Floppies aren't hard to find, but the hardware of the age you're looking for usually is. It's difficult to ship as well.
$500 is just a price someone puts in the hopes that "someone" will buy it in a year or so 😜

But alas, the days where one could find free 486's on the side of the road in great numbers are long gone.

Vintage software is less of a problem, as it is "soft"ware 😉
(btw, no warezing is allowed on Vogons, just so I mentioned it 😉 )

Edit:And welcome to Vogons! Enjoy your flight and please remember, the parachutes are on your left hand side! 😜

Prices are outrageous. I had so much stuff that I threw away over the years that I wish I had kept. Once one person starts setting prices high, soon everyone else does as well. They don't care if it takes 5 years to sell at that price. Stay alert and keep checking ebay often. Sometimes things do come up for more reasonable prices, but you have to act fast before someone else gets it. Patience pays off, even if you have to wait a while to get the thing you want. A lot of things aren't especially rare, it's just that some people think that because it's old it must be valuable. Everything shows up for a reasonable price eventually, unless it really is a rarity. Try some of the other sites like ebid. Because they have less traffic, you'll have less competition and because fees are lower than ebay, the sellers can put lower prices on buy it now items.

That's what kills me, too. At one point I had an SB awe32, crap tons of 30 pin sims, 8 and 16 bit expansion cards, etc. But I thought, "what the hell am I going to do with this stuff"? So ended up selling it cheap, giving it away, or what have you.

I still have a 16 bit ATI vga card, 16 bit scsi card, 16 bit SB pro, along with an old p100 and some other odds and ends. I may set the p100 up as a "vintage" box, and just watch for the other stuff I want. I wish I could find a baby AT case and power supply, I have no need for a full tower (the p100 I have is from a Gateway system, literally like 2 or 3 feet high).
I figure instead of trying to find an old HD, it might make more sense to get an IDE to compact flash adapter, and install the OS on it. Anyone know if you can put DOS and/or win95 on a compact flash drive? I remember trying to do the same thing w/ win xp and there is some convoluted process you have to go through to do it.

snorg wrote:

I figure instead of trying to find an old HD, it might make more sense to get an IDE to compact flash adapter, and install the OS on it. Anyone know if you can put DOS and/or win95 on a compact flash drive? I remember trying to do the same thing w/ win xp and there is some convoluted process you have to go through to do it.

DOS is quite happy on flash memory - if you're going to use WIndows 95 I would maybe use a hard drive instead, due to all the of the reads and writes.

snorg wrote:

I've seen some reasonably priced stuff but also some VINTAGE!! OMG!! $500 IBM 5162s.

Well, an IBM 5162 is arguably a genuine piece of history, being one of the first IBM PCs. It is also possible that someone somewhere out there has some ancient piece of proprietary laboratory equipment or database software that is incompatible with anything other than the original hardware it came with (or at least, sufficiently incompatible that it is beyond the capability of the maintainer to make the necessary alterations).

A couple of years ago I managed to sell a pair of ancient VAX tape drives for $80 on eBay. That was completely unexpected!

megatron-uk wrote:

snorg wrote:

I figure instead of trying to find an old HD, it might make more sense to get an IDE to compact flash adapter, and install the OS on it. Anyone know if you can put DOS and/or win95 on a compact flash drive? I remember trying to do the same thing w/ win xp and there is some convoluted process you have to go through to do it.

DOS is quite happy on flash memory - if you're going to use WIndows 95 I would maybe use a hard drive instead, due to all the of the reads and writes.

Or an IOMEGA Jaz drive. 😁

30 pin simms. Don't get me started!

I keep tossing the idea around of getting a pair of 16mb simms for my CT3600, but I couldn't find anything nearly that size on Ebay, and found them from a solitary online vendor for 10 bucks when everyone else wants like 50 bucks a simm! It's outrageous. As it stands, my CT3600 may never know the joy of sound fonts.

This stuff is pretty expensive these days unless you're exceedingly patient, and then it's still somewhat affordable.

I wonder if 30 pin Mac SIMMS would work. You can sometimes still find those reasonably priced.

Found a cheap copy of OS/2 warp connect in a blue box online, if memory serves there was a version that required an existing windows install and a version that did not. I am pretty sure I don't still have my copy (of either OS/2 or win 3.11). Is this version likely to be the win 3.11 not required version?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OS/2#The_.22Warp.22_years suggests neither version necessarily required Windows, but the "blue" box was not the one that required Windows.

Or you could just buy eComStation, if you really wanted to.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/EComStation
http://toastytech.com/guis/ecsd3.html

Wait, wasn't this a thread about hardware?

snorg wrote:

Found a cheap copy of OS/2 warp connect in a blue box online, if memory serves there was a version that required an existing windows install and a version that did not. I am pretty sure I don't still have my copy (of either OS/2 or win 3.11). Is this version likely to be the win 3.11 not required version?

Windows was never a requirement for running OS/2. The red box version would use whatever version of Windows was already installed for compatibility purposes, but it was not necessary to have Windows to run OS/2 or it's apps. This might actually be the better one to have if it will call up Windows versions later than 3.11. You could potentially have 95 or 98 installed and the red version would call that one up. With the blue box you'd be stuck with Windows 3.11 compatibility. Windows 3.11 compatibility is pretty much meaningless now, so having it isn't a benefit anymore. All the Windows 3.x apps are useless. It's even a chore just to set up an internet connection on a Windows 3.x system and the primitive web browsers that will run under it are pathetic at best.

OS/2 is still around, it's called ecomstation now. It's not cheap, though.

http://www.ecomstation.com/

Here's a sample of the prices you will find when shopping for it online. There aren't many distributors, so I don't expect pricing will vary greatly between them.

http://www.finnsoft.com/html/ecomstation.html

I just can't justify paying more than I would pay for Windows 7 Ultimate for it.

sliderider wrote:

Windows was never a requirement for running OS/2. The red box version would use whatever version of Windows was already installe […]
Show full quote

snorg wrote:

Found a cheap copy of OS/2 warp connect in a blue box online, if memory serves there was a version that required an existing windows install and a version that did not. I am pretty sure I don't still have my copy (of either OS/2 or win 3.11). Is this version likely to be the win 3.11 not required version?

Windows was never a requirement for running OS/2. The red box version would use whatever version of Windows was already installed for compatibility purposes, but it was not necessary to have Windows to run OS/2 or it's apps. This might actually be the better one to have if it will call up Windows versions later than 3.11. You could potentially have 95 or 98 installed and the red version would call that one up. With the blue box you'd be stuck with Windows 3.11 compatibility. Windows 3.11 compatibility is pretty much meaningless now, so having it isn't a benefit anymore. All the Windows 3.x apps are useless. It's even a chore just to set up an internet connection on a Windows 3.x system and the primitive web browsers that will run under it are pathetic at best.

OS/2 is still around, it's called ecomstation now. It's not cheap, though.

http://www.ecomstation.com/

Here's a sample of the prices you will find when shopping for it online. There aren't many distributors, so I don't expect pricing will vary greatly between them.

http://www.finnsoft.com/html/ecomstation.html

I just can't justify paying more than I would pay for Windows 7 Ultimate for it.

Gawd it looks awful. Kinda like the KDE desktop on Linux did 10 years ago. Really hideous window gadgets too.

sliderider wrote:

Windows 3.11 compatibility is pretty much meaningless now, so having it isn't a benefit anymore. All the Windows 3.x apps are useless. It's even a chore just to set up an internet connection on a Windows 3.x system and the primitive web browsers that will run under it are pathetic at best.

If it was that useless, no one would want to run it in DOSBox.

Jorpho wrote:

sliderider wrote:

Windows 3.11 compatibility is pretty much meaningless now, so having it isn't a benefit anymore. All the Windows 3.x apps are useless. It's even a chore just to set up an internet connection on a Windows 3.x system and the primitive web browsers that will run under it are pathetic at best.

If it was that useless, no one would want to run it in DOSBox.

Think about it. It's called DOS box, not Windows 3.11 box. 😉

You don't need any version of Windows to play DOS games.

And have you ever tried browsing the modern web with something like Netscape 4.0 or Opera 3?

You should be able to locate OS/2 Warp for free somewhere on the intertrons. It was included on the cover disk of Australian Personal Computer one month many years ago, no doubt somebody has uploaded this free copy somewhere.

sliderider wrote:

Think about it. It's called DOS box, not Windows 3.11 box. 😉

You don't need any version of Windows to play DOS games.

And yet for some reason people keep wanting to run Windows 3.11 in DOSBox anyway. If the many threads about it on these forums are any indication, it happens quite frequently.

SquallStrife wrote:

You should be able to locate OS/2 Warp for free somewhere on the intertrons. It was included on the cover disk of Australian Personal Computer one month many years ago, no doubt somebody has uploaded this free copy somewhere.

As I doubt the version on that cover disk came with an unlimited license to redistribute the software, this "free copy" is just as "free" as any other version floating around the Internet.

Jorpho wrote:

And yet for some reason people keep wanting to run Windows 3.11 in DOSBox anyway. If the many threads about it on these forums […]
Show full quote

sliderider wrote:

Think about it. It's called DOS box, not Windows 3.11 box. 😉

You don't need any version of Windows to play DOS games.

And yet for some reason people keep wanting to run Windows 3.11 in DOSBox anyway. If the many threads about it on these forums are any indication, it happens quite frequently.

SquallStrife wrote:

You should be able to locate OS/2 Warp for free somewhere on the intertrons. It was included on the cover disk of Australian Personal Computer one month many years ago, no doubt somebody has uploaded this free copy somewhere.

As I doubt the version on that cover disk came with an unlimited license to redistribute the software, this "free copy" is just as "free" as any other version floating around the Internet.

I can't really see any reason why except that it makes finding files easier, but you can load a DOS shell to do that. When I used DOS 4.01 I used the DOS Shell a lot more than Windows to find things.

How can OS/2 call win95/win32 instead of win 3.1? Has anyone ever tried this? Something tells me it would not work too well, or at all. Would be interesting if it did.

To get back to hardware: what should I expect to pay the following items:

30 pin simms (per MB pricing)
72 pin simms
286 motherboard w/ cpu
287 coprocessor
386 motherboard w/ cpu
387
Hard disks I am assuming I can just use scsi or IDE, and they should be dirt cheap, or I can use compact flash in an adapter for a dos system.

If you could only build one or 2 retro systems, what would you choose? An 8088 system, or 286? 386/486 or pentium?

I currently have the hardware to throw together a pentium class system, but would have to go foraging for the other stuff. I am not sure what I would do with an 8 bit system, outside of running games or word processing. A paint program like dpaint might not even run. With a pentium class system, I could fart around with 3d graphics, photoshop also (although why I would do this on a p5-100 instead of my core i7 I do not know, unless for the nostalgia trip)

snorg wrote:

How can OS/2 call win95/win32 instead of win 3.1? Has anyone ever tried this? Something tells me it would not work too well, or at all. Would be interesting if it did.

I cannot comprehend why you think this would be possible. (Of course, using Win32s with OS/2 / Win3.1 is feasible, but that's a different matter.)

To get back to hardware: what should I expect to pay the following items:

That depends entirely on what is available to you. If you are planning to buy everything on eBay, you know the prices as well as anyone else.

If you could only build one or 2 retro systems, what would you choose? An 8088 system, or 286? 386/486 or pentium?

Why don't you decide what you want to do? If you're not sure what you would do with an 8-bit system, why should you build one? If you want to spend a great deal of time and money for the sake of a "nostalgia trip", that is your prerogative.