VOGONS


First post, by tizzdizz

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This has probably been done before but my recent thread about my unicorn at turbo case made me curious what other cases you guys are particularly attached to for sentimental reasons?

Reply 1 of 27, by seanneko

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Photo stolen from someone else on this forum (badmojo)...

IMG_4407_zpsd1d737ab.jpg

This was the case that my first computer came in, a 386 SX 33. I'd pay far too much if I ever found one for sale to rebuild the computer again.

Reply 2 of 27, by LHN91

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Neither I really had a choice to keep, as I was too young to decide... but two of the computers that were mine to use ultimately were disposed of, and I really do wish I had kept them, as both would be at least semi-rare and awesome to have nowadays. Photos from elsewhere as I don't have any pictures from then....

Digital Rainbow 100

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This was the first computer I ever used. A hand-me-down from an aunt of mine, and we never really figured out how to do much on it, but the dual floppy and green-and-white monochrome screen are etched in my memory.

IBM PS/2 Model 55SX

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This was essentially my second pc, a hand me down from my mother's cousin. It was a good PC until it started to fail, and then it sat in the basement for years and years until it was disposed of in the mid-2000's when we moved house.

Reply 5 of 27, by Vynix

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I know this might sound as a surprise to all of you but...

... One of my unicorns I would have loved to keep was my Indigo iMac G3, I regret having to part with it, because at the time, I was very unfamiliar with MacOS and didn't know how to use it (mind that, when I had it, I was 12 yrs old and had no idea these old PPC macs were sought-after) because of that my parents threw it away "because I didn't know how to use it"

So yeah it's a pretty bad regret even if mine had a nasty gash on the CRT, I'm still kicking myself for not having kept it.. Now I'm still looking for a snow or graphite DV/SE (or a regular Indigo, as long it's a slot loader)

Proud owner of a Shuttle HOT-555A 430VX motherboard and two wonderful retro laptops, namely a Compaq Armada 1700 [nonfunctional] and a HP Omnibook XE3-GC [fully working :p]

Reply 6 of 27, by konc

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Errius wrote:

Are those removable hard drives?

On the Rainbow 100 photo? If so you're looking at the floppy drives, each one is double so 4 in total in this picture. The left one has the latches closed and the right one open.

Reply 7 of 27, by PTherapist

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Only picture I have of it I'm afraid, rather poor quality -

vqLxiWWl.jpg

Both of the 2 systems on the right hand side were destroyed by poor storage in a shed. But I most wish I'd kept the setup on the far right.

I received it 2nd hand for free in the early 2000s, it was a 486SX 33MHz PC and had about 8MB RAM. It was the very first PC I ever installed Windows 95 onto. It had a regular ISA Tseng Labs ET4000X Graphics Card and I put in an ESS1868 ISA sound card.

In around 2002, I upgraded the CPU to a Cyrix 5x86 133MHz and upgraded the RAM to 64MB. Funny thing is, I went into PC World to buy the Cyrix CPU and it was priced around £70-£80 but when I got to the checkout it came up at just £15. Bargain! 🤣

First I set up Windows 98SE on this machine, but then got bored and decided to go with Windows 2000 and run this PC as a small Web & FTP server. Only problem was, I had no idea about the CPU voltage requirements and this motherboard was a 5V only board. Whilst it worked happily with only occasional usage, running it 24/7 as a server did what you'd expect - CPU fried.

That ended it's brief server usage and I had to roll back to an old AMD Am486 DX-40 CPU and reinstall Windows 95.

By the time that picture was taken, I had run out of spare VGA monitors as the 2 PCs on the left were better systems overall, so I installed my Hercules Monochrome Graphics Card and used my green screen monochrome monitor (pictured). Ran it with Windows 3.11 at first, then discovered I could get it running Windows 95 in Monochrome. Web browsing in Monochrome was fun, albeit not at all practical. 😎

Reply 8 of 27, by dicky96

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Without doub't my Amiga 1500 with a massive 8Mb RAM expansion, SCSI HDD, scan doubler (flicker fixer), Datel Action Replay III and Sony 15" Multisync Monitor.

Sold it at an Amateur Radio/Electronics fair back around 1996 🙁

I miss my Amiga.

Reply 9 of 27, by PcBytes

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This thing.

Maybe you'll think it looks an case that would store an Athlon XP or even a Pentium 4.

Nope.

This thing was my childhood's Pentium 2 350MHz. Paired with an Dell CRT that would probably crack your spine, that was my PC that I used to play Oddworld on.

This is what I remember it had, more or less:

ACorp 6VIA81P
Pentium 2 350MHz
256MB RAM
Windows 2000 Pro
20GB HDD
24x CD-ROM
S3 Trio 3D/2X AGP
generic PCI audio
300W noname PSU

Unfortunately my dad had sold it to a friend who later got kicked out from his house, spent most of its life after that as a homeless person and eventually died of pneumonia. AFAIK nobody lives in his apartment to this day, it's been locked and the locks were changed. No idea if the machine still exists.

Thing is, I'd still want to find this case, but my chances and hope are pretty slim to find one. I know who manufactured it though, and it's KME/K-Mex/KeyMouse, model number CX-6459.

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"Enter at your own peril, past the bolted door..."
Main PC: i5 3470, GB B75M-D3H, 16GB RAM, 2x1TB
98SE : P3 650, Soyo SY-6BA+IV, 384MB RAM, 80GB

Reply 10 of 27, by DaveJustDave

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(photo borrowed from retrocomputing.net)

When I was a kid my 2nd or 3rd computer came with an IBM 5175 VGA monitor aka the IBM Professional Graphics Display.

This thing is so rare, even PICTURES of it are rare! (if anyone has one PLEASE take some decent photos of it)

Absolute unobtainium now. I've owned several 5153s, a 5154, and a 5151.. some of the PS/2 monitors, but have never ever come across a 5175 in the wild.

I sold it at a yard sale for $5 USD.

IMG_1277monitorIBM.JPG

I have no clue what I'm doing! If you want to watch me fumble through all my retro projects, you can watch here: https://www.youtube.com/user/MrDavejustdave

Reply 11 of 27, by PcBytes

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I remember owning a B/W version of that monitor at one point.

Sadly I had to throw it away. It had severe burn-in and was weird to use with a Pentium 2 machine.

"Enter at your own peril, past the bolted door..."
Main PC: i5 3470, GB B75M-D3H, 16GB RAM, 2x1TB
98SE : P3 650, Soyo SY-6BA+IV, 384MB RAM, 80GB

Reply 12 of 27, by jaZz_KCS

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DaveJustDave wrote:
(photo borrowed from retrocomputing.net) […]
Show full quote

(photo borrowed from retrocomputing.net)

When I was a kid my 2nd or 3rd computer came with an IBM 5175 VGA monitor aka the IBM Professional Graphics Display.

This thing is so rare, even PICTURES of it are rare! (if anyone has one PLEASE take some decent photos of it)

Absolute unobtainium now. I've owned several 5153s, a 5154, and a 5151.. some of the PS/2 monitors, but have never ever come across a 5175 in the wild.

I sold it at a yard sale for $5 USD.

IMG_1277monitorIBM.JPG

AAAAAAAAAAAHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH....

*stops for some seconds to get fresh breath*

AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH... (this time with hand in the air)

Reply 13 of 27, by cyclone3d

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About 10 years ago somebody gave me a bunch of old hardware. Included in that pile were at least 3 different AWE32 sound cards and some Sound Blaster 16 cards, a few Socket 7 with Pentium 233MMX boards and some other stuff including an SBC or two. I didn't have a backplane for them and didn't know anything about them back then.

I figured I would never use them and so ended up sending them to the curb probably about 8 years ago.

Somebody of course picked them up pretty quickly and I hope that they got good use out of them.

In recent years I have gotten into retro computers and gaming and only have 1 AWE32 card with SIMM slots not in my collection.. the CT2760.

I still wish I wouldn't have gotten rid of those.. but whatever.

Also gave away a large lot of video cards and other hardware to a co-worker a few years ago, including my Voodoo 3 3500. Bleh.

And then around the same time I gave away my small CPU collection to somebody on another forum I am a member of.

Hind-site is 20/20 as they say.

Yamaha modified setupds and drivers
Yamaha XG repository
YMF7x4 Guide
Aopen AW744L II SB-LINK

Reply 14 of 27, by jaZz_KCS

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My unicorn would be the PC we owned when I was a wee lad, and that I loved to play around with, and which had - if I stop and think about it now - a complete package:

It was a 486DX40 with 8MB of RAM, SVGA card and a Soundblaster 16. This in itself is already a well rounded system, but if I think about the peripherals that went with it, it gets even better.

It had a 15" CRT monitor which I remember had analogue calibration controls and a super sharp picture (especially on the lower resolutions).

Additionally to that it had what actually very many ppl had in those times - an IBM Model M mechanical keyboard.
The more I think about this system the more I would be willing to sell my soul to get it back. It was really a perfect little setup.

Reply 15 of 27, by brostenen

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I have a couple of unicorns....

The first is a PC. My first dx2-66 system.
- Edom MV020 motherboard with Hint chipset.
- Intel Dx2-66
- 8mb Ram
- Cirrus Logc 5428 1mb VLB card
- iWill Side-Jr Pro VLB Controller
- SB16 Value CT2770 soundcard

The other unicorn is an Amiga 1200 with expansions.
- GVP Turbojaws-II (030-50mhz)
- Surf Squirrel PCMCIA SCSI controller.

Don't eat stuff off a 15 year old never cleaned cpu cooler.
Those cakes make you sick....

My blog: http://to9xct.blogspot.dk
My YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/user/brostenen

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Reply 16 of 27, by SW-SSG

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Looks like people haven't been talking solely about cases, so...

By chance I found one of these NEC DSE1700A 1.7GB IDE HDDs about ~15 years ago. Was the only NEC drive I'd ever seen to date, but it went out with a bunch of other stuff as part of one of my purges a few years later. Even when they were selling new they were an uncommon choice, and nowadays they are, of course, hen's teeth-tier rare, and the few other NEC HDDs that can be found on Ebay command exorbitant prices. Too bad for me.

Reply 17 of 27, by Gered

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This case, in ATX form factor (I've seen several come up for sale in AT form factor, but not ATX).

6CYKjFpm.png

My brother and I had an otherwise unremarkable, budget PC, in this case from 1999-2003 or so, beginning with a low-end Pentium, and then upgrading to an AMD Duron when those became available. I spent a lot of time programming on that computer throughout high-school and probably owe my current career as a software developer to all that time spent. I've a lot of nostalgia for it despite the fact that most people would've considered it a pretty "meh" computer, heh. I've collected all the hardware necessary to rebuild it except for the case.

I remember when I built myself a Pentium 4 system in 2003 to replace it. My brother asked me if I wanted that old system for any reason and I was like "nah, just take the hard drive out of it and junk it." Damn you, Younger-Me! 😢

486DX2-66/16MB/S3 Trio32 VLB/SBPro2/GUS
P233 MMX/64MB/Voodoo2/Matrox/YMF719/GUS CD3
Duron 800/256MB/Savage4 Pro/SBLive (IN PROGRESS)
Toshiba 430CDT

Reply 18 of 27, by SirNickity

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I've given away, or thrown away, so much hardware I regret tossing out.

My unicorn 486DX2/66 case that I posted in another thread, first and foremost. First DIY PC build, and I looooved that computer. Recently found that CPU though! Which I kept for I don't know what reason, but I'm glad I did. I don't have the motherboard anymore, but given the dive PC shop I bought it from, it was probably just a crappy PC Chips board. 😀

Then the Enlight case that I used in the Cyrix 6x86 build after that one. Although I recently scored another, albeit yellowed. Don't miss the Cyrix at all -- what a POS that one was. Mostly the motherboard, which was always overheating and crashing. I think I got it for peanuts from a Tiger catalog.

An ATI Graphics Pro Turbo VLB that I'm determined to find again. Creative DXR2 MPEG and DVD-ROM upgrade kit -- since replaced, but would love to have my original ones. A Pro Audio Studio 16. My dad's old 386DX/33... An AST Advantage 486SX/25 that I have mixed feelings about -- my first "just mine" PC, but it's not one I feel particularly drawn to now.

Reply 19 of 27, by brostenen

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Well... I do have my family's first computer in my posession. It is an old Unisys PW/2-Series300 machine. Yes... PW/2-Series300 is the actual name. And that is the Unicorn that I still have. Or rather, it was given to me by my parents a few years ago. They had it sitting in their basement in a dry and warm room, and because of that it is in near perfect condition. Except for the heat, that had yellowed the plastic over time. Darn bromide's.

It is original and complete, down to everything like purchase reciet and original manual. Well... Not 100 percent complete, as I am missing the printer. The printer was an Star LC10 and my father did wear it out, because he used it for work and stuff. The unicorn that was not mine in my childhood, are the first unicorn in my life and funny enough the only unicorn that I have to this date.

Don't eat stuff off a 15 year old never cleaned cpu cooler.
Those cakes make you sick....

My blog: http://to9xct.blogspot.dk
My YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/user/brostenen

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