My parents gave me their Pentium 3 computers to play with when I was in high school, so around 2005-2008. Ended up donating them after a spring cleaning in 2010 and I was in college anyways.

Fast forward to early 2016, my uncle was cleaning his basement and I offered to take all his old computers in there. A Pentium M Sony VAIO laptop, a couple of PII/III Dell Dimension XPS rigs, a Gateway Pentium III, and a pair of Pentium 4 Optiplexes.

That's hard to say as I managed to save most of my original PC games from 91-94. I pretty much stopped buying new games around 00-01 and then started to collect more retro gear in -09. So technically it was 2009 when I started collecting, but by then I already had a small collection. If that makes any sense. 😵

Well after I upgraded from my 486DX4/100 (my first build from 1995), I always hung onto the motherboard of that system. I got rid of a lot of retro stuff in 2005 (when it was simply 'old') but always felt attached to the 486. It's a baby-AT board so I always wanted to build a cabinet around it so I could fire up the DOS games (all preconfigured) via a menu system like a console. Never got around to it.

After I discovered this site, it really 'awoke' my interest in this stuff as before that it was a passing interest. Now it's a proper hobby. Thank you guys. I mean damn you guys. I mean thank you guys. I mean...

When I was 7 years old my dad started teaching me to program on an old craptop that he'd put DOS on. I found it very interesting to push DOS to its very limits of what it could do on that little 900MHz Celeron... Of course I was just programming in Quick Basic but I discovered ways to push that to its limits as well 🤣

At his office he had a couple of old XPS-Txxx machines that he let me play with. Playing with those and that old DOS craptop for hours on end was what got me caught on the "retro" bug - I thought it was very cool to make these machines perform just as productively as the modern machine down the hall.

I'll always be trying to relive the excitement I felt as an 11-year-old whenever I set up one of those machines with a new configuration and watched it fly doing whatever I had set it up to do 🤣

That's still a large part of why I'm in the "retro" scene: pushing old tech to its limits and making it do things you never thought possible, or weren't possible even back in the day. Playing mp3's smoothly on a 486, for instance. Or browsing the internet and sending emails or tweeting from an XT. Or creating new games for old platforms, or modding old games to get a fresh experience, or just using them the way they were meant to be so they fulfill their purpose!

Maybe when we got our first family PC when I was 12 - an 80386sx-25Mhz system.

I've always kept some of the parts I bought from back around that time such as an Opti 930 based ISA soundcard with onboard wavetable I bought used and my AGP Voodoo 5-5500 which I bought new.

I've even got the only PC game I ever pre-ordered, along with the original box, receipt, etc. - Final Fantasy VII.

I've got a few other things from back then but a lot of what I had was sold and/or given away.

After I grew up and moved I started collecting some older stuff and recently have started hoarding old sound cards for a project I am gearing up to do.

When I started my job at Apple and they told us about Apple ][ and Macintosh is what drove me over the edge to actually start collecting. Many years later I have the collection in my signature.

Oh man, now here's a big wall of text coming up....grab a coffee, you're going to need it.....

Since my oldest sister got a 386 for college in 1991, and I played Monkey Island on it, I wanted a computer of my own. Then my other sister got a Pentium 100 in 1995 and got internet access through the University. That fueled the fire more. But back then, computers were expensive and until the early 21st century I had no bloody idea that I would ever be able to afford one. I also kind of feared the "Nerd" stigma so I did not talk openly about my technological leanings as a kid.

I did not start in this hobby like most people do now. I started getting my hands on vintage PC compatibles LOOOONG before it was cool to do so. Back when this stuff was "old junk". I'd get laughed at by people in the know, and people not in the know just saw me as some dumb kid looking for a glorified games device.

I kind of got the "gamer" reputation because I started collecting Atari 2600 games in 1995, NES a year later.

Truth be told, I wanted a PC with Internet, and I started off with my second older sister's old Tandy 1000 SX in 1997! This was what I had for my FIRST computer. So I was retro from my first PC onward.

The problem with the Tandy though was that back then, computers were a mystery to the typical run-of-the-mill "for beer money" freelance computer techs and various other I.t. people I crossed paths with. They called it a "Dinosaur", a "Doorstop", a "useless piece of junk", and so on. I upgraded the RAM to 640K using Radio Shack's outdated ink-and-paper catalogs in-store - I paid $46 in 1998 to add like...eight more DIP IC chips to make the full 640K RAM the system supported just so I could play Ultima VI: The False Prophet off of a total of 11 360K DSDD Floppies. Playing that game was an all day affair so I only played it on Sundays. Traveling from Brittania to Trinsic took me till Lunch time on that pokey little 8088.

Then a family friend, one of those freelancer I.T. guys, Larry, he would come by to visit every so often and one day took a look at the Tandy and said if I got my grades sup in school he would build me a 486 based system that could run Windows 95 and have internet access. He also had a 4MB VLB video card for it (!!!) - god I wish he'd left that WITH the motherboard. Of course, he had a falling out with the fam and was never seen or heard from again.

The motherboard was a ZEOS 459-0001-GMB, aKa. the Zeos Upgradeable Systems Main board used in their 386 and 486 line of machines circa 1989-1990. It was a baby AT board, had one IDE channel, on-board floppy, on-board game, serial, and parallel ports. The CPU fit onto a daughtercard that attached to the motherboard via 2 connectors and held on by 2 screws.

After the Tandy died because the 8253 chip got spotty, I got rid of all of the Tandy stuff ( a move I sorely regret, hell, I wish I'd kept the old CGA RGB monitor it had....hindsight is 20/20, and at the time I had no idea this stuff would become collectable yet). I took to digging on the street curbs of Opelika and Auburn looking for dead x86 PC's to get parts from. Eventually I got 2 Packard Bell LPX Shell halves for 2 different models, used a Dremel to hack-them together properly, got a floppy drive in one pile, got a PSU in another (a WORKING PSU at that), and would have had a usable PC by this point had I had a video card, monitor, keyboard, and cables.....

Then things REALLY Began.....

I had joined a metal band, and our rhythm guitar player's dad was a Lawyer who once was a computer tech. He had some old systems at his house he wanted to give away, 2 of which were 386 based systems (one I found). The one I got initially was a Flight 386 SX built sometime around 1992, with a 124MB Maxtor 7120AT hard disk, 1.2 and 1.4M Floppy drives, an Addonics MON7c4B VGA monitor, and a Chicony 5661 Xt/AT switchable keyboard. It came home on February 9th 2001 - my 18th birthday - and that's when I started with this madness seriously. About 2 weeks in, I did my first motherboard swap, and after about six months of my mom witnessing that computer growing off thrift shop parts and hardware I found by walking home six miles from my school through downtown Opelika buying up every New-Old-Stock and cast-off PC component I could find, she put $150 into it and got us a modem, printer, and a mouse, and I got online finally via AOL 3.0 and 4.0 in July of 2001. I also started my old website called the Creeping Network around that time and learned HTML coding, how to use FTP, and so on, at that time.

When I was not rehearsing, practicing guitar, or anything, I was dabbling in legacy I.T. Word got around I liked fixing and was doing amazing things with these old machines - getting them online, and was taking it as a serious career path (I work in I.T. now). In a way, this hobby did kind of save me from a future of being a constantly broke, lonely, angry, and most likely homeless and destitute local rock musician as up til that point that's ALL I wanted to do with my life. My mom considered my room a computer version of "Monster Garage".

When word got around, I met my rhythm guitarist's sister who was server watcher-person for a local bank. She'd just got a circa 1995 IBM PC 330 100DX4 system from work and gave it to me for fixing her AMD 5x86 133 box, that was the first DECENT computer that ran a modern O/S on it - she later got a Data General Pentium, upgraded to that herself (she knew a lot of computer technical stuff as well), and gave me her AMD 5x86 133 based system as well (overclocked to 160MHz as well). Not long after that, the dad had another 386 - a GEM computer Products 386 that he bought new circa 1988 for about $3000 with the coolest looking full AT case that mimicked a Compaq Deskpro 386. That was originally my rhythm guitarist's and he gave it to me because it was a bloody basketcase, it blew the PSU and the Seagate MFM ST-421 HDD in the first month.

And to think, all this madness started with me just wanting to cobble together a cheap computer that could dial-up to the internet and allow me to pursue my music and other goals at the time, as well as play a few old DOS games like Monkey Island and Ultima VI: The False Prophet. Then with all the naysaying of IT people around me, saying a 486 can't go online, and all this other baloney, it made me mad, drove me to PROVE it could be done, and I kept trying it. My collection was not about value, it was about trying to PROVE someone, or someone's, wrong, and get all the benefits and fun of messing with older hardware up until about 2005 - I accumulated more machines eventually peaking around 2004 with a total of 32 machines ranging from a Texas Instruments TI-99/4a to that same old GEM computer case-modded into a micro ATX Pentium III system with half a gig of RAM running Windows 2000. Also, back then, it was CHEAP!

I could go into any thrift shop and buy a pile of 486s for the cost of a Papa Johns Pizza. The more shady, decrepit, or worn down looking the thrift shop, the better, because in Alabama at the time, the best, oldest, weirdest, coolest looking hardware was found in these little junk shops in places like downtown Montgomery or downtown Opelika that were run by little old ladies who had no idea what they had and just wanted to get that old boat anchor out of the store. If I walked in with a $100 bill at that time, I could have bought every computer, monitor, or piece of hardware in the store! It was insane. I really really miss those early days.

Also, I made friends through garage sales and thrifts? Ever brought a Ford Explorer to it's axles with computer hardware? I have. I had enough crap in there that it looked like Doctor Emmett L Brown tried to make a time machine out of it! The rhythm guitarist in the band followed suit not long afterward, I think I recall his back den was nothing but a mess of old computers and printers for about 2 years after that, and I was constantly trading/buying/taking the stuff he would not use or that I needed if possible.

Other fun memories of starting off and the early days. That band folded, me and those people all fell out of touch and stopped getting along, typical late teen/early tewenty something rocker bullshit. I eventually found another great source with this old man downtown who had a unlabeled shop full of vintage DOS era hardware out the wazoo. I bought so many cards, SIMMS, drives, cables, monitors, and other stuff off him, and some of that stuff is still out there in circulation to this day. In 2003 I started selling the computers I rebuilt/repaired on e-bay for bargain basement prices to people whom I assume where some of the other early collectors.

I would not trade the journey of this hobby for anything. I could write a literal book on it.

These days, I don't really "collect" anymore. I have three vintage machines, my Tandy 1000, GEM 286, and XT 486 Frankenputer that I am caregiver to, but all those experiences early on are visible in those machines, and some of the parts from those old machines from the old days live on in those computers. Crazy to think that's over 17 years ago.

I've never actually wanted to collect PC stuff. I was more interested in 8 and 16 bit computers and arcades. Of course arcades only as emulators. I was pretty much in emulation scene from the start in 1995/6 (Atari XL/XE, ST, Amiga, MAME...).

Real stuff on my wanted list were: Atari 800XL (I used to have from 1986 to 1991), Atari 130XE, Atari 1040STF, Amiga 1200 and that was pretty much it.

Got a real Atari 1040STe in 1998 as the TV out wasn't working I tossed it 😢 Much later in 2005 I got Amiga 500 with 1084 monitor. It worked only a week or so. I sold it on for parts for 10€. Monitor still works fine thou 😉 From 2006 to 2010 I got pretty much everything I wanted. My older brother (who is also into computers) even teased me about PC stuff. I wasn't interested...

To quick forward... I started collecting PC stuff in the summer of 2012 when I discovered a complete 486DX4-100 in the storage at my "wife's" parents home. At first I only wanted what I had back in the days (286-16, 386-40, 486slc-33, 486DX-80,...)... this turned into a mass hoarding of everything I could get my hands on and I have really too much of everything - even though I sell a lot to fund this hobby - my payroll is just too low for this kind of spending.

In recent months I find myself not so much engaged in searching and even testing out stuff like I used to. Is this only temporary or is the END coming 😕 I guess I'll just have to wait and see 🤣

I don't remember, I don't want to remember note do I want to get back into collecting. I like old computers and everything, but it takes over my life. I'm strictly a one computer at a time guy now.

I know Macs being dumped onto schools has something to do with it.

Considering much of my humble collection was purchased by me when new, then held onto, I'm not sure how to answer. But, it sat in boxes most of that time til a couple of years ago when I stumbled across Phil's youtube channel. That got the juices flowing again. Then last summer on a visit to my mom's (I live in a different state now), I rummaged through my old bedroom and came across even more stuff. Notably, a VLB graphics card that now is in my 486 as well as a bunch of DOS and early Windows games on both floppy and CD. Also found a mint, boxed NES with a bunch of games that I forgot I bought in college. I even found an MT-32, but it was my brother's so I couldn't take it, even though he doesn't use it. 🙁

A year before this.

Blame Need for Speed 4.
In 2012 I was in the mood to play it first time for years so didn't know about its incompatibility with WinXP.
Whatever, I'll just get a cheap PC off gumtree, That ended up being a 486 with PCI, had loads of fun upgrading that and I had the bug. Plus I still couldn't play NFS4.
A lot of my stuff also had since new or ex work PC's that were being thrown out round 2003-5 (think P3 era machines) so has sentimental value

I grew up in the era when PC XT compatibles with the advanced CGA were THE systems to own. The machines that would have entered the "Dream Machine" setup category in gaming magazines.

I grew as the PC scene grew too - from XT to AT to 286, 386....

I was lucky to have a 8088 with CGA and 10 or 20 MB hard drive. Considered a luxury back then. Buying a system those days comes with some game executables on floppy disks - Digger, Tapper, Blockout, Sokoban, etc.

I used to hear about MT-32 back then and used to dream of having it....and there were so many stuff back then that I dreamt of having, but all were prohibitively expensive.

Not until I started working and earning on my own, that I started to collect. Internet and eBay helped realize my dreams.

It was 2006, and the first of my collection started with none other than the Roland LAPC-I card, bought from a seller in Germany via eBay.

The rest, as they say, was history.

Malik wrote:

I used to hear about MT-32 back then and used to dream of having it....and there were so many stuff back then that I dreamt of having, but all were prohibitively expensive.

Ah, now this is where my retro hobby merges with my gaming hobby - I NEVER had the latest stuff and this started with playing Doom on a 386SX - postage stamp all the way, while my friends all had 486s. So when I upgraded I would then play all the games I'd had an inferior experience with as they were truly intended. So the irony of this site if that it's primarily about pretending to use old hardware (yes, I just referred to 'emulators' as 'pretenders' 🤣) but a big part of it is about seeking the absolute zenith of PC gaming: 3DFX, SLI, MT32, caching VLB hard disk controllers, 10K SCSI drives, Pentium Pro, SMP... the list goes on. All the shit we could never touch back in the day and now we can have that ultimate experience and feel 13 years old again in the process 😀

brassicGamer wrote:

Malik wrote:

I used to hear about MT-32 back then and used to dream of having it....and there were so many stuff back then that I dreamt of having, but all were prohibitively expensive.

Ah, now this is where my retro hobby merges with my gaming hobby - I NEVER had the latest stuff and this started with playing Doom on a 386SX - postage stamp all the way, while my friends all had 486s. So when I upgraded I would then play all the games I'd had an inferior experience with as they were truly intended. So the irony of this site if that it's primarily about pretending to use old hardware (yes, I just referred to 'emulators' as 'pretenders' 🤣) but a big part of it is about seeking the absolute zenith of PC gaming: 3DFX, SLI, MT32, caching VLB hard disk controllers, 10K SCSI drives, Pentium Pro, SMP... the list goes on. All the shit we could never touch back in the day and now we can have that ultimate experience and feel 13 years old again in the process 😀

Most definitely this. Although I did have 3DFX gear once I had a job. My first 3DFX card was a Rush... took it back after a couple days because it was too slow and upgraded to a Banshee.

My second job was at a local computer store so I got a very nice discount on hardware. I think the employees paid 12% over cost instead of the massive markup most things had.

I began wanting to run older games, and hadn't thrown out my old computers. From then I've been given and obtained various items, chief amongst which are the Roland sound modules that were far too expensive at the time!

Although there's always been a lot of poor games it's remarkable some of the tech that was possible at the time. It doesn't stop me wishing for a better interface in Ultima Underworld, though..

For me it started in the 8-bit era when I got a CPC464. I still have the very first piece of software I ever bought for it (F-15 Strike Eagle ... on tape ... kids ask your parents if you have no idea what that means). And its just grown from there to a rag tag collection of PCs (some of which work) and other misc hardware and software. You know how it is.

For some reason I appear to accumulate books and manuals. I simply can't resist going to library book sales and picking up another half dozen or so titles. I'm my own worst enemy when it comes to that.

I started my collection in 2013, when I tried to get a SB-live working in Dos. Little did I know that it can only do dos with emm386. Anyway... I started to search for ISA stuff then, and soon I was in full swing, setting a goal for a collection. One can argue, that the SB-Live working in dos made got me started on this. 🤣