I used to have an IBM PS/2 E which was a pretty neat computer. Also had a Compaq Portable III at one point.

I think I was at a garage sale and there was a 24 Port Switch (unkown brand) that was probably 100mbps I don't know for sure and I didnt get it, this was just after I got my CISCO 1900 series switch before I realised it only had 2 100mbps ports. In comparassin the other day I got a D-Link 14 Port Fast Ethernet switch (rack mountable) and it only had 2 100mbps ports as well and I realised when it was too late to change my mind.

I think my biggest regret now is that a few years ago some one offered me a 286 system no idea if it worked but it had everything and I was like no its not even 32bit can't possibly want that...............SIGH
Good thing vogons educated me better.

I don't really regret getting rid of hardware with bad capacitors I guess I don't think it is worth fixing I decide its too much effort. Not sure if the soltek socket 370 board that takes Mendocino Celerons actually still works at all. Have another 370 compaq board with bad caps that I seem to be ignoring with no idea what to do with, probably just junk it.

I had a bit of regret when the S3 Trio 3D I got didn't work for 3D all the menu text was just a black square and the game looked terrible with lots of artefacts, so still have to use an S3 Trio 64V2 for UT99. which isn't the greatest for playing in Direct3D. I had no problem with giving the Trio 3D away to someone else.

Later got an S3 Trio 3D/2X which had the same problem as the Trio 3D. Quite a bit later got my first TNT2 M64 but it didn't work but I'd got a Matrox Millenium G200 PCI which works in some systems not others and a Geforce 4MX 420 PCI so the TNT2 not working didn't actually bother me.

My Acer V80M having bad caps annoyed me heaps at the time I realised but now it doesn't really bother me since it was OEM and since has ended up on my dead pile since it somehow completely died. I still really should get me a good slot 1 board to put the PIII 750 in.

I was annoyed when my IBM Netvista PIII died on me that was a bit sad but in retrospect its not a particularly great board anyway. It was just annoying because it was my main PC which was actually the
replacement for the Acer V80M.

Last regret I can think of being the most recent at uni they were chucking some stuff as usual and I grabbed a whole lot of stuff and there was some random really old board think it was all ISA no idea what it was. but I'm sure it would have been interesting to have but I already filled both my motherboard size sheets of antistatic plastic and I justified to my self that something was unsocketed on the board not quite sure what but something. 2 days later when I went back nothing was there :'(
Missed out on some 5¼ FDD as well.

SB Pro 2.0
Tandy 1000sx
My first "real" PC (286, 20mb hard drive, 1mb ram, mono VGA monitor)
Gravis Ultrasound Max
Diamond Monster3d

I forgot. Once had a 386/486 combo board. At some point I decided to strip it of it's cache chips and I tossed the rest 🙁

Oh well, gotta place a limit somewhere on your collection, riight?? 😜

Regret parting with my pair of Dell Dual P3 slot 1 550Mhz boxes which I had in lan quite a few years ago. They were the most robust and easy to work with PC's I've owned.

Also a dual P2-450 server I had for quite a while in a 4' tall steel case (which I had to carry about 2.5 miles to get home).

Regret losing a S7 system which I had some fun with a few years back, my Dad tripped and dropped a plate full of pasta (with the plate and spoon) directly into the open desktop case. Snapped my voodoo clean in half.

Regret not buying 10 Logitech MX300's when they were £9.99 on ebuyer and being set up for gaming mice for 20 years to come. 🤣

- My old Voodoo2 card (gave it away to one of my friends at the time who needed some basic 3D acceleration; I on the other hand was already using a TNT2 so at the time I didn't really see the need for it anyway, as Glide-only games became extinct). Nonetheless, I recently bought one off ebay at a cheap price, so no big worries.

- My Leadtek GeForce4 Ti 4200 card - Lasted me a good 3 years and was overall a good gaming card; I recall playing Doom 3 and HL2 on it (with decent speed on even high quality settings), but unfortunately all it produces now is major graphics corruption, even on boot-up. I suspect either the graphics chip or the memory went bad, but I don't have a soldering kit at my disposal so I can't really find out for sure.

- Toshiba T4900CT laptop - This was a 4000$ machine back in '94, and the only modification I ever made to it was upgrading the memory from 8 MB to 24 MB. After about 10 years of use the LCD started crapping out and producing degraded color quality (but the system itself worked fine if you plugged an external monitor to it), and the floppy drive went kaput. I ended up sending it to e-waste not too long ago, as I didn't see the need for such an old thing. Well, I do sometimes wish I still had it as it would have made a good Win 3.1 machine for messing around with. As I also recall, there was also a docking station available for this laptop, that gave two additional ISA slots for expansion.

- My old GE television (from the early 80s) - Complete with the fake wood panel and channel dials. This thing just looked cool, if you ask me. Never knew what happened to it; I think my parents junked it many years ago.

Pippy P. Poopypants wrote:

- My old GE television (from the early 80s) - Complete with the fake wood panel and channel dials. This thing just looked cool, if you ask me. Never knew what happened to it; I think my parents junked it many years ago.

Just a random thought:

It would be cool in a special geeky kinda way to watch NBC on a GE TV... 😜

Not necessarily Mac or PC-related, but I had one of these awesome drawing tablets when I was a kid. It was the first "computer" that helped me get into computer graphics. Regrettably, my parents sold it after I got an actual PC, but I have since gotten it back, and also got back some nostalgia. 😏

For the record, it uses the same Zilog Z80 processor as with the old TRS-80 machine, but also it doesn't work correctly with my LCD TV (it works just fine on my old CRT though - I suspect it's related to a V-sync issue that may require me to tweak one or more of the resistors in the unit). A good example of a real-world GUI if you ever wanted to see one. Pretty technologically advanced toy for its time (early 1990s).

About 15-20 years ago I dug my TI 99/4A out of my Mom's attic after it had been there silently sleeping 5-10 years. When I plugged it in, it wouldn't wake up. It was my childhood love fantasy light beam. I kept it clean and pristine. I chunked the whole thing.

Wish I would have at least kept the box.

bushwack wrote:

About 15-20 years ago I dug my TI 99/4A out of my Mom's attic after it had been there silently sleeping 5-10 years. When I plugged it in, it wouldn't wake up. It was my childhood love fantasy light beam. I kept it clean and pristine. I chunked the whole thing.

Wish I would have at least kept the box.

What was the number one selling home computer before the Commodore 64 was released? The TI99/4A was. Jack Tramiel released the C64 to deliberately mess with TI for competing directly against him in the calculator market and undercutting his prices. That's why he bought a chip foundry, so he could manufacture all his own parts and set his own prices. That's how he was able to engage in a price war that destroyed almost every player in the home computer industry back then. Only IBM and Apple really came out of it unscathed because they catered to a different customer base. I still say the best version of Donkey Kong on any computer back then was the TI99/4A version.

A Jetway board that was my first experience of bad caps. It was purple, it had agp4x [think it could take a v5 though I didnt have one], may have had an isa slot, cant remember. But I had worked out it was exactly the right spec for my needs. Within months we had random reboots, non-boots etc. I could see capacitors puffing up, think one may have burst. On the bright side that's when I got my first asrock board, a cheap and cheerful k7s8x but it never let me down.

I miss my an old Asus socket 7 motherboard + p100. With integrated mach64 and 1 expansion slot. Always plays "ta-dah!" in my mind when I think of it 🤣. Was that the 95 boot sound, I dunno.

And the socket 370 boards I got really cheap for upgrading it. Maplins sold them as desktop upgrades but they were full pc motherboards on a big expansion card - s370, ram, vga, sound, nic, ps/2, serial, parallel, ide, floppy. Fitted into the expansion slot. Took both at and atx connectors iirc. Apart from the marketing [not just maplins, the manufacturer's instructions described them as upgrade boards iirc] they would otherwise surely just be industrial boards wanting a backplane. What made it especially nice was I got them a couple of years after maplins ceased selling them.. rang up to enquire about items in an old catalogue... they had 2 old stock at my local store, I got them like 95% off the old price, bnib... maplins were cool back then. I passed those boards on to other people but have since often regretted it.

And I suppose finally my se/30 that I got cheap not working but got running again. Washed the motherboard in the sink to get the video working [black and white bars issue]. Replaced the caps, broke a few traces and half of them fell off fairly soon but it worked anyway. Upgraded to 128mb ram from a US seller. Upgraded the hdd, attached a scsi cd internally, installed os 6 and 7. Got a nic and connected it to my ppc mac. Was alot of fun but I needed the space so it went, sadly I sold the internals and binned the case and screen. A guy in japan bought the mainboard even in that state.

sliderider wrote:

I still say the best version of Donkey Kong on any computer back then was the TI99/4A version.

The best version of Donkey Kong on an 8bit machine is on the TRS CoCo3.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DQgd5p-Z5DY

Yes, it's real. 🤣

Pippy P. Poopypants wrote:

Not necessarily Mac or PC-related, but I had one of these awesome drawing tablets when I was a kid. It was the first "computer" […]
Show full quote

Not necessarily Mac or PC-related, but I had one of these awesome drawing tablets when I was a kid. It was the first "computer" that helped me get into computer graphics. Regrettably, my parents sold it after I got an actual PC, but I have since gotten it back, and also got back some nostalgia. 😏

For the record, it uses the same Zilog Z80 processor as with the old TRS-80 machine, but also it doesn't work correctly with my LCD TV (it works just fine on my old CRT though - I suspect it's related to a V-sync issue that may require me to tweak one or more of the resistors in the unit). A good example of a real-world GUI if you ever wanted to see one. Pretty technologically advanced toy for its time (early 1990s).

VIDEO PAINTER!!!!

I had one of those. I think I donated it years ago. Now I miss it too 🙁.

I sucked at it though, so no computer graphics for me. 🤣

Yep, I could never get my drawings to be as good as the demos either 😀. So, I just started doing funny things, such as taking the preloaded character stamps and edit them to make them look nude or disgusting. Oh well, fun times.

Pippy P. Poopypants wrote:

Yep, I could never get my drawings to be as good as the demos either 😀. So, I just started doing funny things, such as taking the preloaded character stamps and edit them to make them look nude or disgusting. Oh well, fun times.

Those demos were pretty awesome weren't they? The sounds were cool too.

I know a guy who went to a sleep over once and the guys there were so addled with testosterone they created pron in the apple version of MS Paint. That's some dedication.

*UPDATE*

Playing around tonight I got one of my ABIT BE6-II motherboards working again! I swear I tried it before with this Pentium III Slot 1 CPU before and it didn't work though. This time I enabled SoftMenu III and all the sudden the system decided to boot up!!

I tried the other one but still no go 🙁

Wonder what my chances are of having a unlocked CPU multi??? 😉

The build currently:
Pentium III 500MHz (Slot 1 100x5.0)
ABIT BE6-II (intel 440BX chipset)
128MB PC133 SDRAM
Voodoo 3 3000 AGP (just got it off ebay for $10 with missing cap)
Dlink 10/100 NIC
Samsung 40Gig HDD
LiteOn 48x CD-ROM
Future Power 400W PSU

Tested Quake 2 quickly @ 1024x768x16
3DFX OpenGL 79.xx
Reference OpenGL 69.xx
Not bad at all using reference drivers

Theres only a couple post-Klamath ones that are unlocked. Your best bet would be a Deschutes 333 or 400 (all 350's seem to be locked, so better skip those 😉) of a few selected steppings and and earlier production date.

Anyway, theres 1 more thing I just can't get out of my mind ever since this thread started.
I wouldn't mind if anyone wouldn't believe me btw, it's kinda unbelievable anyway and I could be totally wrong, though I'm pretty sure I remember it correctly myself.

I was at a large computer fleamarket thingy years ago and someone was selling this odd-looking board with 4 heatsinks+fans with "Intel" written somewhere on it. I asked the seller what the heck it was and he had no idea. Good thing I never asked what he wanted for it, as it looked very similar to this! 🙁 🙁 🙁 🙁 🙁

And I very distinctively remember it having this exact layout, with the 4 coolers and Intel written on it on a prominent spot and was thinking it might be somekind of weird SCSI adapter?
And this is over 5 years ago I think...oh well, I prolly didn't have the money for it anyway...

But this is definitely one of my biggest regrets.

Not computer related but still vintage tech... Back in 2001, I was looking around this oddball antique store when I was in this podunk town of a few hundred in New Mexico and saw a pair of very good condition Russian WWII era field phones and the man wanted $50 for the pair. I remember going so far as to bring them to the counter but, somehow, the friend I was with managed to talk me out of buying them. Oh well.

They looked like this one here:
http://www.95thrifles.org/pics/k218.jpg

I also had a circa 2001 Sanyo 3LCD projector that displayed a very nice picture that I used in place of a TV in my bedroom. I had it pointed at the wall my bed faces and kept a wireless keyboard next to my bed. But alas, I had bills to pay and that projector was easy to get decent cash from.

SavantStrike wrote:

Those demos were pretty awesome weren't they? The sounds were cool too.

I know a guy who went to a sleep over once and the guys there were so addled with testosterone they created pron in the apple version of MS Paint. That's some dedication.

Sound effects were cool, even if it was being generated from a tone generator; the Master version also added a MIDI chip but the loopy music got annoying after a while. And yeah, pure dedication during a time when internet access was for the most part unheard of for many consumers.

Oh and if you're interested, there's one up for grabs on ebay:
http://cgi.ebay.com/150608987964

Missing the stylus, but you could also use a popsicle stick for that.

I discovered yesterday that my Ensoniq Soundscape Elite refuses to initialize when I start my main 486. I moved it to another computer, but it won't work in there either. It seems like many faithful years of service has come to an end. I hope I can find a replacement, because it was the best soundcard I've ever had.