that ceramic chip?

I think you'd be surprised as to what is considered "valuable" these days.

Look at it this way: 70s & 80s computers, while collectible, don't have a huge demand because they were out of reach for *most* average consumers, so there's no sentimental value there.

By the 90s, however, the prices on this stuff had come down enough that many/most middle class families had a computer in their home. So we now have a generation that wants to collect the technology they grew up with, much like our parents like to collect the toys they grew up with... follow?

It's not about the function, it's about the nostalgia.

I know it's ISA but I don't have a fucking clue what it is/does. It's obviously IBM related.

The top chip is a microcontroller, an Intel 80186. What does the grey IBM chip say on it?

serial concentrator, the big connector would have a cable that fans out into like 15 serial ports

It looks like a computer or coprocessor card. Maybe some kind of upgrade aimed at retarded people who don't know about bottlenecks.

Ok so pretend I'm completely stupid on this era of stuff (cuz I am)... would it make sense if this was tied to a "dumb terminal" system of sorts? Because there's a plethora of old hardware I've found along with this card. Several monochrome monitors, keyboards, and an old IBM server.

There is an awful lot of glue and TTL logic for it to be that. Plus why would you need an entire 80186 for that sort of thing?

FWIW here's the rest of the IBM hardware I found at the same location. I put it on IMGUR cuz I'm not gonna resize all this bullshit and upload them one by one.

imgur.com/a/pDOH9MR

Fuck, is right, that is exactly what it is. Neat find, you should clean it up and get it working. Those AS/400s ran AIX UNIX!

It looks like that card could be used to connect multiple dumb terminals. Does that computer with the optical drives even have ISA?

Found this beaut dumped last weekend. It's a 486-25 SX and has a 250MB HDD, haven't booted it up yet to checked other specs. The case is quite neat, the HDD pulls out the front and is removable.

Excuse the shit quality, was taken with shitty Nokia phone camera.

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Serial card. Got one similar in an old RS/6000.

nice find. that's an indigo 2.

i see you even got the stands.

if you cant get it to display with the 13W3, you can plug serial into it with keyboard detached and you should get something that way as well.

>Does anyone have any experience with external Apple floppy drives? Are they SCSI or do they use something like serial port?
Apple II I guess? They use the same protocol as the internal drives, it's just the same connection as the internal drives have.

You're the NeXTStation guy? Nice find!

>One word: Hipsters
Talking about yourself?

I've been gone 2 hours and this thread has only netted another 10 replies? Really faggots?

it's 1am here and most site traffic I know is from here also (US)
it's also niche shit many people don't care about

I'm seriously fucking confused as to why there is a hole in the left rear of the chassis....

2 AM my time, but shit man. Should I post more pics? I got plenty...

IRIX is probably the most usable of all the proprietary SysVs, really. Current free software repositories on 6.5, tons of good commercial software, familiar environment to anyone with *nix experience. I'd be daily driving my Octane if I had a nice set of matching peripherals to go with it, instead I do a lot of my everyday computing on a HP-UX system.

Honestly, as long as you've got a usable local development environment and the ability to remote into other systems for tasks you can handle locally, any Unix system is viable to some degree.

Bumping... this is my retro hoard area en-progress. Pic is 2 months old, there's a lot more stuff there now just haven't taken pictures yet. At the point of this pic I was just sorting misc parts.

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fuck that's a nice AS/400
>Those AS/400s ran AIX UNIX!
nah that's the RS/6000, AS/400s ran their own operating system that honestly in my opinion is far cooler anyway

would love a system just like that just to mess with the integrated database

this is the kind of setup I want some day
right now I've got a bunch of shit filling a garage and two sheds

Totally not my era... had a guy in a retro discord express interest but never followed through so I'm still sitting on it.

Fortunately, Unfortunately, depending how you look at it; I have far more than those pictures show. I'm almost overloaded. Have a storage shed full of desktops/towers only.

Exhibit 1.

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don't think you're really going to find a lot of retro enthusiasts that are big into midrange, I've always liked them because it feels like the closest I'm going to get to big iron that's feasible to run in a home
>Have a storage shed full of desktops/towers only.
yeah I've got one of those and then a shed full of just random shit and my garage that's a mix of systems and parts/peripherals
wish I could just find some more retro people locally and just give a lot of it away, it feels wrong to scrap anything pre-2000 anymore

I recently figured out what my g4's problem was, fixed it and then put it back in the corner. Its damn sad.

what G4 and what problem?

Dual 450 gigabit and it was all fucked.
Turns out that I just had to stop using a janky power bar and reseat the CPU/RAM.

>it feels wrong to scrap anything pre-2000 anymore

Agreed. And I won't fucking do it. I don't care what anyone says, the late 90s was the fucking golden era of computing.

oh yeah I remember you
still want a DP 500 Mystic but I've never fucking seen one, I even got the rarer single 500 Sawtooth model

I'm not sure what the "g4" era was, I'm not a mac guy at all. But it was recently confirmed to me that I picked up a "quicksilver". I have no idea wtf to do with it, I don't even know if it works.

That is basically it. And not just the stuff that they had when growing up, but also the stuff that was around but they couldn't get at the time when they were growing up.

every era's got great shit for me but the '90s was probably the best medium between modern convenience and oldschool hardware diversity, rapid progress and over-engineering, that survived into the 2000s too even if it was a bit more muted

computing doesn't die for me until 2008-2009, that's when everything started really becoming same-y appliances and my interest shifts into collecting mobile devices which then died again in like 2013
post it and the configuration label on the back and I'll suggest a software stack for you if you want ideas

1/3

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Possibly; the AS/400 was introduced a few years before PCI was a thing.

2/3

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3/3

Sorry I dunno why these went all fucking crazy on the proportions.

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Again, I know fuck all about Macs. It just came to me as part of a lot. Don't ask me if it works or what it can do, I have nary a fucking clue. No rhyme intended.

Easy access to expansion cards?

>IRIX is probably the most usable of all the proprietary SysVs, really.
>when Solaris exists

>dual 1 GHz
Nice.

>retro on discord
Those things unironically exists.

No what's sad is are faggots who make and use them exist

There's actually a really good retro channel on discord. I'm only vaguely familiar with how discord works desu. I found the link in someone's signature on vogons.org. Don't ask me to invite cuz I have nary a fucking clue unless you were to tell me how.

this is pretty much the best factory configuration other than the lack of a zip drive, the only thing that would make it more perfect was if they had done a build-to-order and loaded it with Ultra160 SCSI drives

the 1.0DP came out in early 2002 and was the last and best of the quicksilver generation before the switch off to the new mirrored drive door design, it'll make a very capable OS 9 system and a decent OS X system too

as far as the software loadout goes you could do two things, you could restore it back to the original factory state with an OS 10.1 + 9.2.2 dual boot and appropriate software or dual boot 9.2.2 with 10.4 instead

either of these are pretty doable, I like the former option because of my own personal preferences but also because 10.1 is kind of a cool more NeXTSTEP-ish environment with a more unique look compared to later versions and still runs plenty of good software, going with 10.4 is of course more compatible and also has more retro development like OS 9 does, so you get a better browser support and also more modern development tools with tigerbrew and the like

but QSes don't really like JavaScript so some of the 10.4 benefits like TenFourFox are kind of lost to me, Camino 0.85 is still pretty good for shitposting and surfing Wikipedia, and 10.1 is old enough that the Macintosh Garden archives software that runs natively on it where that's a little harder to get for Tiger.

either way it's a system worth keeping, be sure to make sure the L3 cache chips haven't melted off like what happened to mine though

>guy who does not have a 13W3 monitor, yet alone adapter or right cable already buys a SGI
Boy this is going to be fun.

it's not really that hard to find SoG monitors anymore and adapters are absolute pennies

I bought the following about a week ago:

2 PowerMac G5s
1 PowerMac G4 Quicksilver MDD
2 PowerMac G3s Bondi Blue
For $40.

The Quicksilver G4 is in working condition, with the original HDD and OS X Tiger.

Neither of the G5s has a GPU, so I'll pull one out of another computer to test.

Neither of the G3s have RAM, and one is missing a battery, so I will need to test that when I get some PC133 RAM out.

The G4 will have Gentoo installed on it and be a server. It has 4 places for HDDs, and I have a PCI SATA controller, a PCI-X SCSI controller from an IBM server, and it has ATA33, ATA66, and regular ass IDE. It is the dual core 1.25Ghz model and has 1.5GB of RAM.

I have spare disks for the G5s, and RAM for one. One of them has gore-tier corrosion in one. Odd. Probably still works. Will install Gentoo on one and make it a FOG server. Will sell the other.

I'll use one of the G3s as a HTTP server to copy games to my Windows 98 based retro gaming PC. It has IE4 and I put in a ISA PCI adapter, so it can access games without having to burn any CDs or use a bunch of floppies.

macintoshgarden.org/apps/power-mac-g4-quicksilver-2002-restore-discs
here are the restore disks for it if you want to go with 10.1.2, just need PM_G4_OSX_10_1_2.toast_.zip and PM_G4_9_2_Install.iso_.zip, if you really want the bundled applications you can mount those as disk images afterwards
pretty sure you can rename .toast files to .iso and burn them from a PC
macintoshgarden.org/apps/mac-osx-mac-os-10-ppc
this one has 10.4.6 (Tiger_4_6.dmg_.zip) if you just want to fuck around with OS X applications without worrying about compatibility and hunting for old versions

honestly you'd probably spend a lot of time in OS 9 anyway though and there's plenty of stuff to do there, the main thing about OS X is operating system level SMP-awareness and multitasking advantages

This might be doable by starting something like a ".retro" or ".web1"" TLD in the OpenNIC network. Anyone using those would be free to register a domain as as long as they adhere to strict guidelines making sure only Web1.0 is used in their pages.

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what configurations are the G5s and G3s?
sounds great, but how would you enforce that? seems like it would be hard to really decide what actually defines "web1.0" without having to have people regularly reviewing every site under the TLD

Theoretically you could write a program to examine web pages to identify tags and features that are too modern, and set it to crawl through everything on .retro or whatever it is.

I fugyre that:

1. There wouldn't really be a point to using that TLD for a website with modern crap, as it's not going to run on old systems anyway
2. Web 1.0 pages being small and simple, having a crawler to check their compliance and blacklist those accounts shouldn't be too difficult.

figure*

sheesh

standards as rules have never been enforced successfully on the web, though I'd like a .retro.

Legit sounds like a plan but as pointed out I have no idea how you'd enforce it. I suppose enforcement would come through it's own saving grace: it would utterly useless to those trying to abuse it. The host could simply limit bandwidth to all arbitrary users.

guess I'm just asking what you'd look for when talking about compliance, it feels like it would be difficult to distinguish between sites with completely legitimate and innocent implementations of "dangerous" technologies and ones that actually are bad and shouldn't be on the TLD

for example, my own website uses a lot of modern CSS features but I still build and test every page for compatibility with Mosaic 1.03 and Netscape 4.08
and as already said for me, enforcing a unified standard for an era of the web that was defined by pretty much having no real standards is very difficult

you could mitigate a lot of it with pure CSS-free HTML and the like but maintaining sites like that is absolutely awful, maybe someone should take a page from the nu-dev handbook and build some kind of server-side framework for it and use it to jumpstart the idea

Ok guys, I am NOT a web developer or anything along those lines. I'm a hardware guy. But I know a little bit about a little bit. I'd 100% be down to build/host/etc a retro-web for those interested. I'm open to ideas and advice. Feed me.

Well you could still let people use PHP or other server-side scripting on the backend so they're not literally hand-writing every individual HTML page, though if the goal is building simpler sites for use with retro hardware, hand-writing is less of a burden.

Otherwise, it's basically a matter of someone with the authority to remove offending websites from the TLD having an automated system for crawling all the sites and de-listing anything that contains CSS or any other tags or features that are too modern.

I considered the idea but I'm hoping the one I ordered should work fine at it's job. Also the sands were a surprise when picking it up since the seller did not show them in the sale post. I just hope I can clean it up and find a replacement from the flap for the case to make it look perfect.

Aye, I didn't think I would hit two instances of luck this fast, but I feel this was an opportunity after losing out on a DEC case.

I know all about 13w3, the "standard" that was different for each fucking company that had used it. The converter to VGA I ordered should actually work without the requirement of SoG since they are handmade to SGI specifics and are not hackjobs of Sun 13w3 connectors where the H/V sync pins have to be cut off to use.

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There was a guy here who bought a NeXT machine and posted for weeks that he is working on getting the networking to work like it was the hardest feat known to mankind

Yeah i'm thinking that the backend doesn't really matter, as long as the pages show up correctly in say Netscape 4.08. The whole point is to have a webzone you could visit with an old machine. If there is a crawler, it would only check if the page loads up correctly or not. AFAIK there was a search engine somewhere that would list only pure HTML pages so it shouldnt be that hard to tell

Same guy mate. Also figured out it was the 50ft cable I used which was the problem. Now trying to wait to get a new cable in.

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honestly the TLD itself will probably do a lot of the work for you in making sure that only people with the right attitude are using it
you could define a few standard browsers that cover a wide range of platforms and build a bot that looks for compliance with these browsers by looking for HTML/CSS/JS parsing errors
you can also accompany this with a user-curated gateway like in 's pic to show off some particularly good sites
and build guides, documentation and tools that can help people build really nice but fully compliant websites
>Well you could still let people use PHP or other server-side scripting on the backend so they're not literally hand-writing every individual HTML page
that's not really the issue I'm talking about, you'll be writing HTML no matter what you pick, the problem is that without something like a stylesheet making something that actually looks good becomes an utter clusterfuck because mandating the use of pure HTML means you no longer have a centralized location to store styling information, meaning that if you at any point decide to change the look of your site, or add a new feature to your website, or really want to do anything at all to your site, you have a lot of fucking work to do. not only are you updating tons of different pages and code snippets but you also have to remember and keep track of a lot of little details to make sure everything stays consistent from page to page, for big sites this is fucking hell, and it also fills your code with shit tons of attributes and other useless shit that makes it harder to actually find the content when you decide to update it.
you could surely mitigate a lot of this with server-side code, but it's just fucking stupid and most of those early old browsers that couldn't tell a proper web standard from their own asshole will rape it anyway

>I know all about 13w3
>without the requirement of SoG
You know then you need a SoG capable display or circuitry to strip H/V sync from the SoG signal. Nothing to do with Sun adapters, Sun adapters can be different per model basic, some work out of the box for some SGI machine also.

since I ran out of text and that shit was a tl;dr, the end point I'm trying to make is that you can't just limit people and filter things you think are harmful, you just have to encourage good practice with them

developing a page that looks good without CSS and looks even better with it beats the shit out of an unmaintainable mess of barely-standardized HTML attributes any day of the week, same goes for small doses unintrusive client-side scripting, both of which were very much in use in the early days of the web

The SoG requirement is needed when using Sun adapters because of the H/V Sync pins not being present since they are different between companies.

The H/V Sync placement is completely different between Sun and SGI, and the only way to use a Sun adapter on an SGI machine is to break the pins off, only leaving the colour behind but now needing an SoG monitor to use it.

There are also green filters as well, but that is a different subject.

Maybe so, but unless you've got a good idea for how to do this encouraging and human-based checking of what's okay and what's not, it's a fuckload easier to automate banning of features, even if the result is not the most ideal.

for this kind of measure as shitty as I think it is you could probably just ban script tags and you'd be good, that would keep shitters from sticking their trendy react/node/whatever startup pages on the TLD while not fucking people over that want to build something nice

Now you're the class A wierdo.

Those SGI machines don't output H/V dummy. Only SoG.
Only latter machines like Octane2 were VESA compatible and had separate H/V sync output.

As already mentioned, this has nothing to do with Sun adapters in this case.

>converter cable
Why do you need a converter cable if all you'd need is a 13W3 connector, VGA cable and soldering iron?

here is my pentium 166MMX HP Vectra, I just got a sound card for it and it's a nice little DOS/win95 machine. the onboard video memory has some issues but spraying the chips on the motherboard seem to fix it at least temporarily.

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Tested my first pc today, an Athlon XP 1800 + 256mb SDRAM, to see if it was still working. Sadly it wasn't, I think the motherboard is fried.

Are G5s retro now?

Macs started going Intel more than a decade ago now, so I'd say yes.

shield them well. people like you are going to rebuild the internet when that russian EMP strike knocks down the grid and all other computers.