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Your oldest, most outdated device

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20 pointsJDGM51 comments

IBM PS/2 (mostly) keyboard from an RS/6000 workstation from around 1986. Essentially one of the good clicky keyboards. Works ok as a PS/2 keyboard on modern machines, but fails during soft reboots sometimes.

IBM 4758 32-bit PCI HSM from circa 1998 and an nCipher NFast from around 2001.

IBM ThinkPad T43p with a UXGA 15" IPS LCD.

Martini-Henry rifles from Afghanistan. For one I'd actually shoot, an ex-Nazi, ex-IDF Mauser rifle in .308, with Nazi proofmark and IDF star on the same receiver, and a Hebrew name on the stock.

The Mauser rifle sounds interesting. Is there a story behind it that you can share (or a hypothesis)?

It's pretty clear/common, although I don't know so much about this one in particular. Presumably, it was a Nazi weapon during WW2 (although probably not front line), and, like a lot of the other weapons, survived the war.

Israel was desperate for weapons post-WW2 (before and after western countries recognized it as a state). They bought a lot of WW2 surplus. Financial constraints, as well as arms embargoes. So, they ended up with this rifle, and were quite practical. They converted it to .308, issued it to a soldier, who put his name on the stock. Israel eventually upgraded again, and the rifle was sold surplus, and a few years ago it was on Gunbroker and I bought it (2009). Apparently Israeli fighters were told "it's up to you if you want to scratch off the swastika marks on the old proofs"; I suspect most of them either didn't care, or appreciated the irony that the Nazis had lost and now Israelis were using their weapons to defend themselves in Israel.

I also have an M1 Garand (US rifle during WW2) which was later sold to the Italians who converted it to .308, and I bought it -- it is a far nicer weapon, and about 10x the price of the Mauser, but roughly the same path -- war surplus reused by another military and then sold again as surplus.

(I wanted both kinds of guns, and specifically was looking for .308, since I try to only stock .22lr, .38/357, 9mm, 12ga, .45acp, 5.56mm, 7.62x51mm, .300winmag, .338 Lapua Magnum ammo.)

There are still plenty of WW2 (and even WW1, I think) surplus rifles for sale by the US Government to civilians in the US (odcmp.com). In WW2 they made a lot of weapons.

I was going to ask the exact same thing as shriphani. Thanks for such a detailed reply. Fascinating. I especially enjoyed:

"Apparently Israeli fighters were told "it's up to you if you want to scratch off the swastika marks on the old proofs"; I suspect most of them either didn't care, or appreciated the irony that the Nazis had lost and now Israelis were using their weapons to defend themselves in Israel."

You've reminded me of something that's 2 feet from me. It's a bad copy of a British pound note, with one side filled with Arabic. It's propaganda dropped by the Germans over (I think) Cairo during the war. It's all about the devaluing if the pound and collapse of empire. Weird that winning the war led to this - not losing. I'd forgotten about this. Thanks!

Why are you talking about guns ? It is clear that the context of the article is electronic stuff.

Are guns "geeky" gadgets ? Why aren't you posting the latest in murder weapons on HN ?

Expanding the definition has lead to some interesting posts. I learnt something and didn't let my view on gun control colour a fascinating post. That gun has a fascinating history and the one item has been part of 2 of the bigger world events that have occurred in recent history.

This will never cease to shock me. Why is it OK to discuss weapons, but not, say, sex toys? After all the former are built for death and the latter for pleasure.

If someone has a 70 year old sex toy, that could be kind of interesting.

Even if they take great satisfaction in stocking the right batteries and lube? Would it really be OK to have a vintage dildo cabinet over the fireplace?

Now I'm curious when the first electrical sex toy was invented, and when the first battery (well, smallish battery, not leyden jar or big external battery) powered sex toy was developed.

http://www.vibratormuseum.com/battery/ says 1880, which is kind of terrifying.

I'd still rather have an Enigma, even a 3-rotor, or the Swiss post-WW2 enigma-alike (NEMA or Enigma-K), though.

God damn it, I'm eating. I do recall reading about Cleopatra and a box of bees. The only link I can find is from Gizmodo, and I won't link to that.

“Or,” he continues, “maybe there is a simpler explanation: You can't order a car stereo off Amazon, which is where I get the rest of my stuff.”

...huh? http://www.amazon.com/s/ref=nb_sb_noss_1?url=search-alias%3D...

(The oldest thing I own is a Sega Genesis Model 1 -- not terribly old, but it is a few years older than me.)

I've got quite a few of the best keyboards that were ever on the market: IBM Model M. And I'm proud that I have them, and use them.

I've a working Commodore 64. With 2 1541's. And a tape deck.

I have a working quadrophonic 8track player.

I have a working Edisongraph conical record player, the horn, along with about a dozen cylinders.

I have 300+ electron tubes I'm trying to sell to interested hackers. All US tubes. No janky Russian tubes.

I have a huge electronics parts cabinet with semiconductor tech from the late '60s, 70's, 80's, 90's, and 00's.

And I use a unlocked, jailbroken iphone 3gs for my phone.

Casio CZ1000 from 1985. Hours upon hours of fun: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W6vyCNWJVME

Close second, a Kawai K4R rompler from 1989. It is also seriously badass: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r7VSPDeN19c

80s digital synthesis gear is incredibly unfashionable now and therefore very very cheap. Lots of it is almost being thrown away, like the classic analog kit was in the 80s. I'm sure you can guess how much that stuff's worth today...

Probably my desk phone. It's a rotary phone built in the 1950's. It's got mechanical bells on it, and the voice quality is far better than any of the modern phones.

I bought it 'new' about 15 years ago, as it had been sitting overlooked in a warehouse since it was made.

I have other old stuff, but this one is in daily use.

Do you actually dial numbers?

70s: Videomaster Enterprise, Atari 2600

80s: TRS-80 model 100, Sharp pc-1211 (both work and the latter allows weeks long computing on the one charge; eat your heart out Haswell!), MSX 1 and 2 computers (around 20 of them, all working), Amiga 500, Commodore 64 and 128, few ZX Spectrums, arcade joysticks with 1,2,3 buttons, music keyboard with a special connector which fits only a cartridge on the msx, a ton of modems for the above computers (1200/75 baud)

90s: around 8 Apple Newtons, Psion 5, few SGI O2s, 10 Sparcstations, E450 and a big load of laptops/desktops

Everything is working still (if it breaks I fix it to satisfy my electronics and soldering lust). Stuff I use regularly: MSX-2 to code on (making a game, I like the keyboard better than my laptop and it's more of a challenge to write software on paper to such a standard that the machine doesn't crash upon running it, wasting a lot of time) and creating extensions (like ethernet and making it into a 'laptop'), Atari 2600, C64 (last ninja plays nicer with an arcade joystick than the sad controls on the Android emulator) and Amiga 500 (Shadow of the beast plays nicer with an arcade etcetc).

Pretty easy for me its an old Thinkpad 101 key keyboard that I got for my Thinkpad 750C when I got the 'dock' for it (which held up to three ISA cards, back when a dock meant something :-))

The keyboard though is has the same mechanical cherry switches of the PC keyboard except it has the trackpad pressure sensitve joystick thing in the crotch of the home row. Oh and mouse buttons below the space bar which can come in handy too.

I have two Acoustic Coupler modems. A Racal Vadic and an Anderson/Jacobson, they're early 1980's, 75/110/300/600/1200bps selectable by DIP switches. One of them has an embossing of Van Jacobson's signature. Sadly I don't think I have a telephone that fits either of them anymore so I can't demo them.

Outside of that I have a car from 1978 with Mechanical Fuel Injection, and some pre-1900's pyrotechnic machines.

I have enjoyed a PI Triumph, and have seen a supposedly factory 60s Triumph fuel injected car. They are pretty bad in fuel but (compared to the NA versions) go like stink! What's the car?

Jeremy Clarkson likes to call it a beetle.

I have a small collection of older unique/high end computer hardware. Up until a few years ago my firewall was OpenBSD on a DEC Alpha 21164 at 533Mhz, with 512MB of RAM, which I retired just to save on power. Also in the collection are a Mac IIfx and a SGI O2, both in working order.

I also have a set of early 80's Bose 901 speakers in my office, which were acquired for $25 at a yard sale.

Bose is amazing for longevity. I'm still using a set my parents gave me when I left for college that they had for 10 years at least before that. They still sell the same model in stores today!

The pro stuff (802s, etc.) is even longer lasting.

I had a set of Klipsch LaScala from 1960 to 1971 (since they had the "A-type" crossover) in college (in the mid/late 1990s); I don't think loudspeakers really go out of date in general. The crossovers might be worth replacing, but that's about it.

Slightly off-topic, but does anyone think that in ten, twenty years, their "most outdated device" would be their personal computer? It's like Moore's law has been too kind -- just 3 years ago I don't think I would've ever had this thought. But now, IMO, the only real reason you'd need to update your PC would be for newer games. Otherwise, there really is no reason why you'd ever need more computational power than you currently have (say, mid-high range ivy bridge, decent graphics, etc). Anything more intensive that cannot be reasonably handled by your own computer, you have the cloud -- crunch large numbers, computer renders, etc.

Or am I just afraid of change? Am I missing something? Do I really need to update my hardware for a better screen? Perhaps the day Wi-Fi becomes obsolete, maybe then I'd have to buy a new laptop...

Well, the future seems to be in ARM chips. It's quite likely that the developments in the next few years will be about building ARM processors for laptops as powerful as our current non-ARM ones.

This + evolution of battery technology means that in 2020, we might have Macbook Airs roughly as powerful as our current ones (albeit with better GPUs, as that's still evolving pretty fast), but with a battery life at 20+ hours.

Battery technology has been the primary bottleneck for technological advancement for awhile now, especially on mobile.

I got rid of all but two of my x86 machines which didn't have AES-NI. One is essentially unused, and the other is my current home theater box, to be replaced with the Late-2013 Mac Mini. AES-NI essentially makes Full Disk Encryption "free", and FDE is a minimum standard for any machine I'd use today.

If iOS gets biometrics, I'd probably feel the same way about it (and fixing the imaging attack is why I upgraded ASAP off the iPhone 4 and iPad 1). If Mac hardware added real trusted boot hardware, I'd probably replace all of mine at the same time, too.

So, not performance, but features.

My great great grandfathers hand saw, and my fathers Rancilio Silvia espresso machine (gen one). In a subtly different vein... Oldest software/service? For me its a copy of Marathon (well, all of them actually).

In use: A Telequipment D61 Oscilloscope (1974).

In the cupboard: A tube of unused WD2795A floppy drive controller integrated circuits. I'd throw them out, but I've got delusions that one day someone will have to repair a drive to read some critical data, and these will be the last WD2795A chips in existence. Never mind that that the oxide layer all the world's 8 inch and 5 1/4 inch floppies (including my own) is probably dust by now.

Edit: Forgot to mention the 5 1/4", 3.5" and zip drives, still powered up and hanging off the IDE bus of the desktop I use.

Last year I was able to read my 1980 era 8" floppies to recover some files. Every byte read without error.

1886 Columbia Standard highwheel bicycle, the ultimate hipster fixie. Yes, I ride it (though not all that often), including 100 mile rides.

For computing tech it would have to be an Apple Newton. It isn't terribly old, but I gave up using my house to curate a computing museum years ago.

I love the comments on the Yahoo page complaining about new technology. You just KNOW these are people that got turned on to Yahoo in the 90s and have been using it for 'Internet' ever since.

I just went back - thanks for the tip. Discussion of transistor radios versus stereo, complaints about touch screens and smart phones (people call them that!?) and someone complaining about the Internet. Its like peeking though a keyhole.

I have an NES. I'm sad that the Zapper and Duck Hunt from the Super Mario Bros/Duck Hunt Game Pak doesn't work with my LCD HDTV. Everything else works great, though.

This would be easy if I were still living with the folks as my old bedroom is virtually a vintage computing museum.

Since moving out - and abroad no less - I have to think a little. Probably a 2GB USB memory stick I brought with me. I shudder to think how much it cost new at the time and perhaps because of that still sentimentally use it over the 16GB+ sticks I've acquired since. Good ol', reliable 2GB USB stick!

I splurged for a 32MB flash drive. Cost me far more than I'd like to admit.

I still have my 128 MB thumb drive. It still works. At the price that I (okay, not me, but my parents) paid for it back then in 7th grade, I can get a USB 3.0 32 GB one today.

On the bandwagon, my dad had a 256MB usb stick. I showed it off in a college class to everyones amazement. I put a couple of Simpsons episodes on it.

Mine's a Sony Discman D-E200 ESP2, not really THAT old. But still, not many people walk around with cds and a discman anymore.

Commodore Amiga A1200. I need to get it an accelerator card though.

A500 here. Monitor connection needs a fix, but otherwise ok.

Panasonic CRT with built in VCR player.

It's used daily.

An Olivetti M24 :-)

My 80s-era digital alarm clock, sans front. I usually sleep heavily, and I fear this clock finally breaking down and having to find another one that works.

A friend's dad had a vacuum cleaner that finally died after 30 years. He went into the store and asked for another one that was well-made like that, he was happy to pay extra. The salesman just laughed.

I have a Casio DQ-520 alarm clock that I love and depend on, I've tried to replace it many times and have not succeeded. Its validating to know other people share this experience :)

A Nintendo Super Color circa 1984.

A microvax. Well, two of them.

ugh

it doesn't take much effort to take an alcohol pad to your disgusting caked-on-brown keyboards and telephones, people.

Commodore C-64.

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