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Yes, I do...an '89 vintage Gateway 386-SX, comes with dual floppy disk drives, a 220 watt power supply, and a 16 bit video card...PLUS a HUGE NEC 14 inch VGA monitor, which was a $600 option back in 1/90. The entire CPU weighs about 35-40 pounds because it's thick metal...and guess what, there is a label on the back that says "Made in the USA"...maybe that is why I keep it. :biggrin:

Yes, it still works...I am going thru the invoice, lets see now...MS DOS 4.1 was a $90 option back then....
the computer itself was $1605, monitor $600, extra software $90, $75 shipping....

Total invoice was $2370.00...big bucks back in early 1990...my current desktop is a highly modded Dell 530 set up for gaming, even with a new 23 inch LCD, maxed out on memory, aftermarket 1 gb video card, plus two external hard drives and two printers, it doesn't even touch the $1500 mark. And that is pocket money these days.

It baffles me, electronics get better, faster, and cheaper all the time...why do most other things keep getting more expensive? :confused2:

JDgreen said:

It baffles me, electronics get better, faster, and cheaper all the time...why do most other things keep getting more expensive? :confused2:

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Keep that to yourself JD. Don't give them any more ideas on how to get into our pockets Next thing you know they will charging by the Kb.

My dad has an old "portable apple computer" the ones that are green and black and take the huge 5 1/2 inch floppies. At one point we had like 3 and they were about 3-5 k each.

Honey said:

My dad has an old "portable apple computer" the ones that are green and black and take the huge 5 1/2 inch floppies. At one point we had like 3 and they were about 3-5 k each.

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I've got a pair of Texas Instruments TI-99 4A's that date to '79...don't ask why I keep them. New they cost about $525 w/o a monitor, I got them at a thrift store for about $6 each...keep trying to find a monitor for them on Ebay.

I had it for a long time but it's been gone now for a long time too. It was before hard drives were what they are today. There was room only for a few things. Win 3.1 was the thing back then.

We kept a bunch of our computers for quite a while, but just recently we joined the modern era and junked all of them except for one which we use as a backup.

Old computers make poor boat anchors.
I am not sure what they are good for... :smile:KennyV

I still do, in fact it was passed on to me from my older sibling. It had a 256mb RAM, really astonishing speed, but after a few modifications, it still keeps going.

I probably have everybody beat. I still have an old desktop that started life as a 286/12, 40 Mb HD and 1 Mb of RAM from Level IV Computers. Cost me $1795 back in 1988. DOS 4 was brand new then and I had it! I upgraded it to a blistering 486SX/20 with local bus, DOS 5, and a 200 Mb HD a few years later and did it ever play Red Baron spectacularly then! The upgrade cost me $800 and it was worth every penny back then. No more choppiness in the graphics intensive games. A few years later again, and I upgraded it to a 486DX2/66 for even more power, RAM, added a piggybacked 250 Mb HD and a double-spin CD ROM.:laughing: I was really in the big time then. That was as far as I went with that system, but it certainly proved to be upgradeable and was top-notch in every way. My next foray into computers was another complete system for about the same price I paid in the 80s, but this was a Pentium 2/266 by Dell, which also proved to be a great unit, and yes I still have it, plus the tower that I upgraded it with. Eventually, I want to take all this old equipment up north where it will make great targets for high-power rifles, pistols and shotguns.

I still have all my original video games also, including Pong.:biggrin:

I 'm waiting for when a computerized lawnmower is the norm. (I'm sure there already are some out there...! Consider the possibilities and all the various useful functions and apps that could be included---MP3 player, GPS, "auto-cut".....:laughing:

JDgreen, I am not sure if I have seen the computer you have But I keep on hearing about "floppy" things in the past. Technology develops very fast.

minkyung said:

JDgreen, I am not sure if I have seen the computer you have But I keep on hearing about "floppy" things in the past. Technology develops very fast.

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Tell me about it...I had one of the original Blackberries back in 2002, it was basically just a glorified 2 way email pager. Compare that with the 3 year old model I have now, it gained a camera, video camera, a color screen, a web browser, GPS, etc. And it's rather obsolete compared to the newest ones, I keep wondering what technology is going to bring us next...