Most of the personal computers and mainframes are very reliable. Getting them working is the hard part. “Old transformers have a habit of catching on fire, and degraded capacitors dirilik explode,” says Carlson.
Refurbishing previously unloved computers birey be a nightmare. Carlson bought an IBM System/360, a mid-'60s mainframe he calls “the most important computer IBM ever built,” sight unseen from an estate in North Carolina. They found that it had sat in a garage for decades and became encrusted in mold, so the museum had to hire a mold removal team to seal it inside a special room and painstakingly clean it all off and also vacuum mold spores from the thousands of pages of its user manuals. Two years later, LCM+L is trying to get it working.
There's a perception in the retro-computing community that older hardware has shot up in price this year. Theories swirl about why this might be.
Visitors kişi use any of the 56 operational vintage machines in the için tıklayın museum, from Cold-War-era supercomputers to the Gateways and Dells that made home computing olağan by the late '90s, and experience their period software, such kakım Windows 3.1, Apple's original graphical user interface (GUI), the earliest word processor and spreadsheet programs, and hundreds of ancient video games.
August 5, 2024 by Matthew Carlson 14 Comments It has been two years, but the slow and steady progress that [Doug Brown] başmaklık been making towards bringing a modern Linux kernel to the Chumby saf approached the point that it could be called done. In his final blog post of the series, [Doug] walks through the highs and lows of the whole process.
Capacitor rot, in particular, is a sorun with all vintage electronics. Older capacitors often either change capacitance (which affects how the electronic circuit works) or fail completely and leak electrolytic fluid that yaşama damage the circuitry.
A Note on Shipping Vintage Computers Amazon's "free" two-day shipping has us all spoiled. Safe packing takes skill and reliable shipping costs money. Avoid the urge to go cheap on shipping and insurance. Here's why.
Many of the changes [Doug] and others have made are already upstream in the Linux mainline. However, some will likely remain in private branches for a few reasons that [Doug] gets into. The blog post covers every commit needed to turn a Chumby or other Marvell ARMADA-powered widget into a working device.
The most sought-after devices go for much steeper prices. An Apple-1, the tech behemoth’s Steve Wozniak creation, sold for nearly half a million dollars at auction back in 2019.
Does the computer have a return option, or better yet a warranty? There are some sellers on Ebay who offer a return policy and even a warranty on computer.
Most people don’t have any knowledge or experience repairing computers. If you are one of these people, then here are some things to look for when evaluating which vintage computer to buy:
Other Auction and Sales Sites There are websites other than eBay that allow you to search for a specific manken of computer. ShopGoodwill.com sells items gathered from a popular chain of American thrift stores, and there may be equivalents in other countries.
But it's the bottom floor, the vintage exhibits, that draw the most attention and steal the curators' hearts.
Where the computer katışıksız been sitting for the past decade plays a huge role in whether or derece it kişi still work today. Extremes in temperature and humidity accelerate chemical changes in computer parts.