Your favorite vintage non-palmtop computer?

It doesn't fit on your palm but it's still old enough to be called "vintage"? Then it probably belongs in here...
saveitforparts
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Re: Your favorite vintage non-palmtop computer?

Post by saveitforparts »

My favorite is still the Tandy 100 family. At one point I had a 100, 102 (the best one IMHO), the clamshell 200, and a WP-2, along with the disk drives, tape drive, acoustic modem, some fancy ROM upgrades, etc. I also had a couple NEC look-alikes and a weird Epson version with an even smaller screen, built-in micro cassette deck and built-in receipt printer. Sadly I had to give away the whole collection when I moved, I just couldn't justify lugging them across the continent!

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These were great fun to dink around with in BASIC, messing with com stuff and dabbling in packet radio, pushing the limits of the graphics for games, ordering experimental ROM chips from the back of magazines, and even just writing on a decent keyboard without worrying about battery life (4x AAs would last a loooong time!).

I still keep an eye out for these at garage sales, maybe some day I'll start rebuilding my collection.
Kyodai
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Re: Your favorite vintage non-palmtop computer?

Post by Kyodai »

I used to have one of these and always tried to justify using it by finding a way to program a killer app. Best i could come up with was a database for my VHS collection. Which honestly was not so much ahead of a sheet of paper. XD I always hated these for the display, so I'd be curious to hear about ways to pushing the graphics to the limits since i never managed to do that. I had a C-64 at home and always thought like "the graphics suck so much on this one". But yeah keyboard and battery life were great.
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bastetfurry
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Re: Your favorite vintage non-palmtop computer?

Post by bastetfurry »

If that is vintage enough for you folks:
CPU: Intel P3-800
Mainboard: No clue, would need to open the case. :mrgreen:
RAM: 256 MByte RAM
OS: Windows 98SE, booting into MSDOS first
HDD: 32 GByte SD-Card trough an IDE adapter, never was easier to get files from and to a DOS machine.
GFX: 3dfx Voodoo 3
SFX: Creative SoundBlaster AWE64 Gold
Optical: Some Liteon DVD-ROM "Selected because it was on top of the pile ;) "
All in a Miditower.
Kyodai
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Re: Your favorite vintage non-palmtop computer?

Post by Kyodai »

Ha, you could run Windows XP on that!

Still nice machine. I always liked the old Voodoo cards. Back in the days these were pretty much what I'd dream about at night. The Soundblaster AWE 64 was also kinda the last of its kind - back then you'd get a real sound card and not rely on a chip on your motherboard... :)
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