Old Gear/OS Nostalgia ...

[keyb_user]

Hi,

Yesterday I was booting an old PC I have lying arround my house on a huge Thermaltake box with a lot of fan control contraption gear.

My surprise is that it was an Old SuSE 9.2 (and, -_Yuck!, Windows XP dual boot).
I got a bit nostalgic about the OS
It did have a Matrox Pharelia 128MB and it worked with VESA graphics ...
Two IDE 120GB disks ... 1GB Ram and a Pentium hyperthread CPU

I am the only one planning to use old gear?
What old gear / OS do you use?


Regards,
Pedro

[hcvv]

Originally Posted by keyb_user

I am the only one planning to use old gear?
What old gear / OS do you use?

I am not that good at determination of hardware. THis one says:

i586
Processor 0 : GenuineIntel Pentium MMX with speed 199.963 MHz and cache size 0 KB
Memory size: 126396 kB

That means 128 MB I suppose.
There is a 2.5 GB disk (system) and a 40 GB one for backup data.

It may be old, but the OS isn't that old: openSUSE 10.3. Text only installation and I pruned as much as possible during installation. Installing using YaST is a pain (because of swapping I think), but the normal task of making backups (with rsync) from my other system runs fast enough.

[robopensuse]

I still fire up SuSE 8.2 sometimes, on a dual boot system (also has 11.1 on it at present).

Last year I tried installing SuSE 6.1 into a Virtual Box for a kick, but that one failed as it didn't recognise the CPU family. I'm sure it'd work on an older machine

[ken_yap]

The oldest machine I have that is in any kind of use is a P133 (I think) with 32MB RAM running Debian on which I run dosemu to run a DOS EPROM programmer. I could have run FreeDOS natively, but then I want to be able to transfer files over the network, hence Debian. Footprint is only about 16MB, so lots of room. No GUI of course.

I tend to get rid of a whole generation of technology at one go. I went through cleanouts of the 286s, the 386s, and the 486s. I think the P-1s are next. Another timemark was stopping the use of floppies. In related areas, I have got rid of video cassettes, compact cassettes and vinyl (all digitised now). When they start digital radio broadcasting, that AM tuner will be next.

Just the other day I saw 1GB USB sticks for $5 IIRC. Crazy, you couldn't even get a floppy drive new for $5 now. Some 6 or 7 years ago I had paid $180 for a 512MB CF card for a 2MP camera. But that replaced a dozen rolls of slide film on extended travels which cost some $30 each to buy and process, IIRC.

On Wed February 4 2009 04:06 pm, ken yap wrote:

>
> The oldest machine I have that is in any kind of use is a P133 (I think)
> with 32MB RAM running Debian on which I run dosemu to run a DOS EPROM
> programmer. I could have run FreeDOS natively, but then I want to be
> able to transfer files over the network, hence Debian. Footprint is only
> about 16MB, so lots of room. No GUI of course.
>
The oldest machine I have that still boots ( or at least did the last time I
tried) is a SAGE II circa 1984. 68000 processor with a eye popping 1MB of
Ram. It originally shipped with 512K but after surgery it was updated to
1MB. Dual floppies. The terminal died long ago, but I can use a terminal
emulator in Windows.
--
P. V.
"We're all in this together, I'm pulling for you." Red Green

On Wed February 4 2009 09:37 pm, PV wrote:

> On Wed February 4 2009 04:06 pm, ken yap wrote:
>
>>
>> The oldest machine I have that is in any kind of use is a P133 (I think)
>> with 32MB RAM running Debian on which I run dosemu to run a DOS EPROM
>> programmer. I could have run FreeDOS natively, but then I want to be
>> able to transfer files over the network, hence Debian. Footprint is only
>> about 16MB, so lots of room. No GUI of course.
>>
> The oldest machine I have that still boots ( or at least did the last time I
> tried) is a SAGE II circa 1984. 68000 processor with a eye popping 1MB of
> Ram. It originally shipped with 512K but after surgery it was updated to
> 1MB. Dual floppies. The terminal died long ago, but I can use a terminal
> emulator in Windows.
Forgot to mention, the operating system is UCSD p-system or IDRIS (a Unix
clone) To dual boot, just swap floppies.
--
P. V.
"We're all in this together, I'm pulling for you." Red Green