shuppy (@delan) — [archived]

funny computers

i like collecting and tinkering with funny computers. here are the adventures i’ve written about on twitter:

when i was like 10 to 15, mum used to drive me around looking for old computers in verge collections [1], where i used to be able to find machines that were more like the ones i had when i was even younger (pentium 1 era). i have installed windows 98 so many times that i can type my product key from muscle memory in eight seconds.

over time, the kinds of computers people threw out moved on to pentium 4 and core 2 era machines, which dominated verge collections in the 2010s. my parents asked me to strip the machines i had collected with mum for parts to save space, so eventually these were all i had. nowadays i know the lga775 platforms inside out, and i’m sick to death of them. they feel like a “solved problem”, everything more or less just works, and you can generally boot cds and flash drives without floppy emulation.

i feel like people threw out way more of their old home computers back then. i’m not sure why, maybe retrocomputing wasn’t the lucrative market™ it is now so the computers weren’t worth anything, maybe people in general were better off back then and didn’t feel the need to sell, maybe desktop computing was evolving a lot faster and not the “solved problem” to the extent it is now, maybe people were less privacy-conscious and worried they needed to destroy their “hard drives” (pars pro toto) lest their bank details got in the wrong hands.

going to university gave me a chance to revive my hobby, because i got to meet other people who had interesting hardware, and this is how i found almost all of the funny computers and unique parts i have now. some notable examples include pOpArOb who gave me my first pentium 2/3 hardware, mike aldred who had a real job™ where they could throw out a bunch of agp video cards in roughly my direction, and peter metz who gave me my first non-x86 machines before they moved to germany.

but in 2017, i graduated and moved to sydney, and i had to leave all of my funny computers in a storage unit, in most cases before i ever had time to play with them. when i moved back to perth in 2021, i had a lot of catching up to do. i’ve had to buy a bunch of tools and equipment that i previously mooched off my parents. i didn’t even have a cd burner for my first month!

i had also forgotten a lot of what i knew about old pc hardware (which probably wasn’t that good anyway), so i’ve been learning a lot along the way. one embarrassing example of this is misremembering which way my debug card plugged into the isa slot and blowing a trace. i started reading mueller’s upgrading and repairing pcs the other day, which seems like it will teach me a lot about at troubleshooting and compatibility.

stay tuned for more funny computer adventures in #funny computer!

[1] verge collectionsaccording to google this is apparently not a term that anyone outside western australia uses?! maybe my search results are being heavily personalised by geolocation, but i searched “x verge collection” for x in sydney and a few of its councils (strathfield, bayside, marrickville) and no one called them verge collections. anyway a few times a year, people put their junk that they never got around to throwing out along the street, and the council picks it up.