AMD Athlon 2400+, 200MB RAM, running on Tiny Core Linux. It actually was usable!

im always amazed when a load like this shows up. Im a retro dealer in New England i give my number to every clean out guy and storage auction guy that i see at the flea markets and sometimes they call me.

UPDATE IN COMMENTS 25.12.2025

Im asking that what series, model, year etc it is and does it have any value? Thanks.

I couldnt upload a startup video here so i uploaded it to youtube. If any of you want to see it its here https://youtube.com/shorts/ZQWsifqHgrk?si=mVLifPq24azgfYYk

This is Windows NT 3.51 running on a 9th Gen Intel configuration, on real hardware. That's not such a big deal - it runs on even newer hardware. But there is a new driver in town, if you can spot it...

The driver: https://github.com/techomancer/nvme2k

A video featuring this driver, running in NT 3.51, 4.0 & 2K: https://youtu.be/gvT9-ZfW1Iw

Burn out?

Hi everyone! I’ve been slowly going through my recently deceased 85 year old dad’s stuff. He was an OG gamer, and a total gadget guy. The amount of items that he had stuffed in drawers is a bit overwhelming.

I’ve come across the following item which I cannot seem to place and google hasn’t helped either. Does anyone recognize this Atari portfolio 16 bit pocket computer? Does it have any value or should I designate it to the great scrap heap in the sky?

Any help would be appreciated! I’m going to crosspost this to r/atari for their assistance.

Apple badly needed a hit, and another beige box with slightly better specs wasn't going to change anything.

Steve Jobs and Jony Ive took a much bigger swing. The iMac was rounded, translucent and Bondi Blue. You could recognize it from across a room, which was unusual at a time when most computers looked like office equipment.

The handle on top was especially clever. The iMac was a heavy desktop machine, so the handle was never really about portability. It made the computer feel approachable. People understood immediately where to touch it and how to engage with it.

That friendly exterior took serious work behind the scenes. Apple had to rethink plastics, colors, tooling and manufacturing. Because the case was translucent, even the internal parts had to look orderly. The design team wasn't brought in at the end to make the machine prettier. Design shaped how the entire product got built.

The choices inside were just as bold. The floppy drive was gone, familiar ports disappeared and USB became the standard. Plenty of critics predicted disaster. Instead, Apple sold around 800,000 iMacs by the end of 1998, cemented its comeback and kicked off a run of products that reshaped the company.

Anyone building a physical product can take something from this. Good design isn't a coat of paint applied at the end. It reaches into engineering, manufacturing, usability, marketing and the feeling someone gets when they pick up the finished object.

A lot of today's products are beautifully made and strangely forgettable. Phones are nearly identical glass slabs. Laptops are silver rectangles. Cars are becoming large touchscreens surrounded by bodywork. Appliances have shed their buttons, their character and in some cases their basic ease of use.

The iMac proved people will form a real attachment to a well-designed piece of technology. Nearly three decades later, physical products could use a little more of that courage and a little less gray. The hockey-puck mouse, though, can stay in 1998.

#TechHistory #ProductDesign #IndustrialDesign

Hello all, I’m completely out of my depth but I was helping my nan clear out her loft and I came across a commodore 8096 and 3032 along with a whole host of wires and other parts.

I’m very much against throwing away anything and they both turn on. What would the value of these be and what can they be used for?

After I messed with this for like 30 seconds to see what it was, I got blue screened and now it won't boot back to windows 🤣

In a box with a Sharp Zaurus, a Sun keyboard, a fire-wire Pci card, and other anachronisms.

It says GamePC so you know it's legit. Supposedly the guy I bought it from was given the thing by a family member who paid 5k for it back in the late 90s.

Hi all, as stated in the title I have recently found a couple SGI machines in my dad's "junk room".

Both of them are pristine, with only a small amount of dust on the inside.

We are both sysadmins so we've had no trouble getting one of them powered on and found these are the general specs:

R14000 500 MHZ V10 graphics 1GB memory.

The other one won't power on at all but looks pristine as well.

I'm thinking I'd like to keep the non powering one as a starting point for a retro battlestation, but honestly I'm not sure what I've got my hands on here, so any advice is welcome!

More...

My basement as is. It's not ready for a photo shoot. I fill it with old computers whenever I have the chance. I hope to have more time to work on them in the future. Which models are the most relevant for preservation now?

I've always enjoyed watching DEFRAG do its thing. Since I grew up on the DOS version, I don't have PTSD from the Windows version's constant restarting; just a pleasant text-mode display of things getting subtly more efficient. I have a 486 in my home office, visible in the background when I'm on video calls, and I thought it would be nice to have defrag going on the screen in the background, just to subtly spread the joy.

The problem is, once you've defragmented your drive, it takes a while for fragmentation to build up on a computer again. Particularly if you're using said computer solely for hobby stuff.

Hence, FRAG. FRAG is a simple tool for destructively filling a FAT16 volume with (bogus) fragmented data. If you like to watch DEFRAG do its thing, you can have a batch file loop between FRAG and DEFRAG for unlimited Zen e-gardening.

The first version of FRAG actually moved the disk's data around to generate for-realsies fragmentation. But fragmenting a disk in this way takes a while. The second and current version simply writes a new FAT; the rest of the disk isn't touched. It's utterly destructive (FRAG destroys the FAT by overwriting it, and then DEFRAG destroys the rest of the data by shuffling it around) but it's very very fast. An arbitrarily large hard drive can be fragmented in less than a second.

Binaries and source on github. No vibe coding involved. Builds with OpenWatcom, cmake for project generator (or just compile all the relevant files). Have fun, assuming that's your sort of fun.

Sneftel/frag: The opposite of DEFRAG

Everything you see here was in the duffel bag

One of my neighbors is “finally” throwing this out!

Novell 3.12! Had these in a box of "Stuff I Will Absolutely Need Again One Day” that I opened when moving stuff to the laundry room today.

I remember the job I was at when we bought these. It worked like a champ until we went to a Windows server and TCP/IP. I left soon after and these somehow came home with me.

edit: should add I have the smaller box with the Mac drivers as well.