There are many different connector configurations, and there is nothing from the configuration alone that will tell us what kind of device it was used with, or what voltage or current was involved. If someone HAS that model they may know. If we can find the service information online for that monitor, it may be specified: there may even be an illustration.

Sorted! It's a German mains connector. The monitor is a Fujitsu-Siemens ScenicView Series A but it was made in Germany. I found this Wikipedia article about AC plugs and it shows a German connector and socket much like this one. There's no earth pin because earthing is done through conductive strips along the sides of the plug.

The funny thing is that oldboy is a Fujitsu-Siemens Scenic, so it's now finally got the monitor it was made for.

Correction: The plug is actually a Europlug (CEE 7/7). These work for both German and French sockets. There's a hole for the earth pin that French sockets have, and earthing strips along the sides for a German one.

Yes, France, Germany, Spain and Portugal, among others, use those. Here in the UK, you often find that some printers come with two "kettle leads" - a UK one and a Euro one.

Just tried it out. Works beautifully. Nice clear picture. Why do people throw these things away?

Simple:
Forced to move
Short of Space, New Upgrades

Among the many. Glad you collected it and are using it. Congrats and enjoy :))

I normally get old computers and try to refurbish as best as I can and give away or charge a nominal fee, to the poor/low income people in my area. I've been trying to find a nice distro to install on it. I ran across Q4OS, with Trinity DE, and may start installing it.

A lot of hardware I run across do be pure junk.

That's more or less what I did for my "computer virgin" friend. She's been a carer for years and still doesn't have a paying job, so she's rather short of cash.

I put a system together for her from things found or not required by me any more. The TFT screen was found. The keyboard and mouse came from me. I found a nice keyboard with a ps2 connection, which bigboy can take, but most modern PCs don't support any more. So she got my old usb keyboard. The tower was bought for £10 off Gumtree, but it came with a wireless dongle which I kept, and I think that alone was worth a tenner.

So now she has a working computer with AntiX running on it, and I'm teaching her how to use it. Her dad has recently bought a tablet, so he has acquired a broadband connection which we are piggypacking on. The ethernet cable we are using is a foundling and so is the splitter.

Excellent, just this one post makes this thread a success. Glad you helped your friend.

littlebrothers.org helps lonely seniors
It is interesting to consider the uses of a PC to overcome loneliness, can help folks who are alone and want company, like sick, disabled, elderly etc.
in poor weather also. Old computers are excellent for games, books, comics, puzzles, movies, chat, music, audiobooks, radio shows, podcasts etc.,
Lots of options for that with old PC.
It is not the same as interacting in person but atleast something.

http://psychcentral.com/lib/computer...be-a-computer/

On a different note, here is a video about using a DOS PC in 2016, it is rather limiting in regards to net and can do only one task at a time, however it still has its positives:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CeZS46t7zrQ

Finally a bonus for readers of this thread, nice software FREE and most can work on older PC it appears:
https://www.ossblog.org/top-software/

Downfall of Commodore:
http://www.toptechnicalsolutions.com...-of-commodore/

Interesting to see why such a good and popular computer faced a downfall.

Chat with FreeDos founder Jim Hall
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hzRZ6kgFPyY

Very impressive to see that DOS has such a large community of users, developers and is still going very strong. A must watch for those into retro computing.

The users mailing list is good to join for those interested at www.freedos.org

Freedos is very good for retro gaming. Helps to find and dl a collection of FREE DOS games.

Top 10 Reasons Retro gaming is good:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0blP8k_wDzE

Nice Bonus for readers of this thread:
DOS GAMES COLLECTION
Collection of over 500 retro Dos games below as one big zip file.
https://docs.google.com/file/d/0Bx_D...it?usp=sharing

http://pareto.uab.es/mcreel/PelicanHPC/

Wow, came across the above. Helps to use several older PCs in parallel to create a mini super computer at home. Personally, I have no need for this, however it is good to know that this option exists. :)

Is this retro enough, 3MHz 8085 running NOP's

https://photos.google.com/photo/AF1Q...8JBNNZNcVJ5vXb

Browser not supported message for the above link :)

odd, what browser? Its just google photos. I have a photobucket account but photobucket seems to be having issues at the moment.

ok try this one http://i306.photobucket.com/albums/n...06_1855459.jpg

Seamonkey very old version, built into live CD so can't be upgraded. If possible kindly upload that pic to picpaste.com and then share the link. If not, it is fine.
Thanks in advance.

Links to vintage computer magazines and retro gamer, interesting to know:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Retro_Gamer
http://www.retrogamer.net/

http://www.vintage-computer.com/magazines.shtml


Compared to all these P2 feels like really brand new. :)

Saw it, wow that is old indeed.

That's what was known as a Lunchbox Computer, it was portable, everything was built in, but you needed strong arms to carry them. :)

Not the oscope :P, the 'computer' is on the protoboard in front of it.

Archive.org has a bunch of old magazines as well.

Great way to try the Ras Pi on older PC:

https://opensource.com/article/17/1/...xel-os-your-pc

This is good for older PC it says above :)

This retro computer was stolen out of my pickup truck. It used a at&t phone contract to connect to the internet.

http://www.ebay.com/itm/SAVE-200-ON-...wAAOSweW5Vcgkm

Funny thing. I thought it was too old to steal. But I see they still sell them. Even today.
Windows CE was lightening fast on it.

When desperate even getting a buck or two is ok for some. Not surprised it was stolen. Sorry about your loss. Very easy to resell small electronics.

They don't know what it is, they steal and find out its worthless later. My oscilloscope was probably tossed in the trash.

Learning about emulators recently:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Emulator

Interesting to see that there is an x86 emulator, it is said to work for
even the 386 emulation:
http://bochs.sourceforge.net/

http://www.zophar.net/pc.html

RasPi Emulator:
https://sourceforge.net/projects/rpiqemuwindows/

The old PC learning continues :)

You also have ones like
http://www.dosbox.com/download.php?main=1
https://fs-uae.net/
http://vice-emu.sourceforge.net/

I have my own setup within each. FS-UAE I have an Amiga 1.3 workbench setup like I had back in 91/92. Vice I have some of my old C64 software.
dosbox I have turbo pascal and turbo C what I used in college.

Thanks for these. Will be nice if there was one zip file or archive of all retro PC emulators and their related software. This will be very convenient. Please advice if you know of any such. Tx in advance.

The issue there is you have several different projects each on their own schedule. The clsest you'll find is a popular linux distro that has them all in their repositories and you can then just use their package tool to install them all at once.

True. The latest is not needed, even an old such collection will do.

And there, rivjay, is a perfect project for you! If you get it packaged, let us know.

while most are geared toward gaming, there are projects like retropi

Came across a Vax Emulator, this is interesting:
https://sourceforge.net/projects/evax/

http://www.es40.org/OpenVMS

I have used Vax in the long term past, it was useful.

FAFNER final shutdown:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WKyQa5Uui2U

All good things come to an end. Feels Nostalgic.

Here is a list of emulators for reference, who knows perhaps one day I might do just that:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_o...stem_emulators

Hey, I found one they were missing , droid48 for the hp48sx

One are that this thread totally ignored so far is Cybercrime. Old computers can become important forensic evidence if they were used to commit crime. Infact, there is good documented info. on this:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Computer_forensics
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cybercrime

There are even some companies that give certification in the area of Computer Forensics.

Wow, a likely crime involving old donated computers:
http://www.actionnewsjax.com/news/lo...sted/494287128

Considering buying an Atom netbook...
 

I mentiond to my colleague that I'd prefer a netbook to repairing my 11" acer laptop that broke when I held the screen in the wrong place to open it. he mentioned he may have a netbook for sale.
My quandry is that the netbook is a Smsung N130 with an Atom 270 processor -- that's 32bit only and I'm not even sure it's dual core. I don't intend it for "heavy lifting" or storing anything but I do want to be able to use the WWW including video and other "multimedia" content.
Anybody running something similar day-to-day?
I did have a ASUS EEEEEEEEEEPC with the Linux specifications of a similar age (the one being offered has spinning rust) and that was fine for XFCE but I'm s little worried about being able to use 32 bit nowadays.

No problem running 32bit, try Antix, (Debian based no systemd), nice lightweight distro, I prefer to use 'base', which has more than the name would imply, but 'full' doesn't use much more resources.
http://antix.mepis.org/index.php?title=Main_Page

(I run several Atom processor based netbooks, & a mini ITX desktop, plus an old P4 with 1GB ram, all run Firefox.)

I know it's possible to get Linux running pretty smoothly on it but... I would like things like Adobe Flash (which I know is not possible) and worry wether there are other things (Java springs to mind) that I'll not be able to get.
I pretty-much told the guy I'm not really interested as it's not 64 bit but I may make an offer anyhow as it's almost got sentimental value. So the issue I face is that I know I can get it running well but would I be able to use it for all I want when not at home.


Might have to look up he best way to turn it into a retro-gaming rig for him or something?

You don't really need flash anyway. Most legit videos have all moved to safer formats.

You're right -- I'm almost certain I don't need Flash but, since I have it at the moment, I'm not absolutely sure.
If I buy the machine from my colleague I want to do so with the plan that I use it day-to-day for doing things like posting on this site and, possibly, watching a little YouTube posted from Twitter.
I don't need all that much processing power but I'm worried that the lack of 64 bit will mean I end up just using my phone instead.

I am using only 32 bit mostly on here. Rarely do I use 64 bit, it is only to run VM on the rare instance.

uninstall your flash package now and try, I'll bet you won't miss it. You can always reinstall if needed.

Luckily, because my colleague dug out the device his mother, whose device it is, is now playing games on her "netbook" that only came with Windows 7 -- she's not connecting it to anything so it's safe and it is, as my colleague sad "her gaming rig" :).
I appreciate the answers regarding 32 bit though but have to admit that I'll likely look for AMD64 architecture if I go that route.

How much ram does the netbook have? I found 64 bit with less than 4G was a bit slow.

Some old PC related info.:

1. First Mac sold:
http://www.bbc.com/news/technology-37199000

2. Local store is selling 100 CDR media for 70 bucks including tax. approx.
Wonder who buys this media and what they still use it for ? Seems so niche

3. Recently I tried dosemu and it works excellent with Puppy Linux, now I can pla
retro dos games on my older PC. The advantage of dosemu is that I can open more than one version of the emulator and hence have a few puzzles going on at the same time.

Build Virtual Environment with old PC:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ly1BLt0s0zI

This is a good watch.

My old 63 ford f100 cd player plays cdr's burned on my linux computer.
Out here on the Mexican border. My radio station choices are limited.
If I want to listen to streaming radio. I gotta use my phone with a external speaker on the passenger seat.

You asked. So I am just saying.