It’s wild for me to call it “retro computing” since I’ve lived through some of it, but do you own any cool older computers?
My partner gifted me an iMac G3 in a lovely Indigo color that I’ve wanted for ages. We used these in the computer labs in college (back in the early 2000s). Today I finally upgraded the RAM in it to 1GB from 64MB! 
i own a winxp machine with amd sepron singlecore cpu and 1.5GB ddr2 ram and some geforce-nforce onboard gpu! (yeah in 2000s igpus were on motherboard not inside cpus!)
it has an old semi-failing HDD with some precious data, its my first computer ever. so i dont turn it on until i have the time and spare storage to back everything up, as i want to avoid power cycles on a probably failing hard drive. its so bad that even tho this machine can see and boot from it, connecting such hard drive to a modern system will give me a warning about S.M.A.R.T states.
dunno if youd consider mid-2000s machine retro but its oldest i have. i could probably install an SSD inside this machine to “save” it. but i dont have the $$$ for a spare SSD lol
Currently my oldest machine is a ThinkPad T420 from 2011, but a couple of years ago I had an iMac G4 (the lamp one lol) but unfortunately had to get rid of it when I moved.
I have recently started growing a small collection of early-mid 2000s hardware, some of which don’t work, most of which do though. Quite a few Pentium machines (both towers and laptops, most of which have Windows 98 SE, one of them is a laptop running 2000), three PowerPC Macs, two Intel ones, two XP machines, and a few machines on the slightly newer side (one has Vista, another one has a Windows 7 sticker but its hard drive had been taken out).
I always admired collectors of older hardware, but never had a reason to get into much of that myself until relatively recently. My goal is to write software that can run on all of them, as a way to counteract the modern throwaway culture. I firmly believe that users should be able to find any device with a computer chip and do exactly everything they need to do as long as the hardware can handle it. No “let’s discontinue support for this hardware so you’re forced to throw it away and upgrade it” bullshit. Because of that motivation, I’m not one of those people that try to only find “interesting hardware”; I deliberately acquire normal, working hardware that no one wants, with the hopes that I can demonstrate how to make maximum use out of commodity “old” hardware.
Had to throw out most of them a while ago, but I still own an ASUS Eee PC 701 in working condition, running Haiku. Not that I do much with it, unfortunately.
I’ve got a Thinkpad T60 from 2007. It runs Debian.
None of my retro computers are desktops, but I do have a lot of them. I’ve got a ton of old consoles - Atari 2600, Super Nintendo, N64, Gamecube, and a couple of Wiis, Original Xbox + XBox 360, and an OG Playstation. I’ve also got several MP3 players: iPod Nanos, a couple of iPod shuffles, a Rio Carbon, Creative Labs NOMAD, and I also just picked up a Dell HVO2t.
I’d love to have more desktops, or maybe some laptops, but I just don’t have space for them, so instead I use virtual machines. I love the smaller gadgets, though, and I like keeping those running as well.
I have several retro computers. Most notably a Pentium 4 Windows 98SE machine, an iBook G3 Clamshell and a Macintosh Performa 5320.
The latter I saved from a recycling plant. I got a keyboard to turn it on and found the CRT has a heavy yellow tint and the hard drive appears to be dead, but aside from that, it seems functional?
It’ll be an interesting project regardless!
We have like… 9 functioning computer towers in this place, two of them are Win 98 machines, and one is a Win 2000 machine. But we don’t have anything older than that.
I need to get a SCSI card for the 98 machine because I have an external sy jet tape drive reader unit that I want to get up and running to finally extract data from some 20 year old tape drives that I was unable to access because the unit my family had, died.
I have an iMac g3 from 99 and at my gran’s I have the dumbest laptop of all time, the sony vaio vgn p21zr (but its so cute and small I love it)
Sadly I don’t, but I’ve never really stopped wanting one of those iMac g3’s, lol.
That sony vaio vgn p21zr looks like the perfect device for writing without distractions (if it can run Linux).
thats exactly what I used it for! I think it could probably but it was already so old and dingy when I got it I kind of just let it be
what am I talking about? you can surf the internet easily with retro computers (if you do it wisely)
thanks to some tricks, you can do it even with a computer from 1981 (8088 processor) the only problem there is the allocated memory for the open page. but if you have a hard drive and upper memory, then you can open HTTPS
Depends on what you count.
I have a Thinkpad T410, which some might consider too new to be a retro computer
and I have a HP 27o calculator, which some might consider a “calculator” instead of a computer (it runs BASIC and has an internal storage, so I count it)
i wish. i dont have the money to buy retro computers
Mine wasn’t retro when I bought it.
Been rescuing a few retro things from work, heh. Kinda wish I rescued more, but alas, my apartment’s small. Anyways, here’s my working machines!
Also have a few parts I COULD use to build an even older retro machine (highlights goes to a 486 board, a Socket A Athlon “T-Bird” running at 700 MHz, and a Voodoo Banshee GPU)
I wish I could! I’ve always kind of wanted to get into collecting retro hardware, even beyond just computers (I’d really like an old phone!), but I’m not exactly sure where to look or how to start. I sometimes encounter them but I don’t buy them cause they usually don’t come with any of the extra things they’d need to function (like chargers, etc). So for now I just stick to virtual retro stuff like my VMs
