ScrappyLaptop
July 11th, 2007, 02:52 PM
Hello everyone, from Northern California, USA!
My interest in classic computers started out fairly simply: I had used Apple ]['s, PET's and the odd Atari back in the late 70's/early 80's. I finally had my own computer when a teacher let me have a TRS-80 I that was collecting dust, but it took the parts from another to get it working and upgraded to L2 BASIC. Then I was given a hand-me-down 5150 by an uncle a few years later. And that, as they say, was the beginning of the end. Fast forward twenty-some odd years and I find myself with a (insulated, sheetrocked & shelved) shed of old machines, a few stored in other odd locations and the realization that I finally have an obsess...um, a 'hobby'. It's a bad habit, really, based on the inability to let friends dump old systems into the landfill when they are too old to still be fancy and too new to be collectable. Inventory runs from a Xerox 850 to just about every compact Mac (w/ a few PPC's for contrast); a few 5150's including a 16-64k; a v-20; a C-128d (+ a cubic yard of disks and hardware for it); boxes of 8 and 16 bit PC cards, memory, disks & books; an Alpha Micro 1000 (two year stint working for an accounting s/w company); a Point4 mini; Osborne1; a good handful of other early portables and 'laptops' maybe a 'few' other 8088/286/386/486's & non-x86's, more books & documentation ...the usual scattershot.
Other interests include family, mtn-cycling, making single-purpose Linux appliances out of not-yet-classic laptops or old PC/104 boards, plant life (ran a nursery for a while a decade ago), building gadgets for fun, heckling Mensans, SQL (daily job = SQL server admin), TCP/IP.
Latest completed project is a Sony PCG-1X (P1-266) mini-laptop my work was tossing. It now runs Puppy Linux from a compact flash card replacing the HDD. Fantastic for reading the forums out on the patio. Longest running project is the Xerox 850 resto (and my quest for a 5151 monitor for under $40).
If you made it this far, thanks for reading! I hope to contribute where I can and ask intelligent questions where I can't.
My interest in classic computers started out fairly simply: I had used Apple ]['s, PET's and the odd Atari back in the late 70's/early 80's. I finally had my own computer when a teacher let me have a TRS-80 I that was collecting dust, but it took the parts from another to get it working and upgraded to L2 BASIC. Then I was given a hand-me-down 5150 by an uncle a few years later. And that, as they say, was the beginning of the end. Fast forward twenty-some odd years and I find myself with a (insulated, sheetrocked & shelved) shed of old machines, a few stored in other odd locations and the realization that I finally have an obsess...um, a 'hobby'. It's a bad habit, really, based on the inability to let friends dump old systems into the landfill when they are too old to still be fancy and too new to be collectable. Inventory runs from a Xerox 850 to just about every compact Mac (w/ a few PPC's for contrast); a few 5150's including a 16-64k; a v-20; a C-128d (+ a cubic yard of disks and hardware for it); boxes of 8 and 16 bit PC cards, memory, disks & books; an Alpha Micro 1000 (two year stint working for an accounting s/w company); a Point4 mini; Osborne1; a good handful of other early portables and 'laptops' maybe a 'few' other 8088/286/386/486's & non-x86's, more books & documentation ...the usual scattershot.
Other interests include family, mtn-cycling, making single-purpose Linux appliances out of not-yet-classic laptops or old PC/104 boards, plant life (ran a nursery for a while a decade ago), building gadgets for fun, heckling Mensans, SQL (daily job = SQL server admin), TCP/IP.
Latest completed project is a Sony PCG-1X (P1-266) mini-laptop my work was tossing. It now runs Puppy Linux from a compact flash card replacing the HDD. Fantastic for reading the forums out on the patio. Longest running project is the Xerox 850 resto (and my quest for a 5151 monitor for under $40).
If you made it this far, thanks for reading! I hope to contribute where I can and ask intelligent questions where I can't.