Old computer kit still doing a useful job

[Bill]

Hello All,
I've just been sorting the machine room at work and I was contemplating the disposal of a number of Zenith Z29 terminals . Some of them are alive & connected to modern "Sun" servers. Apparently, they are very suitable for this and is a reason they have not been replaced. They were filthy black on the front due to static build up and the green display could hardly be seen through the grime. These terminals have been in more or less continuous use for nearly 25 years. They don't get looked at much because most admin work on the servers is now done remotely from desktop machines. So, does anyone know of similar kit that is the same age or older and still "on line"?
I wasn't counting old stuff that people might occasionally switch on at home , more the industrial or institutional that's rarely switched off?
Bill

[paulsherwin]

There must be lots of 1980s terminals still in use, hooked up to things like uPDPs and uVaxes. If you hook them up to a terminal server (as was done to many of them in the mid 80s) they can telnet to any Unix system on the net.

Some of the old 1970s industrial control apps on PDPs only get replaced when the plant is demolished - sadly not an uncommon event in the last few years

I still have a 1984 uVaxII in occasional use for data conversion jobs, but it's not used much now.

Paul

[evingar]

Hi
We still have DEC VT420 terminals in regular use, attached to legacy video
equipment (dedicated hardware ).

There is also an elderly Vax cluster in continual use – It runs an elderly parts stock control package called Master Pac- under Unix. Before that an even older package called Service Man. Another node runs a component inventory under VMS. I don't know what hardware precisely because we access it remotely from the company whose products we support. This kit must have been running for at least a couple decades !


In a previous company that I worked for, we provided disk drive emulators for truly ancient systems running in Govt and Military installations. Some of this specialist kit had been running since the 70s, maybe much earlier – Of course the original drive manufacturers had long since ceased trading or moved into other fields. The power of these systems was somewhat “weedy” by modern standards – Kind of made me wonder why they didn't bother upgrading the lot -Maybe the task would have been too complex if the S/W was interwoven into ancient and esoteric hardware !

[paulsherwin]

The killer for the commercial use of really old minicomputer systems (pre microprocessor) was hardware maintenance charges. Much of the market for microPDP systems in the 80s and early 90s was companies replacing ancient rack mounted PDPs - this dramatically reduced the maintenance charges, as well as power and cooling requirements, and the uPDPs could run the apps (and even the OS) unchanged. These systems were also much more reliable and could be run without a maintenance contract altogether if the facilities manager was brave enough. Lots of them are still running today.

Paul

[jay_oldstuff]

Not quite on the same scale but one of the civic buildings that i am involved with still has it's buildings management system (Air conditioning centrall heating) ect still run from an old IBM 8088 XT PC circa 1983 i had to ajust the air con a little while ago this macheain has been running since its instalation in 1983 the origional monitor is dead now crt has no emision whatsoever but i found an old amber terminal minitor dumped in a corner that is now being used on this pc, apart from the screen it still functiones perfectely runnung Ms Dos version 1.1 and the BMS system softwhere from it's two 5.25 inch floppy disks, with its 256 KB ram. the butiding is shedueled for demolition in about five years and i can see this machiean macking it wright to the end.

Jay

[liamoliver]

Originally Posted by jay_oldstuff

the butiding is shedueled for demolition in about five years and i can see this machiean macking it wright to the end.Jay

When the building gets demolished, can you ask them if I can have the PC? Just so you know, I'm not joking!

[jim_beacon]

We still have a lot of PDP11 (mainly /73 and /84, with a few /34 and /94) kit in service, as well as assorted VAXen, from VAXstation 3100, through to VAX6000, and even a couple of VAX FT. There are also a number of Tandem K series (Himalaya), and a lot of IBM kit, though the processors have recently been upgraded to S/390, there are still a lot of older tape drives and terminals. The S/390's came with a brilliant tape robot - about the size of two 19" cabinets, with most of the inner walls covered in tape cartridges, and a robot arm to get the tape and insert it in the drive.

Jim.

[Jim - G4MEZ]

Up until just a short while ago I was a member of a very small team (two of us!) still maintaining a Ferranti Argus 700 installation. It was installed in 1983 and was pretty old-hat then but was chosen for its outstanding reliability, both hardware and software. It was, we were told, the mahine of choice for looking after nuclear power stations, A job it did until quite recenty and no, ours did not do that job. If it had, the UK would have ceased to exist 20 or so years ago!

Reliable it certainly was, it served us magnificently for 23 years and was still in perfect working order when it was finally decommissioned. The only significant change made to it in all those years was a change four years ago from the original CDC 64Mb Cartridge Disks to solid-state disk emulators, necessarily solid-state as no contemporary disk drive was fast enough. It booted from 8" floppies right to the end.

Having been involved with this computer for most of its 23 years in service, I was heartbroken when it was finally powered down and could hardly bear to watch its demolition. I did however rescue some large lumps of it, including a processor box and control panel, for sentimental reasons.

Big computers like these are almost living, much like a steam railway locomotive. I still miss it.

[Dave Moll]

It does seem an awful shame when something like this is demolished.

The trouble is that very few of us have the facilities for taking over an installation of this size - under-floor cabling and all.

[Jim - G4MEZ]

Originally Posted by Dave Moll

It does seem an awful shame when something like this is demolished.

The trouble is that very few of us have the facilities for taking over an installation of this size - under-floor cabling and all.

Indeed, it makes preservation of these early computers very difficult. The Argus I speak of would take over my entire house, not to mention the air conditioning and power requirements, both of which were massive.

[jim_beacon]

We still have a few Argus 700 systems in use - I forgot about those. They are used for RADAR data processing (real time application), and as a large international message switch.

Jim.

[Neil Purling]

Nothing as grand around here. Sending a ebay payment today at my local post office I noted they were still using a Amstrad PC3086 with twin 3.5" floppy drives. Up to 3 years ago they used a Amstrad PC1512 with twin 5.25" floppies. I think the 1512 had a monochrome display.
I Googled the model numbers and I did remember them right.

I just realised something. I might have told you a untruth.
Does a Amstrad PCW16 count as a real computer? It had no hard disc. It booted from 3.5" floppies and was basically a strange sort of electronic typewriter. I believe that is how Mr Sugar targeted the Amstrad PCW.
I do know it ran 720Kb floppies, which were getting hard to get. The software was called Locoscript. When I got my 486 I had my stored files converted to Word docs on IBM format 1.4M floppies.
This old ****** also ran CPM, which looked like DOS. I just used it to re-format new 720Kb floppies. I think Locomotive software used to market a spreadsheet called "Rocket" for the Amstrad PCW as well as a updated version of Locoscript, both for the Amstrad PCW and a normal IBM PC.
Locomotive Software were the last people where owners of older PCW's could get 3" floppy discs.

[Jim - G4MEZ]

Originally Posted by Neil Purling

This old ****** also ran CPM, which looked like DOS. I just used it to re-format new 720Kb floppies.

CP/M was a very powerful OS and in some ways, better than DOS. There was a multi-user version too, called MP/M.

The Amstrad PCW series were in fact very powerful and versatile machines. they may hve been sold as fancy typrwriters but unleash the power of CP/M and they could do all kinds of things. I had one for a long time and ran Wordstar, SuperCalc and DBase II on it for long after IBM PCs came into general use.

I also had the Microsoft M80/L80 Assembler/Linker and wrote a lot of bespoke stuff in Assembly Language for it, the most notable being a full teleprinter emulation for amateur RTTY operation. I also built the UART to give it a serial port that would work with ITA2 at 45.5 Bauds. I nearly got a hard disk working on it before circumstances dictated the aqusition of a PC.

I still have a very fond feeling for these machines and CP/M.

[Dave Moll]

To avoid dragging this thread off topic, I will start a new one about the Amstrad PCW and LocoScript.

[Zelandeth]

Not on as grand a scale as some of the others here...but my Amiga A1200 still sees pretty regular use for word processing (Wordworth 5), though it has admittedly seen somewhat less use of late given that UAE offers an emulator which allows me to run the same software almost as well on the PC...without the old Philips (Acorn) fuzz-o-vision PAL monitor.

I have to admit that I was really shocked one day when I walked into work to find that they'd "upgraded" some of the control systems for what I think were the security systems in our building. I don't know quite what the systems were, but they used orange text based monitors, and keyboards suspiciously similar to those of the Apple II, minus the power light and reset button, which I tend to assume from the size must have been dumb terminals with the actual unit mounted elsewhere. No disc drives or anything in evidence, just the reader for reading/writing to the (horrendously touchy!) magnetic keyfobs.

Really sad, how they'd been there for years on end, doing exactly what they were put there to do, flawlessly...then one morning found themselves unplugged, dragged carelessly off their desks, kicked around, and unceremoniously dumped into a pile in the corner of the room...then the skip. I know it's all bits of metal and glass...but a little bit of me still finds itself thinking, that the machine is sitting there thinking "What did I do wrong?"
It's now been replaced with a Dell box, running Vista. Do we really need that to decide if your keyfob is valid to open the barrier in the carpark?

...Makes me feel really guilty that I can't find a good home for it.

...and makes me really annoyed that the only bit of the old system they kept...was the horribly unreliable keyfob system! So I still have to reverse the van all the way back up the ramp into the carpark when it decides not to let me in...

[Dr Pepper]

I know its not old old but...

I have a spare computer which used to belong to my father...its basically made out of old bits of computers I had laying around. Its an AMD Sempron CPU (Running at 1.6GHz) with 512mb of RAM with a 120gb IDE hard drive.

Anyways I swapped my father a superior spare machine for this one because my father would have more use for the spare computer I had which was a cracking little machine but had been replaced by my new computer I had just built.

I replaced the harddrive with the 120gb drive I mentioned and installed a piece of software called "SK Jukebox" (google it) its freeware and allows you to turn a computer into a jukebox.

Now it has hundreds of CDs on it and I regularly buy compilation albums cheap from car boot sales etc to fill it up. Just an idea if anyone is thinking about chucking out a computer....if its a 200MHz or more you can turn that machine into a jukebox...just stick a massive hard drive in it!

- Dan

[dsergeant]

But that is virtually the spec of my current main pc which I am using at the moment. Nothing old or low performance about it at all...

My oldest computer still seeing active use is a Zenith 8086 laptop with twin 720kb floppies and no hard drives. This is used every year in our club amateur radio national field day as it runs perfectly off a 12V battery. My BBC B sits in a corner unused and I have long since disposed of my UK101 and earlier machines.

Dave

[Mike Phelan]

Not as old, as grandiose or as big as some mentioned here, but there is a good working 286 sitting in my loft running DOS 3.3. If I ever get around to it (story of my life!) it will end up in the workshop driving my milling machine - I just need to stick some stepper motors on to it and write the CNC software.

It did sterling service for me when I worked for myself from 1991-1997 doing a similar job as I do now.

[Nickthedentist]

Originally Posted by dsergeant

But that is virtually the spec of my current main pc which I am using at the moment.

And rather better than mine

[Phil G4SPZ]

I have a selection of mid-1990s 486 colour laptops (cost - nil) which do various useful jobs, including AX25 Packet Radio and my home finances using Quicken 3.

Phil