Retro Tech Finds of the Week!
Greetings, all of you fine people, from beautiful south Florida!
I grew up down here, but now I’m just another tourist inconveniencing the locals. This week’s articles may be a little light as I’m on vacation with the family, but still I wanted to give you all a little something as a way of saying thanks for helping The Retro Millennial to pass the 150 subscriber mark!
This past week was pretty cool as far as retro tech goes. I scored some awesome stuff, and happened to see some other things that I couldn’t give a home to but I figured this crowd might appreciate them nonetheless.
Floppy’s Galore!
First up I was given two cases full of 3.5 inch floppy disks. Do they work? Well, Im not sure, but I will certainly be testing them in the future. These things are like gold in the vintage computing scene these days as new floppy’s are getting quite expensive.
IBM 6548-01N Monitor
The next find is one that I would have loved to bring home, but having started clearing out much of the stuff I’ve collected over the years I thought it unwise to haul in a big old CRT monitor. This beauty is an IBM 6548-01N manufactured in September of 1999. I still have access to it, so it might be fun to try it out sometime in the future.
Compaq Deskpro
I have no idea what this old PC was used for, but it showed up for recycling earlier this week. There wasn’t much info on the chassis about it’s model number, and I didn’t have time to open her up, but it apparently had a warranty from a company called Compdisco back in the day. The warranty expired on April 28, 2003. I was just about to graduate high school on that date, which makes me feel old… in a good way.
Gateway MFATXHD8 LUX
Here’s another old tower that showed up out of the blue. It’s a generic Gateway PC running Windows XP that would have been pretty prolific at the time. I don’t know much about this machine, but it was old enough to still have native (and color-coded) PS/2, parallel, and serial ports. It also had one of those little doors on the front that hid the USB and 3.55 mm ports but it had broken off like so many did back then.
2006 White MacBook
And this one is my favorite pick up of the week. A lady at work asked me to help her get the hard drive out of her old MacBook and offered to let me have the computer since she was going to just throw it out. It’s a 2006 White polycarbonate MacBook that originally shipped with OS X Tiger. I have plans for this one, and I’m really excited to add it to my collection!
