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Vintage Computers

Old iron, or maybe old silicon. Either way, I’ve a fascination with vintage computers.

Besides a few branded dinosaurs, I’ve a collection of beige-box machines built around Intel’s venerable Pentium Pro. For years they ran SETI@home through the colder months and kept the garage nice and toasty.

Pick a machine below.

The collection

• ASTPremmia SE 466d
• CommodoreC-64
• Data GeneralAViiON
• DECPDP-11/35
• DECVAXserver 4000
• GatewayALR 9000
• HP9000/835
• IBMSystem/36
• IBMRS/6000
• IBM9595
• IBMPS/1
• IBMMicro Channel
• SunSPARCstation 1 / 2
• IntelPentium Pro CPUs

Dorm room supercomputing

This was Tommy’s senior dorm room. He paid extra to have the whole room to himself so he’d have space for his computers.

To fit more systems into less space, he mounted bare motherboards directly to a shelf framework and cabled them to bare power supplies and drives above and below. At the time he was contributing processor cycles to the Distributed.net project.

How many systems can you count?

SETI@home

The Arecibo radio telescope in Puerto Rico scanned the sky for signals. The data was split into work units and sent out to volunteers’ computers for analysis.

I ran SETI from May 1999 and contributed over 34 computer-years of processor time with the command-line “classic” client.

SETI@home stopped sending out new work in March 2020, and Arecibo’s dish collapsed that December.