Looking at a second-hand 'puter...

[reynardo.livejournal.com]

and the social list at my husband's work listed one at $400 (Aus). But when my beloved told me about it, all I could hear was uncontrollable laughter and the sad sad words:

4 8 6

No, I'm not buying that antique.

Comments

[chaobell]

....PFFFFFFFFFFFF!!!

You could leave a 486 out on the curb with a "I WILL PAY YOU $50 TO TAKE THIS" sign on it and people would walk past it all "man, I dunno..."

[snarl817.livejournal.com]

Someone is actually CHARGING MONEY for a 486?

Whiskey Tango Foxtrot?

[alexanderc.livejournal.com]

It's not all that bad. I still have a 386 with a 387 co-processor installed running as my print server.

Now where did I put my Timex Sinclair...

[compwizrd.livejournal.com]

my zx81 and ts/1000 still worked as of about 5 years ago.. and if they didn't, it can't be too hard to fix :)

[taleya.livejournal.com]

Up until recently, meshyfish.com ran off a PI with a grand total of 32mb RAM :D

[abstrak-tokatl.livejournal.com]

i have like 4 of those in the basement and three in the closet. Kept meaning to turn them in to arcade systems with Mame

[alexanderc.livejournal.com]

Actually, it's probably getting hard to fix given that they used through-hole components which are not as easy to find anymore (plus the RoHS nuisance).

I'd still like to find my Sinclair and see if I can get it working. :)

[superbus.livejournal.com]

$400 AU? That's insane for even a decent rig. For a 486? That's laughable.

I mean, they can still be useful (low stress Linux servers running LFS), but still, you can probably piece together one off of spare parts for $40 AU...

[alexanderc.livejournal.com]

:) My mail server and remote temperature monitor runs on a 486DX. I didn't have the disk space to keep my photo gallery on it so that got migrated over to a donated Sun 220R.

[the-s-guy.livejournal.com]

That 486 better be weighted with solid gold bricks.

[loosechanj.livejournal.com]

They forgot the decimal point after before the "4".

[adamjaskie.livejournal.com]

Typical failure mode is that the ribbon for the keyboard gets brittle and cracks right near its slot on the main board. That happened to mine, and I just cut off the cracked portion and shoved the ribbon back into its connector. As far as I know, it still works, but I haven't played with it in a number of years.

[sdaemon.livejournal.com]

I've thrown 486s in the dumpster. Years ago.

Nowadays I don't throw anything out, I just take it to the free-for-all table in the basement of one of the buildings on Georgia Tech campus and leave it there. Doesn't matter what it is, it's usually gone within 24 hours. Sometimes within 30 minutes.

I still have a working 486 (with two NICs -- it's my linux-based firewall, works great so I don't see any reason to replace it), and a working 286 (first machine I ever bought and built with my own money, keeping it around for sentiment...and it runs minix for lolz).

Other than those two, I've thrown out or given away everything older than pentium4/athlonXP.

[sdaemon.livejournal.com]

I am reminded of a story I once read of a guy who lived in a bad part of town. He was throwing out an old computer and full tower case and decided to be a dick about it. He filled the case with concrete and let it harden, then left it out on his doorstep. Several days when by before anyone messed with it, but one day he noticed it was gone from his doorstep. He found it about a block down the road, jettisoned into a ditch.

[phyphor.livejournal.com]

I just take it to the free-for-all table in the basement of one of the buildings on Georgia Tech campus and leave it there.

But do you wipe the passwords and supply keyboards?

[sdaemon.livejournal.com]

usually I yank the HDD entirely. In the cases where I've left the HDD intact, I've already wiped it and reinstalled a free OS.

MS OEM license stickers are scraped off beforehand, where applicable.

And no, I don't usually supply keyboards :) TANSTAAFK.

[celyste.livejournal.com]

*L* between home and work there's been a 486 sitting on the curb for two weeks now. it's been there through the 'free-cycle' day and everything. Not even the garbage man will take it *L*

[two-pi-r.livejournal.com]

I thought I was reading vintagecomputer for a second there.

[brotherflounder]

Y'know, I kinda want a 486.

Just to say I've seen one...and stuff.

[cthulu-for-pm.livejournal.com]

There are parts of computing history worthy of such sentiments.

The 486 is not one of them.

(I'm so glad we don't have to deal with some of the crap from years past - parallel port ethernet adapters, anyone?)

[geekgrrl-ca.livejournal.com]

I'll see your parallel port ethernet addaptor and raise you two scsi ethernet addaptors.

[geekgrrl-ca.livejournal.com]

The only real reason to replace that (besides hardware failure) would be to switch to something that used a smaller energy footprint. like a cheap laptop.

[cthulu-for-pm.livejournal.com]

Heh.

And nowadays we have iSCSI - the circle is complete!

[brotherflounder]

How about some USB to PS/2 adapators?

[jecook]

*laughs*

I'd probably need one of those buggers if I ever wanted to put this Portable PC III I have on the network, if I can find get the dos network stack ported over to it...

[mattcaron.livejournal.com]

I draw the line at stuff which can't boot from an optical drive. Floppy bootstraps are over with, and PII's are cheap enough.

[mattcaron.livejournal.com]

DBAN.

[mattcaron.livejournal.com]

I still use them.

KVM is PS/2, and all my machines have both PS/2 and USB... but, my mouse is USB.. thus, adaptor....

I even have some which go the other way, allowing the PS/2 KVM to use USB-only machines, in case someone needs help with one.

[mattcaron.livejournal.com]

I'll throw you in a Token Ring adapter, an EISA video card, and and one each ISA EMS and XMS memory board..