What's the oldest computer that you still use regularly (or occasionally)?

The Water Cooler
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1

For me, it’s a SPARCbook 3000ST from 1998 running Solaris 2.5.1 (I use vi on it to create my blog posts in Markdown, which are later composited on my Fedora system using hugo). And yes, I get a lot of stares.

4032×3024 2.4 MB

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2

Acer Aspire 1830TZ, ~12 years old, running Fedora 38 as a Wi-Fi router, VPN, backup, etc.

3

The oldest “computer” I use still is my MC6802 test system from my college years, when I get the hankering for some assembly programming. Unfortunately, I do not have any of the many 48K Apple Mac clones that I used to assemble for the electronics store I worked at. The oldest actual computer that would be recognized as one is either my IBM Thinkpad laptop or my Dell Inspiron laptop, but I believe the IBM is the oldest of the two. I do have an old 80286 board laying around, but it came out of an industrial PC-AT system in the early 90’s. Well the Thinkpad 600E won’t turn on today, so that leaves the Dell as the only functioning early PC that is not in pieces.

5

I have one about that age. emachines E725 (Acer kept their brand name for a while). 4G ram, 2 cores, still usable when I manage to catch the time for frolicking with home network in useless ways (which doesn’t happen very not often).

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6

Mine oldest computer that booted successfully about year and a half ago is Macintosh SE. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Macintosh_SE

I’ll hopefully bring it from garage tomorrow morning to see if it still works. I had floppy disc with minix for it, but it’s lost.

7

That’s awesome! I loved using Solaris back in the day. I wish I still had my PowerBook 520c but I foolishly sold it many years ago. That computer should have been a keeper.

powerbook-540c
powerbook-540c539×523 95.2 KB

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8

For me that would be a 2008 Dell PowerEdge 2800 currently running Fedora Linux 37.

It’s kind of fun seeing 104760.58 for the number of hours on the SCSI drives (I replaced/upgraded them 11 years ago or the number would be even larger :slight_smile:).

# smartctl -x /dev/sdg
smartctl 7.3 2022-02-28 r5338 [x86_64-linux-6.4.8-100.fc37.x86_64] (local build)
Copyright (C) 2002-22, Bruce Allen, Christian Franke, www.smartmontools.org

=== START OF INFORMATION SECTION ===
Vendor:               SEAGATE
Product:              ST3300007LC
Revision:             D705
User Capacity:        300,000,000,000 bytes [300 GB]
Logical block size:   512 bytes
Rotation Rate:        10033 rpm
Serial number:        3KR1VXEX
Device type:          disk
Transport protocol:   Parallel SCSI (SPI-4)
Local Time is:        Wed Aug 23 19:40:53 2023 CDT
SMART support is:     Available - device has SMART capability.
SMART support is:     Enabled
Temperature Warning:  Enabled
Read Cache is:        Enabled
Writeback Cache is:   Disabled

=== START OF READ SMART DATA SECTION ===
SMART Health Status: OK

Current Drive Temperature:     39 C
Drive Trip Temperature:        68 C

Elements in grown defect list: 0

Vendor (Seagate Cache) information
  Blocks sent to initiator = 523767078
  Blocks received from initiator = 1101309952
  Blocks read from cache and sent to initiator = 3184435890
  Number of read and write commands whose size <= segment size = 563657833
  Number of read and write commands whose size > segment size = 94868

Vendor (Seagate/Hitachi) factory information
  number of hours powered up = 104760.58
  number of minutes until next internal SMART test = 102

Error counter log:
           Errors Corrected by           Total   Correction     Gigabytes    Total
               ECC          rereads/    errors   algorithm      processed    uncorrected
           fast | delayed   rewrites  corrected  invocations   [10^9 bytes]  errors
read:   44495395        0         0  44495395   44495395      23986.109           0
write:         0        0         0         0          0      30544.841           0
verify: 866599270        0         0  866599270   866599270     866702.787           0

Non-medium error count:       20

SMART Self-test log
Num  Test              Status                 segment  LifeTime  LBA_first_err [SK ASC ASQ]
     Description                              number   (hours)
# 1  Background short  Completed                   -    6813                 - [-   -    -]
# 2  Background long   Completed                   -    6755                 - [-   -    -]
# 3  Background long   Aborted (by user command)   -    6753                 - [-   -    -]
# 4  Background long   Completed                   -       3                 - [-   -    -]
# 5  Background long   Completed                   -       1                 - [-   -    -]
# 6  Background short  Completed                   -       0                 - [-   -    -]

Long (extended) Self-test duration: 5622 seconds [93.7 minutes]

Device does not support Background scan results logging

We do have an older 2004 Dell PowerEdge 1800 that still works. But I only use it as a Fog server plugged into an isolated switch for re-imaging laptops these days. It’s not an always-on server that I actually use day-to-day like the 2800.

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