Old computer as workstation

[dryjoints]

I am noticing some newish people here. Welcome!

Some newish, some Jewish... some both. 

[GreyWoolfe]

I am noticing some newish people here. Welcome!

Some newish, some Jewish... some both. 

How about some Druish?

[Ampera]

I am noticing some newish people here. Welcome!

Some newish, some Jewish... some both. 

Always like new people for me to annoy, er I mean talk to!

[David Hess]

My oldest?  There are a couple that I still use:

Slot 1 Pentium 2 450MHz 384M ECC BX chipset operating as a FreeBSD router.
Slot 2 Dual Pentium 3 Xeon 900MHz 2G ECC GX chipset operating as a server.
Slot 1 Dual Pentium 3 600MHz 840 chipset not currently being used.
Slot 1 Pentium 3 1.2GHz 1G ECC BX chipset operating as my legacy and backup XP machine.
Pentium4 2.4C 2G ECC 875P chipset not currently being used.

My nVidia chipset systems which were more recent than all of the above are all dead.  So are all of the nVidia video cards.  I don't buy nVidia anything anymore.

[technix]

You class Core 2 Duo as "old"? Wow...  you must be VERY young.

Do you count 24 as very young?

That laptop came with Core Duo T2300E and I eventually upgraded it to a Core 2 Duo T7600. I have two even earlier machine but neither of them is with me or in working order: an AMD K6 166MHz with 64MB RAM and a Creative Labs Sound Blaster 16 which is long gone, and a Socket 478 Pentium with DDR SDRAM (I think I upgraded it to 512MB?) that is not in working order although I still had the motherboard and the processor.

[Nusa]

You class Core 2 Duo as "old"? Wow...  you must be VERY young.

Do you count 24 as very young?

Comparatively, yes. I've been playing with computers for about 55 years now and predate personal workstations entirely. My father is still alive, and he started using computers in the 1950's for his research.

[Ampera]

You class Core 2 Duo as "old"? Wow...  you must be VERY young.

Do you count 24 as very young?

Comparatively, yes. I've been playing with computers for about 55 years now and predate personal workstations entirely. My father is still alive, and he started using computers in the 1950's for his research.

ask the wrong questions to the wrong people and get the right answers

[james_s]

Do you count 24 as very young?

I wish I could say no, but time keeps slipping by and 24 was quite a while back now. I was a teenager and built my first Pentium (60Mhz) about the time you were born.

[Gribo]

The oldest working machine I have is a Dual slot 1 1GHz P3. It had Windows 7 and SCSI RAID. Had to unplug it, as it consumed way too much power for its purpose.

[ajb]

At one point a few months ago I grabbed an old PC off a shelf at work because I needed to us a PCI interface card it had in it*.  It booted to XP.  I turned it off and found another solution. 

*actually it was one of few computers in the building that even had PCI sockets and could fit a full-height card.

I only keep one desktop at home, it's a Phenom something-or-other that does a reasonable job with most things, but is noticeably sluggish compared to the i7 system I have at work (or maybe not once patches for meltdown roll out ).  I keep thinking about upgrading, but it's going to need a full replacement at this point, except maybe the SSD.  With the SSD it's substantially faster at compiling software than my i7 laptop.  I should probably but an SSD in the laptop before I upgrade my desktop.

[james_s]

Nothing wrong with XP, I still have it on an old laptop that gets used occasionally for specific needs, still works fine. It's getting old enough now that I'm not too concerned with someone hacking it, there are many juicier targets out there.

[ajb]

No, XP isn't that bad, I was mainly being facetious (although I did actually find another solution because I didn't want to dig through old software versions to find something that would work on XP).  XP was great until 7 came out, then the biggest problem with XP was that it wasn't 7.  These days the biggest problem with XP is that it isn't 10 

[David Hess]

No, XP isn't that bad, I was mainly being facetious (although I did actually find another solution because I didn't want to dig through old software versions to find something that would work on XP).  XP was great until 7 came out, then the biggest problem with XP was that it wasn't 7.  These days the biggest problem with XP is that it isn't 10 

I am still trying to get Windows 7 or 10 to support what XP does.

[james_s]

I retired XP as my daily driver when I needed 64 bit. If the day comes that I have to retire Win7 then I'm done with Windows, unless Microsoft makes a radical departure from their current trajectory. At work I've been using Linux on my primary PC for over a year and I could just about use it at home. It's only the "legacy" Windows software that keeps me loyal to Windows, the same legacy platform that MS is hell bent on killing off.

[Halcyon]

I retired XP as my daily driver when I needed 64 bit.

I run Windows XP x64 Edition. I'm not willing to let go just yet :-)

[jmelson]

The oldest working machine I have is a Dual slot 1 1GHz P3. It had Windows 7 and SCSI RAID. Had to unplug it, as it consumed way too much power for its purpose.

OK, I have a Honeywell Alert computer, built in 1966 for the X-15 project.  Mine most likely never saw an X-15, but is probably not too much newer.  24-bit CPU, built into a 1/2 ATR rack, weighs about 30 Lbs, takes 5 V at 25 A.  As far as I can tell, it works, too, by jamming various instruction codes into the memory input bus, and observing the address in lights.
(I have the memory that went with it, but no docs, and it appears to be wrecked.)
It was built with custom ICs generally like DTL, made by TI.  Not sure how many, but several hundred ICs, for sure.

Jon

[james_s]

Well that certainly gets the award for the most unique computer mentioned here. I'm not sure it would count as a "workstation" though.

Any idea what the original purpose was specifically?

[jmelson]

Yes, the Honeywell Alert was used to provide energy management info to the X-15 pilot, so he could arrange to be at the right altitude to make a power-off landing at Edwards AFB after going mach <crazy> at a couple hundred thousand feet over the California desert.

They had some kind of range navigation system so they could figure out how many miles they were from the strip, and add in altitude and you have all the info you need to inform the pilot.
If too high, he can circle around, but if just a little too high, he needs to burn off energy with S-turns and such so he doesn't overshoot the runway.

Unlike most systems, I was able to get an incredible 2-volume document on the history of the project.  This was a contemporary of the Apollo Guidance Computer project, which started just a bit earlier than the Alert, but finished later.  That was most likely due to the large amount of software needed for Apollo.

The Computer History Museum has already expressed interest in this relic.  I just don't want to let it go just yes, as it is a bit too neat.

Jon

[David Hess]

The oldest working machine I have is a Dual slot 1 1GHz P3. It had Windows 7 and SCSI RAID. Had to unplug it, as it consumed way too much power for its purpose.

I replaced the hard drive in the Slot 1 Pentium 2 450MHz mentioned above with a compact flash card.  With the CPU operating at a fraction of its maximum load and power management enabled, power consumption is acceptable.  But I also pulled the SCSI drives from my larger server for the reason you gave.

[Dr. Photon]

My oldest computer is normal usage is a Socket-A Athlon running Windows 98 (using a CF card for the "disk"). It's quite snappy considering the winXP era hardware is running win98 (and very reliable!). I don't network it, but sneakernet files back and forth over USB sticks. It is used to run an Audio Precision System One audio analyzer (hence the need for win98 and a parallel port). the Computer has also become very handy for other things such as using my old EEPROM burner, reading/writing the occasional floppy, and (when booted into pure DOS, with a slowdown utility such as THROTTLE) programming old Motorola radios.

I have the win98 machine connected to a KVM switch with an old Core2 Duo Dell laptop (win7) that is used as a general purpose web browsing/KiCAD/datasheet viewer lab machine. Since the old laptop worked so well (and they are super cheap on eBay), I bought a second one and use it as a car ECU tuning computer, for datalogging, and as a general garage computer. These are my oldest computers that are fully networked and used like a "normal" computer.

The oldest machine that is connected and operational (but not really "used" for anything other than the occasional game) is a TI99/4A home computer with all the trimmings.

[cowasaki]

I have a Mac Pro 1,1 2x Dual Xeon 2.66GHz which cost me £1699+ additional hard drives, an additional 2x512Mb,4x1Gb and a better graphics card in 2008ish......

I upgraded the graphics to 5770 a year or so ago then a few months ago I spent around £180 to upgrade the memory to 8x4Gb so 32Gb, 512Gb SSD, USB3 and 2x Quad 3GHz Xeons with El Capitan.

It is back behaving like a modern workstation and running modern software again.  Well worth the time and energy.

[technix]

I have a Mac Pro 1,1 2x Dual Xeon 2.66GHz which cost me £1699+ additional hard drives, an additional 2x512Mb,4x1Gb and a better graphics card in 2008ish......

I upgraded the graphics to 5770 a year or so ago then a few months ago I spent around £180 to upgrade the memory to 8x4Gb so 32Gb, 512Gb SSD, USB3 and 2x Quad 3GHz Xeons with El Capitan.

It is back behaving like a modern workstation and running modern software again.  Well worth the time and energy.

With a little bit of command line magic you can get it up to High Sierra with Fusion Drive. Very snappy and even beats the new iMac Pro.

[cowasaki]

I have a Mac Pro 1,1 2x Dual Xeon 2.66GHz which cost me £1699+ additional hard drives, an additional 2x512Mb,4x1Gb and a better graphics card in 2008ish......

I upgraded the graphics to 5770 a year or so ago then a few months ago I spent around £180 to upgrade the memory to 8x4Gb so 32Gb, 512Gb SSD, USB3 and 2x Quad 3GHz Xeons with El Capitan.

It is back behaving like a modern workstation and running modern software again.  Well worth the time and energy.

With a little bit of command line magic you can get it up to High Sierra with Fusion Drive. Very snappy and even beats the new iMac Pro.

I may well do that when I've got time but the MacPro is my workshop computer for playing music, email, web, arduino programming etc so it would be nice but not really essential then I bought a Windows laptop for there too.  My main machine is a 15" MacBook pro running the latest OS.

[technix]

I have a Mac Pro 1,1 2x Dual Xeon 2.66GHz which cost me £1699+ additional hard drives, an additional 2x512Mb,4x1Gb and a better graphics card in 2008ish......

I upgraded the graphics to 5770 a year or so ago then a few months ago I spent around £180 to upgrade the memory to 8x4Gb so 32Gb, 512Gb SSD, USB3 and 2x Quad 3GHz Xeons with El Capitan.

It is back behaving like a modern workstation and running modern software again.  Well worth the time and energy.

With a little bit of command line magic you can get it up to High Sierra with Fusion Drive. Very snappy and even beats the new iMac Pro.

I may well do that when I've got time but the MacPro is my workshop computer for playing music, email, web, arduino programming etc so it would be nice but not really essential then I bought a Windows laptop for there too.  My main machine is a 15" MacBook pro running the latest OS.

Well AFAIK to upgrade this machine you need to force flash MacPro2,1 firmware into the machine and sacrifice system integrity protection (since a few system files have to be modified.) After the MacPro2,1 firmware upgrade the machine will also accept some faster processors and more RAM. Throw in a modern AMD GPU like a RX 580 and you get a fairly powerful modern system.

[james_s]

This illustrates perfectly why PC sales are declining. We are not in a post-PC era, the PC is not dead, rather the market is saturated and few people need to upgrade regularly anymore. 10-20 years ago contemplating using a 10 year old PC do do actual work was pretty much unheard of. A system that old would have been hopelessly obsolete in the era where computers were outdated pretty much as soon as you took them out of the box.