Last time I traded my Phi-1 shields for old computer processors. It was a big success. A dozen of so of my boards/kits made it to many parts of US and Europe. And I received much needed items for my computer processor collection.
Here's my favorite picture:
The left side is a part of a mother board for a pre-Pentium processor. A friend couldn’t remove the processor without damaging it so he cut the board and shipped it with other processors all the way from Europe so I could extract the processor with a CPU extraction tool (a miniature rake with Intel logo). The right is a surface mount processor another friend painstakingly removed from a board with professional tools among the dozen or so other surface mount processors and other processors from CA.
This time I am expanding to classic/old computer games software (must be original) and even books (maybe within US for shipping reasons). "Official rules" are here:
You know, I think I'm going to take a look through my junk heap for a few items you might
really enjoy. Not so much for the return toys (though I'd love em!) but because you get such
great pleasure from this stuff. Puts a grin on my face, that's all I really need.
The ones I know you'd like: a genuine P-83 Pentium Overdrive chip... Matched pair of
400 Mhz Celerons... A quad 266 Xeon server motherboard with CPU's... In fact, I still
have the MoBo for those Celerons too. Abit BP6, as I remember.. at the time, one of
the best platforms on the planet. When it was finally retired, I had screwed it to
piece of wood along with PS and HDD's, and wall mounted it, using it as a SQL database
and Web server for when I worked at home.
I won't however part with my working Atari 400 (with tape drive and 1200 bps Modem) or
my also working Mac SE Plus. I missed a chance last year to pick up a Mac LISA at a yard
sale for ten dollars.. still kicking myself for that one...
I'd be interested in the overdrive, pair of C400 and the Xeon cpus. Any story on the pair of C400? They don't work as a pair on dual PII mobos. Are the Xeons and C400 all SEC (single ended cartage) packaging or Socket 370? I'd prefer 370 to save you postage and my space
Let me know what else you have.
If I had space I would consider saving complete systems myself but by all means please keep your complete systems in one piece, for you or someone in the future to enjoy. I only have limited mobos and one Amiga system (cheap one).
Actually, that's what the Abit BP-6 was amazing for-- dual socket 370 celerons... and you could
easily overclock the 400's to nearly 600Mhz.. NT 4.0 loved it, shockingly.
It was a little quirky, I got one of the first available. Like I said, that Mobo is still
screwed to a sheet of plywood, and was running Oracle, SQL, and ASP server like a champ for years. As
far as I know, it might still work if I hooked a PS to it. The story of those matched C400's
is the story of that MoBo.. gotten from a student-run store up the street from MIT less than
a week after Abit started selling them.. along with the then MASSIVE 512MB that machine ran..
that machine also hosted many a LAN game party, as well as the occasional Team fortress classic
or Quake throwdown..
At that time, my Production server environment was comprised of Compaq Netserver LX's.
Dual Pentium Pro 200's with 256MB memory... lol!
Man, I used to have so much old stuff that you would be very happy with.
It's a shame it all got caught in a fire and alot of it is lost (ancient stuff really).
Benji:
Man, I used to have so much old stuff that you would be very happy with.
It's a shame it all got caught in a fire and alot of it is lost (ancient stuff really).
Good luck in your scavange!
Sorry to hear about that. There's a lot of these old stuff that are going straight to junk or worse, gold extraction. I'll try to save as many as I can. Might open a museum in the future.
Benji:
Man, I used to have so much old stuff that you would be very happy with.
It's a shame it all got caught in a fire and alot of it is lost (ancient stuff really).
Good luck in your scavange!
Sorry to hear about that. There's a lot of these old stuff that are going straight to junk or worse, gold extraction. I'll try to save as many as I can. Might open a museum in the future.
I was a big time 'junk' collector as well, and people knew it. Usually there was a big box in the hallway so my family could put stuff in that people brought over.
One time I got a PIII-450mhz in it, that they where sure of was completely broken (that was about a year after they came out!).
Yes, a loose PSU cable on the mainboard is completely broken!
I had a display cabinet featuring the old purrty stuff.
Butmost is gone now and what is left I'm not giving out
There's the two Celeron 400's on the left, and on the right, a Pentium (133 or 166, I forget)...
but the 5 volt Pentium Overdrive Processor.. that's a bit of history right there..
Not sure if you care, but all of these processors should be 100%.. they were all working equipment when retired..
Later today I have a need to quest back into the deeper depths of my junkstacks so I may just have a couple more interesting CPU's for you.. including (if I remember right) a sleeve that contains two real relics from the Pentium Wars: a Cyrix 5x86 overdrive and a clone/relabel of that cpu that was put out by IBM for a short time.
These were only out on the market for a short time.. low end pentiums as well as the overdrive basically killed off these clone CPU designs. Cyrix gave a little more game with the 6x86, but these chips were trash-destined from the word go...
During this time period (early to mid nineties) I was doing contract work- a couple of contracts involved bulk upgrades, swapping out 486's and dropping in Overdrives, tossing in new hard drives, etc. We'd go in and upgrade hundreds of machines per day. Some of the more interesting bulk upgrades were when I was working for Harvard University- first off, at that time, the campus was roughly thirds Mac, PC, and Unix. Second of course is that you are dealing with wealthy, entitled jackasses. Amazing the combination of deep pockets and empty heads....
What was most important at the time was that the inter-department softball teams were serious business.. and that we (Office of Information Technology) mopped the place with those clods from "The B School" (Harvard Business School). Playing drunken softball in Harvard Stadium- and getting paid for it- priceless. Once upon a time, you didn't want to be facing me playing shortstop after a few cool ones..
I'm actually quite happy someone will get some pleasure out of this stuff, and giving me a reason to toss out at a couple chunks of twenty-and-more-year-old junk... with the CPU's yanked (as well as couple of other bits) I've managed to bring myself to send a couple of MoBos, a desktop and a server case to that great basement closet in the sky.....
I am very interested in those possible finds (5x86, 6x86). A friend of mine, say two of them, just gave me a bunch of cyrix and IBM 5x86 and 6x86 many years ago. Some are gold tops and rest purple, more reflective than the cpu's purple. I always thought they looked cool. If you find more stuff worth more collection values, I can even send you two kits for your trouble. I will certainly appreciate them in my collection.
I appreciate your stories too. As a kid I used Apple II, 8088, 286, 486, pentium 200 and then after college I bought myself more recent computers, mostly laptops since I moved every year in grad school. The kind of computers in use seems to form one of the time lines for me to remember things. Like I remember one of my friends apartment was burglarized and his computer stolen. I will remember what computer he was using and then more details of that period of my life come up from there. Maybe most people have a cars time line, what cars they drove, owned and what they did with their cars will bring back lots of details of certain period of time. Interesting way the brain works.
