old tech, IN USE! What's your oldest working piece of tech?

Kayden

Tech Monkey
I recently had to slave in a 7 year old 400w PSU for my MCEPC because it's PSU went up in flames. Then I got to thinking what was the oldest piece of tech, that was still in working order? The answer for me is:

Maxtor IDE 20GB 5400rpm FIREBALL

This drive was being used in PC in the late 90's! Why is it the old tech lasts so much longer then the newer stuff?
 

marfig

No ROM battery
My Amstrad PC 1512 (bought sometime in 91 or 92) still works. Or at least it did an year ago when I was doing some cleanup on the attic. I didn't plug it into a monitor, but could hear the disk operating normally and the computer seemingly booting into DOS. It's keyboard still works too. I blind typed "dir" and I could hear the disk starting.

My Toshiba Satellite Pro 6000 (bought in 2001) still works flawlessly even despite one visit to support around 2004. Its keyboard is another matter. 'A' and spacebar keys are gone (physically gone) and a group of keys on the right side ceased to operate. Works perfectly attached to an external keyboard.

This laptop, despite being a decade younger is a much more notable case than the Amstrad above. It traveled with me a bit all around the world for 5 years. It experienced sub-zero temperatures in Canada on a basement, desert temperatures in Alice Springs, Australia on the dead of summer. It also witnessed hot humid temperatures in Singapore and has fell to the floor from waist high at least twice that I can remember.

Impressive? Not really. Wait until Tharic-Nar replies to this thread ;)
He has an amazing collection of old stuff he kept through the years. Some of which, I'm sure still work.
 
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Rob Williams

Editor-in-Chief
Staff member
Moderator
The oldest piece of tech I have that's still in use is my computer monitor, the Dell 2408WFP. I bought it in March 2008. The oldest piece of tech I have not being used might be some older graphics cards or CPUs kicking around, though none of those would be much older than four-years-old.

I don't keep around aging tech if I can help it... I'm kind of an anti pack-rat where tech is concerned.
 

TheCrimsonStar

Tech Monkey
heh. I have a Seagate 4.3GB IDE HDD. No idea what year it's from. Also have my dad's old 6.4GB IDE HDD from a PC he built in the mid-90's. The Seagate has Windows 95 on it, and the 6.4GB has Windows 98.
 

Kougar

Techgage Staff
Staff member
Hmm. I managed to collect four Pentium Pro socket 7 systems 2-3 years ago, still have the 1GB Quantum disk drives in them. No idea why I have them, could tell the guy was relieved to be rid of them for some strange reason...:p

Amusingly enough for one of them a bank I shall not mention had turned it into a network router with linux software and everything, for I don't know how many years... :rolleyes:

/me dumpster dives outside of Rob's place.

Hey! I have dibs on that other dumpster!
 

RainMotorsports

Partition Master
I have a working Pentium 1 laptop under my desk with a 1GB hdd and i had upgraded the ram to 64mb lol. Havent really used it since 2005 fired it up in 2009 i think.

Definitely not used stuff in my collection would be a 20MB Conner Peripherals hard drive and a 1983 IBM PCjr 8088. Oh and i wasnt born when that thing came out lol.

@Kayden - That hard drive is way too damn recent lol. Fireball is a name that should have never left quantum which is a company maxtor should not have acquired. I just say this because of my string of luck with fireballs.... and I loved Maxtor. When my fireball 2Gb went up my Maxtor 512mb was still kicking.
 

OriginalJoeCool

Tech Monkey
The oldest equipment I have now is an Acer Pentium4 system with an NVIDIA Geforce 4. I used to have a Pentium MMX acer with a 0.98 GB hard drive, 512 MB (I think) RAM, and integrated video (this was bought before even the voodoo cards came out). I kind of wish I'd kept it, but I got rid of it quite a few years ago.
 
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