Things you regret doing to vintage computers and parts

I have loads of regrets of throwing rare/special items away, but the one thing that's always bugged me :

I responded to an ad in the paper asking for any old systems, so they could use them for a school's computer club / form a little museum and spark kid's interest. So I donated a few PETs, some Sinclair items. Nothing very rare, but still pretty nice vintage machines.

About a month later, I saw the whole lot listed on eBay. :???:

I once scavenged a Workgroup Server 9150 for parts and junked the rest, not knowing what it was. (I have atoned for this by maintaining a 9150 site and a fully working unit in good condition.)

I also regret selling my A1200 before I went to medical school, though now the A4000T I have is a superior computer in every respect except size.

My biggest regret is throwing out my Olivetti M24 when I moved house 13 years ago. I don't know why I did it, it was my favourite machine. Also turfed an Apple IIe and a broken PS/2 Model 50. What an idiot.

I had to pull apart a Mitsubishi multiscan monitor to salvage the Multitouch overlay that had been installed. In this day and age it does not just to keep some CRT monitors but I'm out of space and I wanted that touchscreen and it was coated in photocopier toner.

I remember discarding the old family PC about 7-8 years ago, considering it to be "old junk" at the time. It wasn't until the last 3-4 years that I really started getting into vintage computing, and now I look back and wish I had kept that old white tower. I have a lot of memories using that thing when I was a kid, and not keeping it around is definitely one of my greatest "vintage computer" regrets.

Not keeping the original keypad components from my Science of Cambridge (Sinclair) MK14 safe when I replaced it with a better (ie, working) keypad soon after I got it. I still have the machine and it works, but it will have its neat, unoriginal keypad for the rest of its days.

The individual component parts (upper frame, key legend sheet, conductive rubber square and lower insulating sheet) kept turning up in different places for a long time afterwards, but once I finally lost one of the parts I didn't take any care to keep hold of the other parts.

I wasn't the only person who replaced the keypad - it was so bad (insensitive / prone to multiple bounces) that MK14s which still have their original keypads are relatively rare and valuable survivors.

I also (at some point) extended the (originally short) wires to the calculator-style display so I could put the machine inside an overall housing with a calculator body as the interface to the outside world. At the time I was quite young and had very rudimentary desoldering gear so some of the tracks around the display suffered and have had to be more sympathetically / patiently repaired since by my more experienced adult self - so it's not as pristine as I wish it was.

..and the manual, although I still have it, is a mess with lots of notes (originally intended to explain things more clearly to myself) scrawled in the white spaces and margins, often in Biro. It makes me wince now when I see it.

Mostly regret not holding on to my first computer. Folks were fastidious about keeping all original stuff, think we even kept original box, but it went off to someone who wanted it.

Same regret for atari 2600 and all the games we had.. sold it at garage sale for a couple bucks, such a waste. Could pick up another for probably fairly cheap, but its only yours once. :D

I had a magnesium cased NEXT cube that I gutted and turned into a project PC much later, subsequently got bored and tired of its layout and got rid of it. such a shame all around.

My biggest regret is letting my grandfather disassemble his Olivetti computer, and not even attempting to keep any parts safe.......

Also, I regret not learning what the name of the computer was... Name as in, M300-10, M380-40, M300-05, M300-30.......

I also regret not taking any pictures of the computer when it was still assembled and "working".......


Actually, I think my biggest regret is formatting/destroying every hard drive or floppy disks I had in my possession... MAN that was dumb! I basically lost every computer games and software I played with when I was younger... Also lost a lot of irreplaceable files... THAT was retarded.

Formatting old hard drives and tossing out software for no longer used operating system versions.

At a scrap center, I was reassembling a Dolch 486 luggable to buy that I have not seen ANYWHERE around the internet. Unlike your average one with an attached keyboard and LCD, this was just a tiny case with a backplane. The thing was not designed to be kid friendly! After making sure all power cables were in their correct placements when removing the hard drive, an annoying task mind you, I did a quick test and--

BAM! POP! SMOKE! POP POP POP POP BLAM!

Sparks flew all over my shirt, and I could instantly tell I ruined the backplane board. (I at least salvaged all the cards, except the main CPU board. An unintentional victory was that I got the Tseng card that is now housed neatly into my AT&T 6300.) Luckily, no one was hurt.

Bought a North Star computer built into a desk many years ago; kept the desk, threw out the computer.

I got a TRS 80 Model III and ripped it apart trying to "fix it" before I knew what I was doing with old equipment. But, #1 is when I installed a RAM board into my Altair, while it was running ...oops!