Dumpsters, abandoned places, recycling spots, office's are all a possible yes. Pentium stuff can still be found free or close to free in most countries. Most older XT, 286, 386 and 486 stuff has been replaced and recycled or sent to garbage years ago. There is also the Ebay problem where those with a little knowledge will try to sell the old computers instead of giving them away. In my country I am lucky to find anything older than about 2001 or 2002 for free. There are many here from Europe that find good free parts often. I do not know if that helps you but it is a very good question !

Horun wrote:

Dumpsters, abandoned places, recycling spots, office's are all a possible yes. Pentium stuff can still be found free or close to free in most countries. Most older XT, 286, 386 and 486 stuff has been replaced and recycled or sent to garbage years ago. There is also the Ebay problem where those with a little knowledge will try to sell the old computers instead of giving them away. In my country I am lucky to find anything older than about 2001 or 2002 for free. There are many here from Europe that find good free parts often. I do not know if that helps you but it is a very good question !

Fortunatelly in my country you can still find some affordable but quite rare stuff online because for the seller it is just junk rather than retro, but on other hand, in the popular market i've seen some prices on ebay that make me puke, even the asian side the prices are getting way up, for a VLB I/O card free shiping from ASIA can cost >100 USD, cmon

It's not impossible just highly improbable. People who have an XT or 286 in 2019 probably know it's value and won't just throw it away. You can find plenty of P4 era computers though. That's what people offer on my local "free" market all the time: socket 478-775, DDR-DDR2 and tons of generic PCI&AGP cards. The local auction sites are also filled with those and people just don't want them even for 3 dollars. The same happened to the computers you are looking for: they became obsolete, most of them were scrapped, some of them were put in the attic to dust away and the rest were bought by collectors and hardware hoarders.
I don't know about Chile but in Hungary e-waste collection is a huge business and people who do it are very protective about their interests. The e-waste guy near my town cherry picks everything and won't let anybody else touch the containers. I recently managed to get through a municipal e-waste collection pile but I was lucky. Most collection sites won't let outsiders in due to health&environmental regulations (haha).
Your best chance is your local market and online "free" section. You could post an ad looking for old computers/parts and hope for the best. I did it a few times with success, there are a lot of generous people around.

Agreed that e-waste isn't much use for the really old stuff.

Check classified ads and look for the "my father/uncle/brother died and had all this junk in his attic/garage, please come pick it up for free" ads. If you see that little bit of beige on the obligatory fuzzy photograph, you can take the dive and see what you get. Sometimes you get a car full of desirable vintage stuff, sometimes you get a car full of random non-computer related crap you can drive straight to the recycling center. And sometimes you don't get anything because if you see something interesting on the photograph others do too, people start offering money and bidding goes astronomical when multiple people figure out that there's an IBM beam spring keyboard up for grabs (as happened to me last week 😉 )

What frequently does help is being polite, interested, honest, reliable and timely. I've repeatedly been able to pick up stuff for nothing or in any event less than the highest bidder for stuff because I was clear about what my interest was and made clear plans about pickup and stuck to them. Up to and including the proverbial 'entire car full of desirable vintage PC stuff' for free while others were offering money - but being arseholes about it. It's certainly not going to get you lucky every time, but having the benefit of the doubt certainly doesn't hurt, and all it costs is a bit of effort on the communication front.

Still, reality check: as I said, I've gotten very lucky a few times with this sort of stuff, twice getting an entire large car full of pre-Pentium era stuff (once for nothing, once for a really token sum), and I regularly go for smaller lots as well. In all of that, I've gotten two XT systems, neither of which was in working order, and one 286 motherboard, which fortunately did work. Free 486 is easy enough (round here at least in NL) with a bit of dedication, 386 is uncommon but you'll hit it sooner or later, but older than that and you're very much in collectible antiques territory.

I've had people I know come and donate things to me often, once they know what I like to do with it. Particularly in the office, people tend to dig up their and their parents' old computers once they learn you resurrect them and put them to use.

appiah4 wrote:

I've had people I know come and donate things to me often, once they know what I like to do with it.

This, pretty much. I´ve gotten quite a nice little mountain of P4 and P3 just because people dont want them anymore. Offices, schools and colleges are another good source for getting pieces of hard, but you can get a look at those places because you know Someone who works in there in the first place.

I the end, i usually end selling the parts i dont need/want on ebay or other places after cleaning and testing everything.

The best place to find free stuff is.... knowing people, especially extended family or in-laws. For example, my mother-in-law keeps an eye out for me all the time. Just last month(?) she was driving and saw a bunch of computers by the curb being thrown away. There was an old Compaq and Dell in the haul, one of which contained a PCI Voodoo 3 3000 and AWE64. Then she tells me that her brother wants to get rid of his Commodore collection. She was talking to him on the phone (he lives about 200 miles away) and he said he was going to throw it away but wants to give it to me instead because he knows I collect retro computers. I still have to go pick it up, but supposedly there's a few C64's, software in box, peripherals, and several other "newer" Commodore computers.

Just let people know about your hobby, and good things come. I've had co-workers donate things to me that their wives told them to throw away.. GeForce 2 GTS, nForce motherboard, beige AT case, beige ATX case, dual socket 940 Opteron motherboard, etc.

Free stuff doesn't come often, but some people simply just don't want to go through the hassle of selling, don't care about computers, find no value in this stuff, or just want it out of their house to make room for more important things to them. You can also give people a monetary compensation as gratitude if they will accept it.

I'm still waiting on a storage closet at my local high school to be cleaned out, because there's a mint condition complete Amiga 4000 Video Toaster setup that was stashed away. I used it back in high school in our TV studio to do non-linear video editing with. It performed video transitions, 3D graphics, title pages, and chroma-key overlays. There were very few people who used it because this was in 2000-2004, and nobody knew how to use the Amiga OS. 😵 I was the person who put it in the closet once I built the district all brand new non-linear editors running Adobe Premiere 6, Canopus EDIUS Pro, and setup a GlobalStreams Trinity to replace the Amiga.

"How do you find retro Hardware free?"
From dead people. I'd say. More precisely, from family members of people that passed away.
They usually don't care about the vintage (electronics) stuff the deceased one collected/repaired in loving detail over the years.
If you're lucky, they will be so kind and tell other family members, friends etc about that "old scrap" that's still laying around
and offer you to take with you as much as you can take.
Or otherwise, they will call the cleaning company first and tell you afterwards how
glad and happy they are now that that useless scrap is now finally gone. 🙁

"How do you find retro Hardware cheaply?"
Clearing companies. Same as above, but without any family members invovled.
Some stuff by such people/companies pop up on places like flea markets, eBay etc.

Jo22 wrote:

"How do you find retro Hardware free?" From dead people. I'd say. More precisely, from family members of people that passed away […]
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"How do you find retro Hardware free?"
From dead people. I'd say. More precisely, from family members of people that passed away.
They usually don't care about the vintage (electronics) stuff the deceased one collected/repaired in loving detail over the years.
If you're lucky, they will be so kind and tell other family members, friends etc about that "old scrap" that's still laying around
and offer you to take with you as much as you can take.
Or otherwise, they will call the cleaning company first and tell you afterwards how
glad and happy they are now that that useless scrap is now finally gone. 🙁

"How do you find retro Hardware cheaply?"
Clearing companies. Same as above, but without any family members invovled.
Some stuff by such people/companies pop up on places like flea markets, eBay etc.

ooooh yeah. People tend to ignore estate sales (hardware liquidation from individuals and/or families representing people who passed away) - they can be a rich goldmine for picking up neglected hardware from people who are desperate to clear out the space, so-to-speak, often to the point where they'll give stuff away for free. Otherwise, volunteer at a local non-profit serving the poor, or hang around local school districts. When they get hardware refreshes they often give inventory to volunteers rather than go through the expense of hiring a recycler/mover to haul it away.
Family...can be, but your family can either have some really garbage hardware, or no hardware you want at all, either.

Best place to get free stuff, is from the family.....

wow thanks for the advice guys 😀

I have got a few nice older systems off Freecycle. Some have been worth adding to my collection 😀

Things accumulate to people over time.
When I was 10-20yo sure I had just a few items:
- Like NES, Playstation1, Pentium1.
Then when 20-30yo. I finally started earning a small salary.
- AMD 64-PC, Xbox 1, Xbox 360.
Now when I'm old 30-40yo I have a steady job and more or less items in cardboard boxes. 😀
- Old obsolete PCs probably more than +10pcs.
- Old obsolete video game consoles +20pcs.
- Other electrical household items.

I'm from a poor family so I have built a tendency over time(due to economic depression) to hold on to everything if I'll ever need those in future. 😵

I get "semi-free" stuff at recycle center.
I bring to recycle center some dead boards or others eletronic itens and change.

user33331 wrote:

I'm from a poor family so I have built a tendency over time(due to economic depression) to hold on to everything if I'll ever need those in future. 😵

Same here, without the poor family thing. I just imagine needing something in the future and then can't let it go. I have stuff I haven't touched in 10 years that I'm finally starting to let go. Insane amounts to sell too, like 2 van loads of stuff and not enough time to sort them out. 😢

"Pula-aika" a Finnish word for *shortage times* or such.
- What if suddenly buying a new computer from stores comes impossible because of shortages and so on.... Or because of some EU-directive.
Hoarding is just prepping. 😒

user33331 wrote:

Hoarding is just prepping. 😒

I must be a super-prepper then. 3 months ago I had to step over boxes to do anything, and had to move boxes out of the bathroom to get to the shower 😀 Fortunately, my nephew found time to help me tidy and declutter - got rid of a few cubic metres of boxes by reorganising, and founds loads of computer parts I didn't remember buying earlier this month 😀 Mind you, I also have about 200 Kg of dried foods, because I really am a prepper as well as a hoarder 😀

Not anymore really. For me the days of free retro hardware are over, I think. Even finding stuff in the e-waste container at my municipal dump is now history since they hired more personnel to check and secure everything and also to keep the property clean.