Welcome! Sounds like you found the right place. 😀 We're happy to have you here! Nice blog and amazing that you've managed to collect so many retro laptops in such a short amount of time. How did you manage that?

Several hundred laptops! And my family thinks I have a problem hoarding stuff (yeah, what do they know). Well, you don't have to be mad to be here but it does help. Blog looks good, I'll bookmark that and have a proper look later when I have more time.

The short answer is for several weeks on the trot (on a Tuesday after work) I met a bloke in a public car park and paid 66p per laptop and transferred them from the boot of his car to mine!!!

The longer answer is, I met a bloke at a Car Boot Sale and snapped up all the retro laptops he had (£1 each), went back the next week and he was there again with some more and got them for the same price, then on the third week when he was there again with even more retro 'barn find' laptops - the penny finally dropped and I asked him how many more he had and when he said a couple of hundred I said I'd have them! A couple of them had some technician notes on them with their company logo on it so I did some searching around on the internet and saw that he was one of the early computer recycling companies. The laptops were in a hell of a state and had clearly been kept in a lockup somewhere for years! A bit of foam cleaner and some of those magic cleaning sponges and they've come out a treat!

25% were damaged (but still had either a keyboard, display, RAM or IDE HDD that could be salvaged) and the remaining 75% worked but some had missing HDDs or RAM - which I have been so far able to get from the spares from the faulty ones!

I have well over 300 Retro laptops (and 1 Vintage Compaq 286 LTE luggable) - what I dont have is the room to go through them all and sort them all out 100% - slowly but surely... I have a few old Compaq and HP tablets from around the year 2000 but only 3 of the 12 have pens.

I'm lucky enough to have some storage space at work where I've got about 40 laptops that I still need to sort through and a trolley I use for hauling car boot finds so my lunchbreaks are pretty busy! From the damaged/broken laptops I have litterally kept everything of any use from the CPUs, RAM, HDD's, Screens, Keyboards and even screws!

Hello and welcome!

FazzaGBR wrote on 2020-01-29, 10:05:

Wow - this looks like the forum I've been looking for! I'm a collector of mainly Retro laptops (I've amassed several hundred over the last 6 months and need to get around to testing them all)... I started off with ComPaq laptops and have everything from a 286 to dozens of Pentium II, III and IV's! I've recently picked up half a dozen IBM ThinkPads (Pentium 150MHz I think) but I've only just gotten around to testing them.

I have my own RetroComputing blog but I've been so busy sorting through all my laptops that I havent had a time to update for a while now.

Any way, that's enough about me - I just thought I'd say hello to you all before I have a proper look around this website, so, hello! 😀

Nice blog... And welcome. Way more beautifull than my blog.

Hah I love the story. I tend to avoid laptops due to limited expansion options and working on them requires more patience and a more delicate touch but if I found a similar deal, I buy them all too.