hey, I got one one those too, very durable and sturdy, like a lobster

Wow. There ain't many left. This one still works fine, it just has a few issues that could still be fixed. It weighs about 20 Kgs, so only barely portable. Heh, Lobster 64.

I found mine, I picked it up and water poured out of it, I waited a few days and it still works o.o

Ha! Water dripping through the vents was the cause of this ones problem also. And to think most modern electronics would wither up and die at too much condensation in the air.

haha yea, I figure they're made less lobstery so you spend more on new ones

Of course it's portable - it's got a handle, hasn't it?

True. I remember an old Magnum PI episode where a rich villain was using one on a table outside his mansion. If they ever made a suitcase-sized battery, you could have taken it on the bus to do your taxes on the wat to the office. ;)

I've heard that this year Sony will finally discontinue production of floppy disks. Better get what you need now.

Noooo! I must secure some more. Though there isn't too much I can do with some now. I haven't seen any 5 & 1/4 inch floppys for sale in years.

Cool, an SX-64! :D Very rare machine.

It is more so now. The DX is rarer still.

1983 called and it wants its portable funky red joysticks back. :P
.

Murr I want the 6581 inside <3

It can't have them. I scavenged them for parts...

Oh, that's a lovely, old darling! I wanted one, but of course I couldn't afford it. I got a C64 that served me well for several years. I donated it to a couple who'd lost theirs when I got my A1000. I still have an A1200/B1260. It's really too bad Commodore went under, they were good!

They were good. I'm glad the C-64's and Amiga's still have a cult following though. It means you can still find a part occasionally and sometime someone who can handle repairs if needed.

ZOMG, so old school..

Aye. My brother purchased it in '83 for $949 which was a fortune back then. Similar to buying a $2500-$3000 laptop now.

Cool.

Thanks. I doubt I'll part with her anytime soon.

I’ve got a 1982 Magnum PC2 PC clone, apart from the hard drive everything works.

I'd love to add something like that to my collection of super nerdy computers so far i've collected a C16 breadbox, a C64 in the more modern beige case, a Coleco ADAM, and an IBM XT that works better then any windows PC i've ever used... and its older then me by about 4 years... and i'm 23... O_o

i have a whole box of those 5.25 inch floppys, about 50 3.5 floppys, a single 8 inch floppy, 2 MFM hard drives, 2 Commodore tape drives, a handfull of ADAM Digital Data Tapes, and even extra 5.25 inch and 3.5 inch drives for my desktop PC or my old IBM, (yes, they ARE backwards compatible THAT far!)

Where did i get all this crap? from wasteful citizens of the United states of America, who will toss an old computer out on their curb, or take it to the scrap yard
simply because their too stupid to get a virus off it, or because they've bought a new one and don't need another, i get this stuff off peoples curbs, in the rain, the snow, in the dusty dirty dry air of the local scrap yard, and i take them home, take them apart, catalogue the parts in boxes, adding whatever happens to be nicer then what i got to my own system, and sticking the rest in my closet, scrapping only the metal case and recycling the plastic case parts,

I do have to say: this old commodore looks very clean and well taken care of, like its been in a closet since 1989 or something O_o
a lot of my stuff is worn or beat up, I do my best to clean what i find, but a lot of it is sun bleached, stained, or warped. yet I won't keep anything that's
no longer useful. (mostly non-standard cases, broken expansion cards, 56K modems, proprietary motherboards, and cords i already have a million of)
it all gets recycled though, either directly or indirectly (occasionally i'll cannibalize a circuit board apart for spare discreet components)

People underestimate the longevity and durability of old equipment, and nobody appreciates the engineering and talent that went into making these things...
I hate people who are like that, but at the same time i love them, -for giving me so much free crap that worked just plain fine when it was given some TLC.

still it disgusts me to know that every time someone tosses out a TV or a boombox, a PC or some kids toy, that theres so many parts inside that could instead
be cannibalized to build something different. its so traqic...

Awesome. Yeah I agree with you on the fact that most people are morons and throw away perfectly good stuff. And if one part is broken, the rest of the device should still be good. I used to get a bunch of the old joysticks and keep each broken one I came across. Eventually I would have enough parts to build my own custom joystick with the best parts (showing my age here, lol). One of the custom joysticks I built lasted longer than several bought ones.

Yep, this SX has been looked after. It's been used regularly up until from 83 til 1999 when it was put in a closet. It's only missing the plastic from one locking tab on the arm (the side you can see), it has a yellowed spacebar. Not sure how that happened. And there is something amiss to do with the power feed to the screen. Auxiliary monitors work fine when plugged in. I did attempt to pull it apart and see if I could fix it but there's a trick to removing the plastic vent panel on the top that I haven't figured out, so rather than risk breaking it I thought I would leave it to someone more familiar with it.

Fortunately there are one or two electronics repair places nearby to me that deal with old tech like this.

Nice collection you have, I'd love a collection like that. It makes me wish I still had the old cartridge games for this machine of mine.

I have tons of controllers, I even have C64 Paddles, Atari Paddles, and the Driving Controller for Pole Position,
Oh, and the colecovision controllers for the Adam, as well as the matching keyboard is that ugly-off-yellow color.
the printer for that ADAM still works fine, if you can put up with the machinegun-like BANG BANG BANG as it hammers out your text at an ASTONISHING
2 to 3 characters per second... Oh and if you ever get one of these things, Dont turn it on with a tape in the drive... Supposedly just turning it on
causes such a big EMF wave that it can erase the tape... (However that copy of Donkey Kong in the cartridge slot will be fine )

The old IBM XT i have belonged to my father who got it used around 1990, paid $50, A Zebra Striped Peavey Flying V Guitar, and a CB Radio to some trucker for it. I remember as a child, (around 1993) he'd be looking at the librarys BBS service on it through an 8-bit Full length card Hayes 2500 modem,
I remember he'd sign on, go in the other room, and i'd look at the screen as letters poured on as fast as it seemed someone could type them onto the screen..
and this was only ASCII on a CGA! (and people complained about 56K... lol) its sentemental to me because not only do i remember playing old games on it
with my dad, THE HIGH SCORE LISTS ARE STILL ON THE DAMN THINGS 15MB HARD DISK! (and it still takes almost 1.5 minutes for it to check its half meg of ram)
it used to have a system clock card in it, but on 12-31-1999 at 12:59:59 the thing locked up thanks to the Y2K bug (LOL)
a simple fix to get it working again? i just yanked the backup battery and let it reset to 12-31-1980 and it came right on :3
what i like about this particular computer is: Technically, its a PC, just as any modern Desktop... i can download any old shareware i want via my modern computer, save it to a 720K formatted 3.5 floppy (since the IBM's floppy controller cant handle 1.33Mb disks) stick it in a modern drive in the old IBM)
and play it,

everything aside, my "workstation" is nothing more then a frankenstation built of parts scavenged, borrowed, built, constructed, and even painted by me.
my desk is about 7 foot wide, and covered with cords, my computer is built out of parts i found on the curb, and at a scrap yard, but it runs well enough for me.
(it can handle Doom, Quake, Half Life, GTA I II II VC and if you kill all other processes, it can run San andreas at a painfully slow 9 Fps. But it was free after all)

its a continously evolving system ,if i find a dead PC with a nicer part then what i have, i part the dead one out, recycling what i dont need, and using that better part to make my system better. if you had to ask for a model number, my best guess is its mobo came from a 1998 HP Pavilion, but thats the only thing from that particular PC... along with a stick of ram and a floppy disk drive that is in use.

Awesome. My desktop computer was (a few years ago) completely original as some weird Canadian assembled PC. I went through the files and was finding stuff from the late 90's. When the power supply died, I transfered the hard drive to a new case. The HDD has a manufacturing date of september 1994! It's only 8Gb but still going strong. The rest of it could still be salvaged I think (apart from the power supply) but I'm not too technical with computers so it's not something I would mess with much.

Sounds like all it needs is another power supply and hard disk, I bet the thing would come right on once you had that, A Startup disk and an OS to put on it.
Thats how my dads computer was born.. found it laying on a curb in the rain, brought it home, stuck it in the closet with the furnace (to dry it out)
plugged it in, nothing, swapped out the power supply, hit power, in less then 3 minutes we were staring at a copy of windows XP Pro with the vista black skin,
10 minutes later we were online with it...

It had a AMD Athalon and i think it was about 2.6Ghz, had around 512Megs of ram, and it looked like it was about 4 months old.
He kept it till it stopped working thanks to the fact he figured letting dust get in the case was a good idea.... wanted me to fix it i sad no way.

somehow he killed the motherboard.

hes not really good with taking care of computers though, he thinks they can be treated just like any other boombox, stereo, telephone, tape deck, TV
or record player that hes fixed. like the time he sprayed WD-40 on the switches of his digital camera cause they had dirt in them... and he wonders why it don't work... That shit works great when you have a scratchy volume knob, but with modern digital high tech stuff... uhh-uhh, thats a no-no...

to give you an idea of what WD-40 does to a computer, look no further then his old Commodore 64 that he gave me...
by the time i got it apparently it was in the bottom of a box of other stuff, and a can of WD-40 was in the top, he tossed something in the back of his van
and that shit squirted all over everything in the box including the Commodore.

he stored it in the back of his place of employment for years and when he decided to give it to me i looked inside... the parts had lierally gotten so corroded they were falling off the board... i died a little on the inside at the look of it, but salvaged the SID chip and the CPU and bid the rest farewell. (yes i tried to get it to work, no it didn't, the light didn't even come on)

most things i've found, i fix one little thing on them and bam, they work again like new. and sometimes its as simple as installing an anti virus, many computers i find work fine, other then a worm or a virus or bonzai buddy or some crap... god... i think bonzai buddy escaped right our of hell itself...
Back in windows 98 getting rid of things was a lot easier... Got a virus that locked a file so windows cant tamper with it? I used to restart in PURE DOS, navigate to the file, then type "Erase XXX" bam, it'd be gone, no questions asked, literally, it wouldn't ask you for a confirmation, the file simply ceased to exist. (as far as windows was concerned)

The ability to do that was my primary reason for using windows 98 long after it was outdated, If i get windows XP too fucked up, there is no back door, no boiler room, no way to get in there under its ass and attack the culpret file, modify its config, or screw with it, all i can do in XP is do a System Restore and pray to god one of the backups work okay...

I do think there should be like a basic intelligence test or license someone must first acquire before being allowed anywhere near a computer.
some people are just too stupid to be allowed access to such a powerful and potentially dangerous device, needing a license would help weed out the morons. maybe they'd try and learn something by themselves so they could use a computer instead of asking for advice every time they catch a virus.

Whoops, didn't reply correctly lol.

Wow, yeah WD40 is good for car engines but not fine electronics.

And most people usually throw stuff away (or break it deliberately) if it's old and they want something new. A waste of resources if you ask me. My old machine was given to me and I was using it regularly up until the beginning of 2009. It a whopping 900Khz processor of some kind with a 8.08Gb HDD. The motherboard in it is the most modern thing being made in 2003. It has XP on it that it runs slowly. I would rather have 98SE but my friends disc of it is scratched.

I have another 8Gb HDD and a bunch of old 128Mb RAM cards somewhere but none of the RAM fits any computer I own. I'm not of the mind to throw them out though. They still work fine.

I've found you can take a really crappy HP or Compaq (if it uses standard parts and not the proprietary crap) from around 1998
toss some high speed ram in there and max the board out (usually 256 megs or 512 on those old boards) toss an AMD K6 cpu in there
and get a respectable computer out of it, It wont run no damn Youtube or Crysis but it will run anything between and Half Life without batting an eye
should you have a "Decent in 1998" AGP card such as a ATI Rage 128 or whatever.

My current PC runs a 333Mhz Pentium II. Pathetic in comparason to anything out there right now, yet i can browse the web with 30 tabs open and tons of
pictures loaded in the cache and still not experience any slowdowns thanks to 512 megs of ram, and a really high RPM 60Gig C:\ hard disk.

I've found the slowdown on older pc's mostly occurs when they start using a swapfile instead of your ram, If you have a pokey old Maxtor or Seagate from
1995 in there, well no matter what your CPU is, its gonna be slow as soon as it starts using the swap file...

So although my motherboard, CPU and Ram are from the 90's, My videocard *Visiontek 9250 with a faster GPU then my CPU!* Hard disks
(60 gig Seagate from a scrapyard as C:\ 250 Gig Hitachi Cinestar from a DVR box as D:\) and my mouse (Cheap ass best buy optical mouse, $20)
all came from 2003-present

In turn, my 333Mhz processor has nothing to slow it down or hurt its performance, on the contrary, my videocard and hard disks are actually waiting on the CPU.
End result? a very steady machine, not the fastest thing in the world, but solid responsiveness, IMMENSE backwards compatibility,
(this thing could run any OS from DOS to Windows XP, any X86 program ever made between the first pc and the mid 2010's + more)
it also sports a pair of ISA slots, should i feel the need to use any old gear, Yet i can burn cd's. use USB drives, load up my MP3 players, emulate games and more.

I'd be willing to bet this thing can run more programs then any computer out there, From Blockout, which also runs fine on my XT, to Half Life
I could run Dos, Windows 1, 2, 3, 3.1 95, 98, 2000, ME, XP 1 2 or 3, and pretty much any flavor of linux, (though i wouldn't) and even Mac System 1-7 via
emulation, Sega genesis, game gear, nes, game boy color, all works fine through emulation,
(yeah i know, screw apples policy on only letting you put their OS on their PC's, Ford cant do anything if you put a Chevy motor in their car!)
What should they care about an old OS that only runs on computers they no longer even make or sell, when they're actually handing it out via FTP for FREE?!

i guess im just one of those nerds who likes to make a system do as many things at once as possible, yet keep it sane, smooth and managable at the same time.

Yeah, I could probably do some of that the the PC I have. The old HDD + 128 Mb RAM doesn't help with its speed. It would need a new hard drive, which may be difficult to find now. A couple old hard drives I have looked at have still been too modern for it. And having another one or two sticks of RAM in there would be great. I am not terribly computer literate, even with old machines, so it normally takes me ages to find out details on parts and then hunt them down. I usually try to enlist the help of friends that are more knowledgeable than myself.

I also have an old D87P Notebook that I got from work as they were going to throw it away. It's battery is totally dead (it switches off the moment it is unplugged) and it had 1 dead RAM card which I have had replaced. It also is supposed to have dual hard drives, both originally being 80Gb each. At present tho, it just has one 40Gb drive in it. But it has a 20" monitor and various ports I will never use such as cable TV and direct video camera feed. It also has built in webcam and 5 speakers including a center bass speaker. So it must have been pretty expensive for its day (2001).

Damn... I thinkl I had a similar beast back then. I remeber it ran cp somethin or other CP/M I still have a 5 slot IBM-PC, Closest thing I got now is a Compaq lunch-box that will run like Compaq-Dos 2 or 3.0

Cool. I love old school tech. More robust and a lot easier to understand. Plus, the more simple a device is, the less that can go wrong with it. I never had any old PC back in the day so I'm not familiar with anything outside of the C-64 or Amiga.