A couple of cheap Macintosh SE's

A friend found a bunch of Macintosh SE's at at recycling center a while ago (year?) and I was finally able to go and pick them up a couple of weeks ago.

Two Macintosh SE FDHD models and three dual DD floppy drive models.

One of the FDHD has been used as a server, and digging around the drive I was able to find out that they had been used at a school in Lahti in the 1990s.

Documents where dated around 1994 and some log files said 1996 so they have probably been unused for 20 years or so.

Apple Macintosh SE

I picked them up on the way to our summer cottage, so to be able to test them I grabbed, what I thought to be, a SCSI box with Mac System on it with me.

Unfortunately my memory had failed me and I took some other systems SCSI disk so I didn't have anything to boot from until I got back home. The server did boot up but directly into AppleShare. And obviously I didn't have any administrator password codes so I couldn't disable it.

Back home I got the right SCSI disk box connected and everything seems to work just fine.

You can see the price in the above picture, 10€ :) (And luckily for me I didn't need to pay anything for them, all free :)

More computer rescuing. A Macintosh SE

A bunch of various sparcs, more about them soon. But I got this old thing:




After some boot disk hunting I got to boot into System 7.1. Memory have been upgraded to a nice 2.5Mb.

Computer rescue! SGI Indy, SS20, Ultra 1 and SunBlade 150

Hmm, don't know if I've ever blogged about my collecting hobby ? Well, I do. Computers. Surprise. Have about a 120 or so.

A couple if weeks ago I struck gold so to say. Åbo Akademi ICT deparment needs to move as the building they are located in needs to be renovated. They have stashed quite nicely a lot of old computers. I had a chance to loot trough the stuff before getting trashed.

There where quite a lot of stuff, mostly just old PC junk. But I did find something fun:



Oh, and I'm going tomorrow to take another look, there are a least 4 SunBlade 100 workstations waiting for me.

I was given a laptop as it was "broken"

I was given an old laptop by a co-worker last week as it had broke down according to him and he was about to throw it away. As a computer enthusiast and collector I wanted to check it out first, even just for parts. I assumed that probably the memory was faulty and ran memtest86 for a while, no problems there. Well, what the hell, let's see if it boots... It wasn't that broken after all.
The only problem was Windows XP didn't start properly, just bluescreened and instantly rebooted. Boot into rescue mode from the XP install disk and a chkdsk run fixed that problem and the laptop "works" just fine again.
And if that wouldn't have fixed it a "simple" re-install would have been the other option.

This started me thinking, how many computers are considered broken by normal computer users just because it won't boot ? And how many of these computers are thrown away ?

Sun tower

Some of my Sun workstations