[Nottingham] Poll: While we're on the subject of ancient gear...

Martin martin at ml1.co.uk
Wed Jun 19 13:46:31 UTC 2013


On 18/06/13 19:07, BARRY WALKER wrote:
> Hi Jamse...
> 
>> What's the oldest *functional* x86 hardware you have? I'll start.

A /did/ have a working original Zilog Z80 CPU, beautiful in a 40-pin
gold and purple ceramic DIP.

Unfortunately, that got zapped by a crossed wire and was replaced with a
Z80A in a very boring looking black plastic package. Not so boringly, it
ran twice as fast even though we are still only talking singular MHz!

With that, there was a magnificent 2kBytes of static ram and 2kBytes of
EPROM for that unique system.

Likely still works...


> KSC, Power PC Board, inserted into my A500 expansion slot.
> It is a HW PC emulator using an NEC V30. Almost an 80186. ;o)
> It runs MS-DOS 6.22 and Windows 3.0 in REAL mode.

Sounds like an interesting mix...


>> ...And what's the oldest *functional* non-x86 gear you have?
> 
> Spectrum 48K bungy KB.

Those must still be very common. Fantastic at the time.


> (Oldest unit I ever owned was a Sharp MZ80K.)
> My A1200(HD) is circa 1993 and is up and running 24/7 from around early 1996. (Just
> relised that is now 17 years, except for power cuts of course... <SHOCK>
> 
> It has been the bedrock of my AMIGA development stuff.

Can an AMIGA run Linux?!


Possibly pre-dating all that, I have 3 digit valve dekatron unit...

This is looking like we should have an old computer gear party... ;-)

Cheers,
Martin

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