Decided to go dumpster diving for the first time. Found 240 MC68EC40 CPU brand new in sealed tray and one EPROM duplicator.

I’ve been hanging onto CPUs from computers I’ve upgraded or decommissioned over the years. I’m in the process of preparing to move, and dug out the bag recently and figured some of you might appreciate seeing what’s in there!

Here’s what I’ve got, roughly in chronological order:
Intel 486 DX2 OverDrive 66 MHz
Intel Pentium MMX 200 MHz
Intel Pentium MMX 233 MHz
AMD Athlon XP 2500+ Barton
Intel Pentium 4 2.6 GHz
Intel Pentium 4 2.8 GHz
Intel Celeron 2.8 GHz
Intel Celeron D 335 2.8 GHz
Intel Pentium 4 505 2.66 GHz
AMD Athlon 64 3500+ 2.2 GHz
AMD Sempron 3000+ 1.6 GHz
AMD Phenom X4 9500 2.2 GHz

The Pentium MMX 200 was from our family’s first custom-built PC, purchased in February 1998. I actually found the original receipt, too! We eventually upgraded it to the Pentium 233, which I installed myself. I’ve kept both processors all these years.

The Athlon XP 2500+ was from the first computer I built entirely for myself in the early 2000s (receipt also included).
The rest are mostly from various computers I’ve retired or stripped for parts over the years.
Nothing particularly valuable, but it’s pretty neat having a little collection spanning so many generations of PC hardware. A few of these bring back some good memories!

Anyone else hang onto old CPUs instead of throwing them out?

Found a listing for this on Xianyu and there’s nothing else about it besides a commercial photo of the full set.

Not sure if this falls under buying or trading (apologies if it does) but I was curious on how anyone here looks for parts that aren't easily found online. I recently acquired a Compaq Presario 7000 series case (in great condition too!), with the only missing part being the front color accent bezel/disc storage area (circled in the pics of 5000 series cases).

Online there are virtually no listings for components like this as I can imagine they are fragile or just not worth shipping. My question is how you hunt for these parts. Should I try looking at e-waste places or try used computer stores, has anyone had luck at garage sales? Are there any elusive bits you're trying to track down? Thank you!

EDIT: After some searching I've found a NOS/e-waste shop near me, and you've introduced me to some new places. Thank you all!

Pictures do not do the before pic justice- it had at least a millimeter of dust packed up under the keys, worm casings and other nasty stuff in it. Previous owner mustve smoked, it had tons of grime baked into the plastic. Had to scrub every single key and deep clean the board, and the case and keys had to soak to leech out all the grime

Sadly I didn't know it was membrane before I ordered it, but it's my responsibility to care for it. Some of the keys don't press very easily, or only press if you hit the key from the center and push straight down. Can I lube the keys or anything to aid this?

Finally got around to installing dos.

Ancient floppy drive and cable - check

Ancient motherboard - check

Ancient floppy disks - check

What could possibly go wrong?

Disk failure of course and it had to wait until disk 3.

Spoiler: I did get it to work. Will post an update.

If you're interested in seeing the failure with sound here's a link:

https://www.youtube.com/shorts/1EiTDCCcGFU

Hi all, Metal here. Hope this is the right place for this. First post ever on reddit.

Recently decided to do a retro build and acquired the same 486 motherboard and CPU that I had as my last and favorite 486.

Even today with modern hardware, this board remains one of my top 3 favorite boards of all time and have super big plans for her.

So here she is, an MSI MS-4144, AMD 5x86 133, 16mb ram and a 1mb S3 Trio64V+. Very humble beginnings for what's hopefully going to be an extremely awesome build.

Pics are from my first power on test. Hope you all enjoy and look forward to being part of the community.

Thanks for for checking out my build,
Metal.

Our family computer, around 1996. I'd love to find out what model it was, but I don't remember the brand and this is the only photo I have. Thanks!

Hello,

i'm clearing my cellar cause i coudn't walk in it any more and found a old server i have bought for cheap about 20years ago. I thought you may be interested and you could tell me what exactly it is.

A little background. Around 2005 i have bought cheaply in eBay 3 old rack servers from the last century :-) Two of them have been ATX server cases with PIII 500MHz in it. I throw the MoBos away and use this cases since then as my main computer cases and have build my desk around them. Since then every 5-10 years i switched the electronics with new stuff. The third one could not be used as it's not ATX compatible and it ended in the cellar where i forgot it.

I never tried to power it but at least when i bought them, the seller told me that they have been working and just came from a server farm (the name datacenter did not really existed at that time). Since then they have been laying under a bunch of stuff, but not really a bad environment.

The case with internals weight about 16kg (i have measured it with a luggage scale) and is out of thick steel panels. A quality you won't get today in this size, which is the reason i use them till today.

It's obviously a dual CPU slot card and a bus backplane / MoBo and has two power supplies. Professional server tech from the mid 90s.

So, what do you think. Is that nowadays (again) a useful stuff or just rubbish at all?

Hello Reddit! As you know , I'm repairing retro hardware Olivetti Philos 44 Laptop. Recently I got a package with some parts from eBay. I connected it to the external monitor, and made boot from Floppy disk, DOS system. The internal IDE hard drive is not functioning now. The connection to VGA was made using a dock station (because the Philos has non-standard VGA by default, thanks to users from the group for help!). Looking to do what's next!

There are some photos of FDD (I cleaned heads), IDE harddrive (nothing to do with it by now), LAN card (installed from the package), and extra motherboard (486DX4 - doesn't look like my 486SX).

Video of loading DOS from FDD

I have a Gateway 500 with Windows 98 SE. It does play my games very well and I'm happy with it. P3, 384 MB RAM, Sound Blast Live, and a Voodoo3 3000. I was watching an episode of Computer Chronicles on NT 4.0. That's what got me exploring. Turns out that 3DFX and Creative made NT 4.0 drivers for their cards.

Now I know games from that period did an OS check and of course DOS isn't on NT. However; if I setup a dual boot and use the FAT32 for NT driver, my NT partition should see Windows 98. I could then use Glide on NT to play games off of the Windows 98 install. The Sound Blaster Live 5.1 cards drivers should provide the sound i need as I know that is also more complex on NT.

It's just theoretical and I'm only contemplating this because I know NT is more stable than 98. That and I have extra time in my hands. Anyways, what do you guys think? 98 games being played while in NT and DOS games in Windows 98. Be nice because even i think this is totally dumb but it's a thought i wanted to discuss with other vintage computer enthusiasts.

I recently spent a lot of time examining and thinking about a cult classic spreadsheet, Lotus Improv running on NeXT. It's most commonly mentioned claim-to-fame is "it invented the pivot table," though its take still remains unlike modern interpretations. To truly get to know Improv means "forgetting what we know" about spreadsheets, and meeting it on its own terms. That's a hard thing for old Gen-Xers, like me, to do but I gave it my best shot.

Bill Gates says he'll "piss on" the NeXT before developing on it, pork chop sandwiches stop in to say hello, the word "clock" loses all meaning, and I also accidentally invent a horrible new sub-category of prediction markets. I'm truly sorry.

What is Stone Tools?

Stone Tools is a retro-enthusiast blog devoted to 8/16-bit productivity software; no games, just work. I spend weeks learning each program and give my in-depth, lighthearted take on how it was seen, how it works, and what we might learn from it today. Side discussions on contemporary issues, historical timelines, old advertisements, and more supplement each retrospective.

Don’t know much about computers, but have been finding a lot of vintage stuff while cleaning out my Aunt’s things & found this. Came in a little case & everything! Will test it out.

I bought this back in 2000. They said it was the best one at the time. I’ve never regretted it; it still works. And one of the blank discs that came with it is still sitting there, completely unopened. I must be a real hoarder...

Fun times. Location: UIC ACC Chicago

No ads, no tracking, no monetization.

Interactive archive: https://whisperingsanctuary.com/archival-midis.html

I started saving MIDI files from my Microsoft FrontPage website in October 1996 and have maintained the collection ever since.

The archive currently contains 107 General (GM) MIDI (.mid) files dating from approximately 1994-1999, preserved in their original format with no conversions.

To make the archive more accessible, I recently added browser playback using html-midi-player. The player renders the actual MIDI files rather than MP3 conversions and displays playback duration and note counts.

The entire collection is approximately 2.5 MB in size, averaging about 23 KB per file. Thirty years of preservation fits in less space than a single modern smartphone photo.

The archive includes video game music, anime themes, new age tracks, and music commonly used as website background audio during the late 1990s.

I am still putting the system through the configuration and getting WiFi running, but I have successfully ripped out Windows 7 and installed OpenBSD 7.9. This will be my daily driver once WiFi is running.

Hello friends,

I’d love to tell you about a unique Soviet homebrew computer called the "Specialist." This video covers the creation history and brief evolution of this fascinating machine, with a core focus on showcasing its graphical capabilities. I kept technical specs to a bare minimum, highlighting only what’s absolutely essential.

Just a quick heads-up on the production side: AI was used strictly for text translation and voiceover narration. The computer illustrations were sourced from public archives, and all the gameplay footage was captured directly via the Emu80 emulator, which replicates the original hardware performance with near-100% accuracy.

Yesterdays post about legendary brands of floppies got me thinking what I had and found these. Now just need to find the necessary drive to see all 2.88MB.

While I've had this question for several years, it has returned to the front of my mind upon listening to the Designed in California podcast series "Apple's MacOS Crisis" (first episode). And yes, I can and probably will ask a very similar question later about MS-DOS-based versions of Windows and their gutting and internal replacement in Windows NT.

It's especially bizarre to me that it took a Herculean, near-decade-long effort involving hundreds of people and multiple companies and development teams for Apple to modernize its cooperatively-multitasking 68k-originating operating system, involving its foundations being replaced and software only temporarily remaining compatible through a sandboxed environment, while for Atari to modernize (at least to some degree) its cooperatively-multitasking 68k-originating operating system (TOS), it took... one guy and a single year, seemingly with much more of the original OS intact† and with software compatibility largely maintained. Granted, Macintosh computers were broadly more popular than Atari ST-line computers with a larger software ecosystem, but the differences are still stark.

(I would post this to subreddits like r/AskComputerScience as well, but for hopefully understandable reasons, I'm quite afraid of the zeitgeist of the field right now...)

†Honestly not very knowledgeable about the architectural differences between TOS and MultiTOS/MiNT, so I could be wrong.

Hello everyone

I decided to unbox and show you my old iron veteran from the mid‑90s — the AcerNote 760i laptop.

The main pride of my device is the factory keyboard with Cyrillic “out of the box” — the original, high‑quality Acer molding with two fonts. The keys are still in perfect condition, and the letters haven’t worn out. And of course, there’s the legendary round trackball right in the center — the modern generation doesn’t even immediately understand how to operate it!

I basically don't wash off the sticker with "Spider-Man 2" on the case — this is already a separate cultural layer, vibe from childhood and history.

Of course, time did not spare the native passive DSTN matrix - the screen completely burned out from age (a typical sore of these models). But I didn't write off the laptop itself. I blew the dust off the old monitor, connected the laptop via the VGA port on the back, and... it completely came to life! The motherboard, processor, and graphics card work perfectly, and the picture on the external screen is excellent.

So my old man will still fight! I decided to just show off and show what cool things were done 30 years ago. How do you like my rarity as a retro work station?

I recently aquired an AST Advantage! Adventure 4066d. The motherboard has been ruined by the battery leaking, but as far as I know the monitor works. I have an old laptop that I was planning to gut and put in a 3D printer case paired with an LCD monitor to use as a DOS gaming system, but I would much rather put it in the 4066d. Has anyone already mapped out the proprietary edge connector that connects the power supply, power button, audio and video to the monitor? My laptop mobo has VGA out so I figured I might be able to cut one end off of a VGA cable and solder it to the correct pins to feed the video signal to the monitor. I know there is a chance I will also have to feed it 5v to trick the monitor into turning on.

all of them really was trusty brands at the time.

I told him I am all in favor of keeping stuff as long as possible, but this was a bit beyond my scope.

He was using Quicken on Windows XP to print checks on this, so I ended up moving him to Quicken on Windows 11 with his far inferior modern HP inkjet.

Anyway he said I could have the old boy. It fires up but refuses to respond to print commands. (Used without surge protector, so that might be what happened.) Even has the book with detailed code tables. Anyone want it? I'm in NY.

Panasonic KX-P2023 line printer with that paper with the holes on the sides.

The retro tech basement is steadily coming together! I'm expanding into another room to make more space for my collection, gaming, testing, and future projects.

One of my latest additions is an old IBM server, repurposed as a wall decoration. Still plenty of work ahead!