For a moment I thought you were holding a 8 cm CD in front of it... 😲

We need a giant Skeletor on that monitor.

King_Corduroy wrote:

Found another machine! […]
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Found another machine!

Neat case, probably not going to keep it but it seem to be complete so I'm trying to get it to boot right now. Seems to have a Pentium 150 in it and it's running Windows 95.

Just wanted to say, I have this exact same case. Its a beast, for sure. 😀

CkRtech wrote:

We need a giant Skeletor on that monitor.

An image so large it blots out the sun.

Definitely! Skeletor is required, remember.

King_Corduroy wrote:

Found a few more freebies today! […]
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Found a few more freebies today!

First up: The biggest fucking monitor in the universe!

It's a Sun Microsystems GDM-90W10 24" Widescreen Monitor!!! I grabbed it at first thinking of reselling it but on closer inspection (and a hernia later) I noticed it did VGA input in addition to the usual SUN connector. 😁

A White Alps mechanical keyboard! Programmable too!

YUCK needs cleaning!

A Blue Alps keyboard! This one is AT/XT switchable and obviously a bit older.

And that's it for today! Now I'm gonna go play Starcraft on my FUCKING GIANT MONITOR. 🤣

Oh man I want that model of monitor so bad now, just for having all those discrete buttons while my Sun GDM (GDM-9010PT, 21" 4:3) has a really cumbersome OSD.

My back hurts just looking at that monitor.

Holy shit guys you wont believe this dumpster find. 🤣

1939 General Electric H-116 AM only tube radio!!! No idea what the hell I'm gonna do about the dial bezel as it's made of Tenite and as you can see it's shrunken significantly over the years but the rest of it looks totally restorable! I'll probably fashion a replacement from wood or something and stain it a light yellow to make it stand out like the old one did. Of course it'll also need new knobs but I'm sure with patience I can find those on ebay.

I also found TWO toshiba laptops from the 90's with Lithium Ion batteries! So far the older of the two has taken a charge and operates off the battery fully. 😁

aaand a Compudyne 16mhz 386SX which is going to be torn down for parts cause it's not all there.

Those Toshiba laptops look mighty fine KC ..
I do love these gey or cream substantial bricks.
So far I have restored a 4500C
2x 4900CT and a 510CDT ..
Those 2 you've found would look superb in my Toshy stack.
Nice finds mate...and in such good condition too..

Pretty big "WTF have I found now?" moment:

This looked like a box of early 1990s computer stuff, but not quite what I expected. It's basically a pile of very unusual input devices.

The keyboard lying flat is an Intellikeys MA-140 touch sensitive keyboard (basically like a Sinclair ZX81, but much bigger), with a PS/2 passthrough so it can be used alongside a more traditional one.
The vertical keyboard is really weird - it's a Shannon Electronics Lucy, a light-sensitive keyboard that can be used with a head-mounted laser pointer (like the red tube thing under it). This was designed by an engineer with severe cerebral palsy to allow himself to work around almost uncontrollable hands.

The joystick looks like a very chunky Atari-compatible digital design (complete with DB9 connector), which can also operate the Lucy keyboard. The little grey joystick is a Suncom joystick-mouse mounted onto a very oddly wired box that seems to allow external buttons to replace the three little ones under the joystick. The rest is a mix of buttons and spares and (not in pic) a big pile of cables to connect it all. Also off-pic: four more Lucy units and two more Intellikeys. The one thing missing: power supplies. The Lucy units need external power via a DB15 connector, with no indication of pinout.

Various stickers indicate this stuff came from several care homes and schools for the severely disabled in the East of the Netherlands. Assumedly they dumped it after computer upgrades meant this stuff with DIN and PS/2 connectors no longer could be mated with the PCs. There's a new version of Lucy that supports USB (and looks a lot less bulky) so they probably use that.

Not exactly the 1990s mechanical keyboards I was hoping for... As it stands all I can immediately think of a use for is a few serial cables and some DIN-to-PS/2 adapters (although I already have those). The joystick would be great for an arcade (MAME?) project, although it's a fairly primitive leaf-switch affair - no microswitches unfortunately. As for the rest - I can't really bring myself to dump it, but I can't really see anyone being able to use it sensibly now the original users have moved on.

For a second i thought to myself.. "neat, you can play battleship on that!"

dionb wrote:

Pretty big "WTF have I found now?" moment: […]
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Pretty big "WTF have I found now?" moment:

So a few days ago a bag was left on my front door notifying me a local organization was going to make rounds in my neighborhood to pick up e-waste, stuff like computers and the like to be picked up Tuesday (tomorrow.) I looked out the front window this morning and noticed a HUGE stack of beige boxes across the street! I nearly jumped through the roof and ran, asked the houseowner and she said I could take them all! 😁 😁 😁

So, in total, it was eight towers, three printers and a lone CRT monitor! Everything is Pentium II and older, I am so excited! Tomorrow I'm gonna jump on a bike and ride around the neighborhood looking for more gems left to be recycled. 😀

Be warned, I had eight whole towers to inspect before it got dark, and I leave new acquisitions in the shed overnight to make sure there arent any bugs left to crawl out, so a lot of the specific hardware is yet unknown. I found a LOT of rare and awesome hardware though!

FULL imgur album of all pics: https://imgur.com/a/O4JNY

So to start with, the towers:
Dell PowerEdge 2200 server. Single Pentium II, dual capable. EDO DIMM RAM installed. Full height SCSI drive and EISA!
Gateway Performance 700 tower. Missing hard drive cage, RAM, and CD drive. CPU installed is Celeron 366, but the case is marked as Pentium III. Video is S3 Trio.
"KC Custom" full tower. slot 1 Pentium II, S3 Virge PCI video, 64MB double height SDRAM! 50x CDROM drive, S3 Sonic Vibes PCI sound.
Generic mid tower, Slot A Athlon 600mhz(!!!), MSI K7 Pro motherboard, another S3 Trio 3D/2X video.
Packard Bell Legend 417CDT, Goldtop Pentium 75(!), Aztech sound modem combo, drive cage was loose and rattling around inside.
"CTX" baby AT tower, Cyrix 6x86 processor, matching case badge and cooler! Case is a bit rusty, Shuttle HOT-591P SS& motherboard(!), Cirrus Logic video. AWE32?!
Generic baby AT tower w/ Colorado tape drive. PC Chips M912 motherboard with cache module(!!!!), unknown CPU, Cirrus Logic video(?).
Hi-Tech USA desktop, unknown socket 3 motherboard, Cyrix 5x86-120 processor!!!!, Cirrus Logic VLB video, Crystal ISA audio.

Printers:
HP LaserJet 4M w/ Appletalk expansion card installed
Epson Stylus Color laserjet printer
Canon bubblejet printer

Monitor:
DigiView 17" CRT advertising "low radiation!" 😵

Anyway, I haven't found anything like this on the curb in YEARS. I hope to find more! This is probably my biggest haul of all time, or at least one of them. 😁

I said WOW.

Wow, that's one great haul you got there! It's always worth the effort to save as much old and interesting hardware as you can before it goes away.

cj_reha wrote:

Gateway Performance 700 tower. Missing hard drive cage, RAM, and CD drive. CPU installed is Celeron 366, but the case is marked as Pentium III. Video is S3 Trio.

It sounds like that machine was parted out on purpose, maybe the owners removed the parts he wanted to hold onto and installed a few mismatching parts (the CPU and the video card) in their place, I wouldn't be surprised if its floppy drive is dead.

500Mhz Athlon Machine. Grabbed from the ewaste near me, primarily for it's floppy drive and cd rom drive + cables. Also had an interesting TNT2 graphics card which was quite lucky as the one included with my Compaq Deskpro EN was producing smeary VGA output, so that was a nice replacement. Other PCI cards just look like cheapy knockoff compatible cards, nothing branded. Case logo blurred as it was a local computer company.

Interesting system, man.

Score! Nabbed this mint iMac G3 400DV SE from one of my usual haunts. 384MB RAM, 12GB drive, 8MB ATI Rage 128 VR, dual firewire, C R I S P Y CRT. It's great!

In this case, 'SE' or "Special Edition" literally means it's a more boring color than the others in the lineup at the time. But it's still cool.

The most recently dated file I found on it was from 2009, so that's probably the last time it was booted. Fired right up. I suspect it was a lab computer that was slowly relegated to electronic babysitter duty for the kid of someone who worked in the lab; it had both a bunch of datalogging/analysis-type software installed and also some learning & kids' games (including Bugdom which for some reason was set to autostart at boot), and this adorable gem written (twice!) in a 'sticky note' on the desktop:

Anyway it's a nice example & in great shape. Not as stunningly pretty as the Indigo (blue) one I had (that I've been kicking myself getting rid of), but it's a bit tidier overall so I was happy to rescue it.

I hate clutter all over the desktop so I cleaned it up and gave it an uplifting new wallpaper (I suspect I've been playing too much Outrun 2.) Was using it as an mp3 player on my desk all day. The little Hardon/Kardon speakers are surprisingly punchy.

Of course I had to mess around with it a little while I was 'working'... There are scant few OS9 demoscene prods out there, but the little iMac seems to run this one decently:

^^ the Rage won't win any awards but it's at least somewhat competent at 3D in 640x480.

But wait, there's more! Poking around on it a bit further, I found some interesting software installed. Photoshop 3.0 and 6.0, Premier 4, what looked like an AOL trial CD, and:

Ahahahaha.

It was a pretty spartan install on a 250MB HDD image, and looked like it had never been used. All the files & directories were dated August 1999 except for a SCANDISK.LOG (WTF) from 2002. There was also a Windows 95 install but I didn't try to boot it yet.

Surpringly it wasn't horrible to use, it booted up in a reasonable amount of time despite the fact that I still had an mp3 playing in the background. Nobody would call this snappy, but you could get some stuff done on this.

Yes, that says 14 MB RAM. I have no idea why.

There's something you don't see very often.
Well, actually, more often than you'd think if you're me, but I digress.

Qjimbo wrote:

500Mhz Athlon Machine. Grabbed from the ewaste near me, primarily for it's floppy drive and cd rom drive + cables. Also had an i […]
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500Mhz Athlon Machine. Grabbed from the ewaste near me, primarily for it's floppy drive and cd rom drive + cables. Also had an interesting TNT2 graphics card which was quite lucky as the one included with my Compaq Deskpro EN was producing smeary VGA output, so that was a nice replacement. Other PCI cards just look like cheapy knockoff compatible cards, nothing branded. Case logo blurred as it was a local computer company.

Nice! But umm no heatsink/fan on the CPU?

EDIT: Nevermind, it's dangling there 😀

xjas wrote:

Surpringly it wasn't horrible to use, it booted up in a reasonable amount of time despite the fact that I still had an mp3 playing in the background. Nobody would call this snappy, but you could get some stuff done on this.

I note you were playing an MP3 on this, how are the speakers holding up?

I have a couple of similar model iMacs and when I pulled one out of storage a few months back I discovered a nasty problem - the speakers in these have a tendency to rot. I was playing music back on mine at normal volume levels for a while, when suddenly the speakers started blowing out dust & debris through the front, followed by what can only be described as farting sounds as the speakers' foam litterally crumbled away and the cones started rattling loose.

Quite a common issue with these old iMacs, so something to watch out for.