Oldest Day to Day machine you still rely on...

[kfitzenreiter]

Hello again everyone!

I currently am typing on a brand new build of a Intel core i5 2400 (sandy bridge). Despite some of my misgivings with certain practices of Intel in general, this seems to be a damn good cpu and an awesome achievement for intel. Thinking back to the 8088's and 8086's I used in the 80's it almost boogles the mind how far these chips have come.

That being said, I still have some older machines in active use around the house. Currently running in my basement office/man cave running windows 7 is a trusty, old AMD Socket A Athlon XP 3200 (Barton) 2.2 ghz. Granted the system is maxed out with 1.5 gigs of ram, a decent AGP graphics card, a couple of hard drives and a system fan, but it runs day and night for months sometimes without needing to be rebooted. It does max out the cpu for brief periods if you restart or if you run multiple applications at once, but not usually for more than a few seconds. Normally during internet/office duties while listening to music it hums along at between 3% - 20% cpu usage. Sometimes I feel like it runs more reliably than my faster machines.

Another moldy, oldy but still going strong system is my file/print server. This is an old Intel Pentium 4 2.4 ghz (socket 478) It just runs XP and is actually a working "workstation," but I primarily use it to store backup copies of files and to access my laserprinter. I tried hooking the printer through a windows 7 machine, but it kept hanging jobs so I changed to the old xp machine and everyone on the network can print without problems.

I have older systems in my basement computer graveyard, but those don't get turned on very often. Although a few months back I did kill an afternoon trying to find a windows 2000 driver for an ancient ISA sound card. Got some windows NT drivers to work, but that's another story.

 

[ghnader hsmithot]

my typewriter..WOOOHHHEEE.
it can type and type..

 

[kfitzenreiter]

my typewriter..WOOOHHHEEE.
it can type and type..

Typewriter, that brings back memories.

I can remember back in the day in high school typing term papers for English class or History research papers. Every single mistake I'd have to take out the standard black cartridge and put in the white "erase" cartridge and then backspace to align over the errant character I had typed. No spell check. No grammer check. Just me and the paper.

Then again there was a certain charm to actually hammering out the real document. Each character getting permanently imprinted on the paper as you put your thoughts down. And we didn't have as many ridiculous typos created by "spell check."

 

[Baralis]

And even with all our modern conveniences life just seemed so much simpler back then.

I too remember typing school papers on the old type writer. Back in the 80's when personal pcs were just starting to gain traction and internet was becoming available to the mainstream I remember thinking that it would be nice if some government or organization would allocate the knowledge of man and make it available on the internet so that everyone could have easy access to knowledge. At that time I couldn't imagine the internet being what it is today, it had very little content, and that it would end up being your average user that would make everything accessible in just a few years. Boy did I miss that one by a long shot lol.

Edit to add - To answer your question. The oldest PC I still have in use is a 2003 dell with a P4.

 

[bearclaw99]

I have a Windows 7 Core i7 2600K desktop, a Core i5 laptop, and a 366 mhz blue clamshell Apple iBook with an upgraded 256 mb of RAM

 

[kfitzenreiter]

And even with all our modern conveniences life just seemed so much simpler back then.

I too remember typing school papers on the old type writer. Back in the 80's when personal pcs were just starting to gain traction and internet was becoming available to the mainstream I remember thinking that it would be nice if some government or organization would allocate the knowledge of man and make it available on the internet so that everyone could have easy access to knowledge. At that time I couldn't imagine the internet being what it is today, it had very little content, and that it would end up being your average user that would make everything accessible in just a few years. Boy did I miss that one by a long shot lol.

Edit to add - To answer your question. The oldest PC I still have in use is a 2003 dell with a P4.

Ah, the 70s. Typewriters and paper. And calculators...

I remember going across the street in the early to mid 70s to the neighbor's house. Eight to Ten of us gathered around the table to admire their shiny new---wait for it---four function calculator!!! All this thing did was add, subtract, multiply and divide. And I think it had maybe eight digits. No square root. No memory function. No trigonometric functions. Just the basic four and a lot of older skeptics checking it against their pad and paper calculations. It probably cost $200 or so. Today you can buy throw aways at the dollar store and sometimes they give them away attached to a childs portfolio for school during "back to school" sales. Today, the neighbor could be having a small supercomputer put in the living room I doubt I would even crane my neck in my chair let alone walk across the street. How times have changed.

 

[JackNaylorPE]

I just retired a Wang APC (8088 processor) I bought for $6000 in 1985....still ran, I just needed the space. Oldest in use (backup server) is a P300 (later upgraded to a P600) on Asus P2B-S that I built somewhere at the end of the last millenium.

 

[kfitzenreiter]

I have a Windows 7 Core i7 2600K desktop, a Core i5 laptop, and a 366 mhz blue clamshell Apple iBook with an upgraded 256 mb of RAM

Wow! a 366 mhz iBook. Does it still get used much?

A good friend of mine is a "dumpster diver." Not for food, but for metal. She recycles the metal and gets money for it; I guess for her it is kind of a hobby. In the process of doing this she ocassionally finds cast off pc parts. One day she takes me aside and says would I like to have this "modem" she found. I am imagining some old, broken serial modem or something, but I think why not, it would be fun to see if I could get it to work on one of my "for fun" systems down in the old basement.

She returns from her truck with a full-fledged computer tower. This thing is a socket 939 sempron, complete with mobo, hard drive, cd-burner, everything. I erased the hard disk and loaded a variety of OS's. It runs Debian like a champ. There doens't seem to be anything really wrong with it. I wouldn't trust it as a so-called "production system," but to mess around surfing, why not??

She has also giving me a functioning Pentium 4 (775) system, an ancient pentium 2 slot processor (this one runs windows 2000, albeit very, very slowly) as well as varied and misc pentium 3 systems, most of which are stuck with windows 2000 or a slow version of xp. Some will run linux some won't. Some seem well suited to Windows Me which despite all of complains about it, I never had that much trouble with it at the time, but that's definitely another thread...

 

[loneninja]

A Phenom X4 9850 is my oldest system still assembled, I've got various K8 chips including a Clawhammer Athlon 64 3400 sitting in the closet.