VOGONS


First post, by ThinkpadIL

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In brief it is a collections appreciation thread.

The idea of this thread is to show your hardware collection (better with pictures) and tell how did you start collecting, what was a trigger of starting to collect old computer hardware, what do you do with your collection nowadays, how do you store and organize it etc.

Reply 1 of 9, by Horun

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You might want to read this topic about motherboard collections: Vogons members average motherboard collection size .Many of us have a few more than whatever we listed back then in 2020.
My collecting started in 1995 while working for a Computer repair shop, when customers wanted upgrades and we could keep the leftovers if those customers did not want the old parts back.
From 1995 thru about 2005 collected the majority of my stuff. All of my bare boards, video cards, controllers, etc that work are in anti-static bags on shelfs or in bags in boxes. Not organized !!

Hate posting a reply and then have to edit it because it made no sense 😁 First computer was an IBM 3270 workstation with CGA monitor. https://archive.org/details/@horun

Reply 2 of 9, by debs3759

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I stopped counting some time ago. I can only say I have over 150 motherboards, over 500 graphics cards, over 1000 CPUs, and a handful of sounds cards. Oh, and not to forget the shelf full of various drives. Not sure how many untested complete PCs, but probably about 20 waiting to be tested (yay for Freecycle!)

And I am collecting Dr Dobb's Journal, for the programming samples 😀

I really must take inventory some time, and finish organising my test/repairs bench 😀

See my graphics card database at www.gpuzoo.com
Constantly being worked on. Feel free to message me with any corrections or details of cards you would like me to research and add.

Reply 3 of 9, by Horun

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debs3759 wrote on 2022-06-07, 23:14:

I stopped counting some time ago. I can only say I have over 150 motherboards, over 500 graphics cards, over 1000 CPUs, and a handful of sounds cards. Oh, and not to forget the shelf full of various drives. Not sure how many untested complete PCs, but probably about 20 waiting to be tested (yay for Freecycle!)

And I am collecting Dr Dobb's Journal, for the programming samples 😀

I really must take inventory some time, and finish organising my test/repairs bench 😀

🤣 seems you need to swap some graphic cards for sound cards, just to balance things out ;p

Hate posting a reply and then have to edit it because it made no sense 😁 First computer was an IBM 3270 workstation with CGA monitor. https://archive.org/details/@horun

Reply 4 of 9, by imi

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the thing is, almost every PC had a graphics card, not every PC had a sound card, so if you accumulate a lot through scrap graphics cards are just more ubiquitous ^^
I think I have an entire box full of just Rage IIc cards 😁

Reply 5 of 9, by debs3759

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Horun wrote on 2022-06-08, 01:54:
debs3759 wrote on 2022-06-07, 23:14:

I stopped counting some time ago. I can only say I have over 150 motherboards, over 500 graphics cards, over 1000 CPUs, and a handful of sounds cards. Oh, and not to forget the shelf full of various drives. Not sure how many untested complete PCs, but probably about 20 waiting to be tested (yay for Freecycle!)

And I am collecting Dr Dobb's Journal, for the programming samples 😀

I really must take inventory some time, and finish organising my test/repairs bench 😀

🤣 seems you need to swap some graphic cards for sound cards, just to balance things out ;p

🤣

I'm deaf in one ear and tone deaf in the other, and have tinnitus, so having decent sound cards would be pointless 😀

See my graphics card database at www.gpuzoo.com
Constantly being worked on. Feel free to message me with any corrections or details of cards you would like me to research and add.

Reply 6 of 9, by user33331

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Reason why I collect is to spread over romanticizing the era of 1990-2005 which is the golden age of PC gaming.
- Big carton box games, multiple small manufacturers, 3Dfx and such.

That era of PCs is like muscle cars of 1950-1960.
( Not that I like: noisy, highly CO2 emissioned and smelly old USA cars but visually: Ford Victoria and Thunderbird, Cadillac Eldorado, early Corvettes and Mustangs were nice if stock and well maintained to original specs and not some highly modified low riders or rat rods like: Xzibit West coast customs, Overhaulin'(Chip Foose) or Monkey Garage "styles" which are horrible.) I just like plain and original setups.

Reply 7 of 9, by SteveC

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I don't collect anything to get a "full set", luckily I'm not addicted to collecting stuff or I'd end up with so much junk (more than I have already!). I'm in awe of people who have hundreds or thousands of CPUs, video cards and so on, but I don't want to step onto that slippery slope - I'd be forever chasing certain items that would drive me mad!
Generally all my retro kit I pick up because it "means" something to me... like Matrox video cards - I have a fair few as I used to be in their little beta testing programme from back in the G200/G4x0/Parhelia days, or IBM kit - my first experience on PCs were on various XTs and PS/2s going in my dad's work to type up homework, and my dad bringing home his P/70 every weekend so that's very nostalgic. Oh I do have about a dozen ThinkPads though!

YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/c/StevesTechShed
Twitter: https://twitter.com/SteveTechShed

Reply 8 of 9, by Tetrium

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The spark for me was back in the early 2000s when I basically wanted to learn how to build computers, but not having any money or parts to practice with, nor people to ask questions about computers since nobody I knew knew anything about them.
So I figured I'd go dumpsterdiving and use those old junkers to practice on. But everything I found was much older than my (at the time) Pentium 2 350, most was 486 and older with a few Pentiums thrown in the mix, all systems being proprietary or AT at best.
And the more I took home with me, the more my interest kept growing along with the size of my stash.

Later on I started doing less of the dumpsterdiving and more of the purchasing because I wanted to get more higher end or maxed out parts (I was getting tons of DX-33 and Pentium 100MHz, 137-ish MB Quantum ProDrives and that kind of stuff etc etc, more than I'd ever need but not really suitable for what I wanted), so I discovered ebay and a couple other sites where I started purchasing stuff (like tons of cheap CPUs or cheap graphics cards, batches of wiped harddrives, even a couple car seats worth of tossaway "I need room so it's going into the bin or you take it for free" stuff) and I only did dumpsterdiving occasionally instead of 5 or 6 nights a week.
I asked left and right for people if they had an old PC collecting dust in their attics and I did some work with PCs where I could also take home some stuff they deemed 'not worth it'.
This was also the time where I moved and also started taking the storage bit more seriously. At some point the proverbial drawer filled with spare socks won't suffice anymore! 😜

At some flea market I bought WinME for €15 or so, which was the event that send me into using WinME a lot (I mean on dozens of systems), so my interest shifted more and more to hardware which I wanted to run ME on.

I basically stopped collecting back in 2014 or so?? I don't remember exactly but in a few years it slowed down to almost full-stop, partially because I had everything that I felt I needed and was basically feeling content about what I had and anything post AGP and post single cores didn't interest me as much
And that stuff was still too expensive for me back then thanks to the decade of tech stagnation thanks to AMD being mostly uncompetitive post core2 and Intel getting lazy to milk the consumers for 10 years or so because of this, so prices on second hand parts stopped dropping, along with mining becoming a thing.
And tbf at some point my interest started to wane and has only been rekindled relatively recently.

So almost by chance, my collection is mostly AGP/ATX stuff and AT/PCI/VLB/ISA stuff >=386 (I needed a cutoff point to prevent my stash from growing too much so 286 and slower had to go) with a very wide assortment of parts, mostly lower end parts. If it was common back then, I'll probably have a sizable amount of it right now. Having a wide range of parts and not just the cool items kinda forced me into experimenting more, which taught me to appreciate a wider range of hardware and gave me way more experience instead of going for only the cookiecutter builds 😜

I don't even know how much exactly I have, but I'm fairly sure I written about it before and it barely grew since then.
I've got some big projects happening with my life and my place atm, but I did notice I've finally run out of antistatic bags so I bought another couple hundred ESD shielding bags and probably in a couple months or so once these other projects have been completed I'll be going up in the attic again ^^

Whats missing in your collections?
My retro rigs (old topic)
Interesting Vogons threads (links to Vogonswiki)
Report spammers here!

Reply 9 of 9, by PTherapist

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My PC collection has slowed in the past couple of years, as I've been diverting my attention towards 8-Bit & 16-Bit Micro-Computers, as well as Games Consoles.

As it stands, including about 7 laptops & 7 Apple Macs, my ready-built/usable "PC" collection is currently at around 64 systems, with a further 10+ systems that could be built with the addition of cases and/or extra parts. There's only a few gaps I'd like to plug, as I pretty much have some kind of hardware to cover PC gaming from the 80s right up to today. The last retro PC parts purchases I made were for a pair of GeForce 8800 GPUs & a 386SX motherboard, as well as parts to fix an old Turbo XT clone motherboard. The last full PC I acquired (given to me for free) was a Socket 775 Core 2 based PC, which I upgraded to a Q6600. I was tempted to purchase a 68K-based Macintosh to add to my collection, but maybe in the future.

Since 2019, my Micro Computer collection has gone from 1 8-bit Micro to 15 different computers, with the most recent being the addition of a Sharp MZ-700. Similarly since 2019, my games console collection has gone from 9 to 28! Most recent console addition being a Super Famicom.

As to how I store it all, it's all in multiple rooms around the house, as well as in the loft, with a select few systems permanently connected up and in use. I'm using an array of storage units & underbed storage boxes etc, as well as parts and stuff stuck in drawers and cardboard boxes. Most of my retro PCs are stored away, I only have a couple permanently connected as they take up too much space so I have to be selective. Most of the space is currently dominated by Micros & Consoles.