What is the oldest piece of tech you have restored?

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What is the oldest piece of tech you have restored? I restored a 22 year old IBM Thinkpad T42 with Debian Bookworm. And an ASUS EeePC with the same OS.

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That was ‘radio’ from 50-th. Well, you know, those wooden cases full of lamps
 It looked like

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P.S. I think that granny’s coal-fuelled iron does not count :wink:

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Oh wow! That’s so cool!

I thought restoring computers was hard, but this is next level!

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@ugnvs Impressive!

I’m pretty sure I owned that laptop.

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Never mind, it was T40p lol:

Not revived, missed!

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The T42 is a TANK! I got it for free from a friend. Look at the EeePC next to it! It is not a Lenovo, it is an IBM.

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Yes, really! What a surprise!

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The Thinkpad T42. You’re messing with me, aren’t you! :angry:

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I remember restoring such an EeePC as well! Cute little thing.

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It’s adorable, but a pain to work with.

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A few years ago, I turned on an old netbook, HP Mini 210 that had Windows 7 Starter or something. :face_vomiting: I think it only had 1GB DDR2 RAM, and it was so laggy you could feel the cursor drag across the screen and had to wait like 5 seconds before anything happened when you clicked. I researched the most lightweight Linux distro and chose antiX. It actually made it usable! (But I didn’t use it much after though
) Really amazing what Linux can do for old computers. :smiling_face_with_three_hearts:

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I haven’t been in the “oldie” space for a while now. At one point I had a 32-bit Dell Dimension 4100 for quite a few years, but it’s been well over a decade since I last had it, 2009 was when it left my home.

My oldest remaining system is a Dell Inspiron 5558 laptop, not even close to the age of stuff here!

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My 16 year old battery for it still works well and handles 3 hours of charge!

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That’s really impressive actually! Amazing :smiley:

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An antique Abacus! (just kidding)

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You have me beaten by a few years with the age of that radio.

I restored a Heathkit AR-3 vacuum tube receiver back in the 1980s. The kit was released sometime in the 1960s. It still operates, but the electrolytic capacitors have deteriorated and need to be replaced.

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My congratulations! It’s always great to meet accomplice (grin)! :smiling_face_with_sunglasses:

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17

This is some impressive stuff! My Dad bought me a tube-based radio that had AM and several short wave bands up to around 30 Mhz, if I remember correctly. There was a LOT of morse code on several sections of that short wave, but the most memorable, and CLEAR signal station was CHU Canada, which provided the time on a minute by minute basis in French and English.

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