Random computer thread chat

I bought three Athlon XP 1700+ Thoroughbred processors in one go for £45 each from Overclockers. It was about 2003 just to see how much they could be overclocked in my Abit board. They were supposed to be the dogs ******** at the time.
 
Slightly related, in 1992 I travelled by train from Edinburgh to Newcastle to buy a DAT machine for the band I was in at the time. We were using a drum machine (BOSS DR 660) but had so many songs it ran out of memory so I spent 5 hours on the train and 10 hours recording the drum parts to DAT, all for it to look like we were miming when we played live :/

It was around the same time I bought the first portable Sony Mini Disc recorder for around £500 which me and my duo used for backing tracks.
We used to have two cassette players and he would feed a tape per song into them while I introduced.
The disks could hold 74 mins with us doing 2x 45 mins spots, later they were 80 mins.
We couldn't afford DAT at the time and it was something I never had.

I have quite a few Acorn Electrons I used to buy them when they were going for 5 to 10 pound each,

If I remember correctly the BBC Micro was around £450 and the Acorn Micro was a cut down version for £250.

It seems a lot of stuff was around the £450 mark that I bought :)
 
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It was around the same time I bought the first portable Sony Mini Disc recorder for around £500 which me and my duo used for backing tracks.
We used to have two cassette players and he would feed a tape per song into them while I introduced.
The disks could hold 74 mins with us doing 2x 45 mins spots, later they were 80 mins.
We couldn't afford DAT at the time and it was something I never had.



If I remember correctly the BBC Micro was around £450 and the Acorn Micro was a cut down version for £250.

It seems a lot of stuff was around the £450 mark that I bought :)
The Acorn Electron was the budget version I think it went for about 150 back then. These old computers are certainly holding there value now. I sold most of my BBC Micro's just one left. The price on those Acorn Electrons are now at 50 to 70 plus pounds on ebay. I'm keeping the ones I have I'm just down sizing my computer hoard.
 
I would like to see somebody make this board which is about the size of a Raspberry Pi for playing old DOS games and programs... build your own DOS PC Project Board which will have a bootable CF Card socket and floppy header that you can also boot from with selectable RAM of 8MB to 16MB for game compatibility.

gOhtWMzs_o.jpg
 
What are you trying to do here that couldn't be done by more conventional means?
The purpose is to create a small single board 486 computer for DOS projects a cheap board that would retail 30 to 40 quid... a modern piece of hardware and cheap for those that don't wanna spend mega bucks on old deteriorating 486 gear.
 
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Did your Olivetti come with any games? I can remember my dad buying an Olivetti 486 with an Intel SX 33MHz, double speed CD-ROM which was connected via the sound card and 4MB of RAM. I'm quite sure it came with Windows 95 installed, which required a laughable amount of floppy discs if you wanted to reinstall Windows - but back in those days, we didn't really think anything about inserting 13 floppy discs to install Windows, you just got on with it and made sure those discs were kept safe. It also came with a game, called Return to Zork, which blew me away. :o

I can remember about 6 months from buying the machine, my dad upgrading the RAM from 4MB to 16MB. That was a good day, because it sped the computer up so much.
It did come with some games. I remember xcom ufo defense and Transport Tycoon. There was also another one with 4 different colour characters that had different abilities to swing across gaps etc. Fury of the Furrys I think it was.
 
I was going through some of my flash drives today trying to find a blank 16GB to write an ISO image file too, I found one but the computer wouldn't show it so I opened G-Parted saw it listed as unallocated so I partitioned it and it went ok then I formatted it to FAT32 and it formatted ok but its showing a hazard symbol saying the file system may not be able to be read so I think that flash drive might be no good but at least it shows now when its plugged in, probably not the best drive to use for flashing an ISO image but I'll see what happens. Just gotta get balenaEtcher to work now in Debian. I might give the flash drive another format in a Windows PC just to see if it chucks out any errors.
 
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Yep I think that USB drive may have failed, although it formatted ok without error when I tried to copy an 9 GB file to it, it reached 5 GB then gave an error to say data could not be written.
 
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