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Things you regret doing to vintage computers and parts

A

Andrew T.

Experienced Member
Joined
Oct 4, 2013
Messages
88
Location
Thunder Bay, Canada
If it's any condolence, most of these things happened years ago...

  • Letting a repair project fall victim to procrastination, leaving a case cover off for twelve months straight, and finding its contents faded and covered in a carpet of dust afterwards.
  • Ruining a Type 1 IBM AT motherboard by pulling out all the socketed ICs and spilling glue on it.
  • Using a CGA monitor as a footstool.
  • Throwing away "broken" Apple II and III monitors without knowledge of proper CRT disposal.
  • "Upgrading" an extremely crufty, unstable Windows 3.1 installation on a 486 by ironing the buggy first edition of Windows 95 over it. (I didn't even think that many illegal operations were possible at once.)
  • Throwing away high-density floppies because they couldn't work in a 360k drive.
  • Tearing 5¼" floppy drives apart and throwing them away because they couldn't read disks...aligning or cleaning the heads never occurred to me.
  • Painting spare PC cards and turning them into art sculptures in boredom.
  • Finding a dumpster with IBM Model F keyboards tossed inside, and leaving them there instead of diving and taking them home.

Does anyone else have past mistakes and transgressions handling vintage computers that they regret today? Confess away!
 
Scaping a number of perfectly good ATs by disassembly and then folding the sheet metal parts till they fit in the bin. Same with various working IBM monitors - I would break off the CRT vacuum seal, reassemble it and and drop in the bin. No one wanted them at the time, only 12 years ago.
 
Andrew T. said:
Tearing 5¼" floppy drives apart and throwing them away because they couldn't read disks...aligning or cleaning the heads never occurred to me
Click to expand...

I'm guilty of this one. It was before I knew anything much about computer hardware years ago. I had a nice drive which just didn't seem to read my System 80 disks. Figuring it was toast I tossed it into the skip bin.

A few weeks later I discovered the reason many of my disks didn't work was because the media had become sticky and degraded. No doubt I had glugged up the drive heads trying to read them. The drive was probably perfectly ok...it just needed a good clean.

Tez
 
Not an awful lot

  • Stealing connectors from a seemingly dead 486 board - only to later discover a short on the power header was causing it to appear dead.
  • Not stealing the weird hard driver from where I worked; it could function as one large drive or two smaller ones, selected by a jumper.
  • Hot-swapping the last remaining backup of an episode from my original cartoon series, breaking the hard drive (Still try recovering it every so often)
  • Stealing the wrong machine from where I worked, they had a K5 and K6 in the same type of case... I wanted the K5 - got the busted up K6.
  • Frying a Cyrix 6x86 - first attempts at overclocking
  • Formatting a perfectly good partition on a laptop to later discover I couldn't get drivers for the modem
  • Erasing the wallpapers on my PS/ValuePoint to save disk space, took 5 years before I had access to a copy of them.


All I can think of.
 
Taking apart a Northgate 286 because the power supply had failed and I wanted to see what hard disk platters looked like.

It was the last in a line of handmedown/garage sale "vintage" computers that my family bought for ~$80 each before my parents were convinced to buy our first "new" computer, a Cyrix 6x86 machine. The 286 had served us well for years and was the first PC we had with a hard drive, but the new machine was in place when it died and 12 year old me was curious what the inside of the hard drive looked like.

Thankfully I saved the machine that we had 2 machines before that, an IBM 5150 (the later 256k model) in all of the original boxes and with all the original manuals.....that was used as a demo machine at IBM's Burlington VT plant open house in ~1982. (lots of fun games on the IBM Open House demo floppy!)
 
- Taking apart my NEC 386 luggable laptop to upgrade the processor but postponing after finding the processor was a different size or socket than what I was intending (maybe I thought I could upgrade it to a 486 or something stupid). Sat on it too long, put it in a box then forgot how it went back together. Pretty sure I still have the box somewhere.
- A friend found an old Tandy desktop and tore it up for fun and ended up dragging the hard drive or something down the road.. literally. My like for vintage gear had just begun but they were so common at the time it wasn't of interest.
- Still stupid but when trying to upgrade my Amiga 2000 and add a SCSI CD-ROM I took out the side by side floppy drives without noting the cable rotation. When putting them back in I can't remember if they had the red sided floppy cables but I had to guess the orientation but they never seemed to work after that. I looked for a cheap replacement and eventually found two more A2000 systems but one was a 2000HD and the other a 2500 so I didn't have the heart to part them out.
- Soon I'll maybe regret trying to fix a Sun Tadpole 1. All I've really heard from the community is "don't". lol
 
De-soldering chips with only a cheap Radio Shack soldering pencil and nothing else. Broke traces and burned the hell out of an Apple II clone board and several others doing that. It is so nice having the right tools for the job these days!

I also sort of regret some of the "customizations" and bad repairs I did along time ago, but on the other hand I learned quite a bit from those experiences. No money for brand new overpriced Apple II parallel port card? No problem, I'll just build one of my own using spare TTL chips and the extra space on the motherboard! Hey, it worked with the Print Shop! Need it to work with the sync of an oddball monitor? No problem, add a few chips an rewire the motherboard! And I'm still trying to remember why I cut the data lines to Slot 7 and have wires running to it from elsewhere!

Also regret taking my TI-99/4a PEB apart (also a long time ago) and letting my bothers get a hold of the parts. The last time I saw the metal cage that is supposed to hold the cards in place, it was bent up and being used as a hat rack!

I kind of regret tearing up a CREI 680 training system someone had given to me assembled. Did a bunch of re-wiring and poor repairs on that too. But again I learned quite a bit, and did a bit of programing on it too.

More recently, I accidentally threw out a knob for an Atari 2600 paddle set because I thought it was a random knob from a printer or something. Later I'm looking a the paddles and notice there is a missing knob...

Plenty of other things I had to throw out over the years. But, you can't keep it all.
 
Not hardware, but I regret tossing most of my old software boxes (kept the disks and manuals) around 2000 or so. This was before I went retro gaming.

Being a packrat means you don't too many things unless you really don't like them.
 
Unknown_K said:
I regret tossing most of my old software boxes (kept the disks and manuals) around 2000 or so. This was before I went retro gaming.
Click to expand...

Ah yes.. that's definitely one; although I look around today and see how much space those are taking still and wonder if it's worth it. Then there's the other thread about backing them all up and what hardware to spend the $$$ on. Which is my biggest complaint for a cheap arse like myself :) I know it takes time and money to make them and in reality for the cost of two or three of the games when they are new you can get most of them it's just the $1xx to see if it works is a bit painful.
 
I picked up two Tandy 1000s, a RL and a RLX at a yardware for $1 together. Both kind of worked but the RLX had a dead hard drive and the RL only floppies. I broke the power switch on the one power supply and the other who knows. I still have the bottom cases\motherboards but I couldn't tell you where the rest of them went after we moved.

I had a Bull SX-L 386 luggable, 40 meg drive, color screen, 640 KB ram. The screen quit working and being as stupid as I was then even I took it apart and never got it back together. I probably have most of it in a box somewhere.

Many TRS-80 Model 100s have been left behind at thrift stores\yardsales. About 5 years ago they were everywhere for basically $2, regret leaving all them behind now.

And I left a Mac Plus behind when moving just because the flyback transformer was probably dead. Wish I had kept that.
 
barythrin said:
Ah yes.. that's definitely one; although I look around today and see how much space those are taking still and wonder if it's worth it. Then there's the other thread about backing them all up and what hardware to spend the $$$ on. Which is my biggest complaint for a cheap arse like myself :) I know it takes time and money to make them and in reality for the cost of two or three of the games when they are new you can get most of them it's just the $1xx to see if it works is a bit painful.
Click to expand...
Currently I have boxed software ALL OVER THE PLACE. I might downsize the hardware collection but the software stays, nothing like having a very large vintage software collection as long as you don't trip over it too much.
 
I mentioned this in another thread but one summer, as a student summer job, I worked at an IBM facility that took apart computers that were returned from lease for precious metal recovery and removing CRT tubes and such. Everything got scrapped into piles including plastics, glass, keyboards, CRT tubes, interface cards, motherboards, etc. If I were able to keep a fraction of some of the stuff I took apart that one summer, I could retire.
 
I regret getting rid of the original Tandy 2810HD laptop I had... tricked out and working fine, but....

I also regret getting rid of my VIC-20... bought with inheritance money (almost all of it... a.k.a not much), and I had an 80 column card for it...
Had a good portion of a home-made PACMAN built for it... my 1st 6502 assembly program :eek:

When I worked for my friend I had access to a BUNCH of 8" drives (and LOTS of other 'junk') that we got rid of when we moved the office... MANY of them were Tandon 848-2/2e... I KNEW I should have kept them ALL... but didnt keep EVEN ONE. :(
 
One fully trigged-out Amiga 2000. One fully triggered-out TRS-80 Model 16B. One Leading Edge Model D. One IBM CGA color monitor. Three TRS-80 daisy-wheel printers. One Apple ][E computer with two floppy drives. Yes, I was stupid!
 
Throwing out my 'old computers' over ten years ago.
It's worthless they said.
It's junk they said.

(Most just old clone PCs, but one was an ICL 8086 based server which ran Concurrent CP/M).
 
One thing I can honestly say is I have never thrown a computer out. I have thrown away a few components but only broken ones after salvaging any working parts remaining inside - this later allowed me to not throw other things away as I was able to repair them.

An example being a CD drive that got stood on by someone, I took it, it didn't work so I stripped it. Some time later I had a machine with the same model of drive and the motor gave up - it was only a crappy lite-on drive but money saved is money saved and the parts left from the crushed up old drive are still working in there almost a decade later. I suppose I've been on this forum long enough that you can tell I'm the kind of bloke who turns up when you've got a skip outside, asks to go through your rubbish and when you say no comes back at night and rummages in it anyway, 90% of things I own were either bought cheaply as broken or found in the trash, so long as people throw good stuff away I'll keep getting things for free. Unfortunately it is usually illegal to take rubbish away in the UK, apparently it is theft... Tough, you don't want it? Fine! It's mine now.

These are not the kind of things I regret. On the other hand, I do regret taking too long to actually look on eBay for stuff, I suspect prices had raised by then (Though it was 2005/6 and things weren't too bad by that point).
 
Helping a friend reconfigure his Amiga 500 from 512 kB chip RAM + 512 kB "fast" RAM to 1 megabyte of chip RAM. He needed to get a upgraded Agnus chip in order to achieve this configuration. The Agnus chip is a square PLCC chip and can be plugged into its socket four different ways (eight, if you count plugging it in upside down which is entirely possible with PLCC), obviously only one of which is correct. We plugged it in so that the printing on the new Agnus chip was the same orientation as it had been on the original. Big mistake. It turns out that they changed the orientation of the printing on the new chip and plugging it in this way was wrong and led to a fried Agnus. $70 (IIRC) down the drain...
 
I used to tear the plastic fronts off XT boxes. I still consider plastic to be ugly, but would have liked to have those machines now. Oh well ....
 
As a kid with my first pc-xt, using the dos version of maxi-form and freeform to tinker with the floppy drive, which was a 360kb full height, The format programs didn't care about 40 or 80 though, so being the inquisitive child I was, I set it to 96 disk tracks and let it fly, after track 43, SLAM SLAM SLAM SLAM. Ended up with one really really misaligned drive with a busted head stop.
 
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