My Vintage Computer Virtual Museum and blog page.
My friend Ryan and I made the 4 hour drive out to the BitHistory.org warehouse to spend the weekend with our friend Garrett. Garrett was doing a public sale at the warehouse, we wanted to go out there to help him sort/prep and hang out for the weekend.
I picked up a few new goodies at the warehouse sale too:
My partner and I were camping about 75 miles from home and happened into an antique shop and I found this cool butt-set for a reasonable price, picked it up to add to my collection of about 4 or 5 other butt-sets.
My friend Ryan and I traveled from Minneapolis MN to Appleton WI (289mi/465km) and spent the weekend with our friend Garrett digging through his warehouse and geeking out over cool vintage tech.
The major items I picked up are a first gen intel Mac Mini 1,1 and an IBM 5150 with Model F keyboard and 5151 monitor.
Switched DNS for my sites to Cloudflare, since my sites are all just small hobby sites I can use their free plan. I can leverage their CDN and DDoS protection, plus free SSL. Should hopefully make the site more responsive and protect my network and web-server too.
Spent my birthday weekend visiting my friend Garrett’s new BitHistory.org warehouse. Picked up a few goodies, a new rack mount server (8-bay) and disk shelf (12-bay) to replace my previous Z800 NAS server lost to the basement flood.
Also picked up some vintage gear while I was there, a cool painted Zenith Z-180 series laptop, and a Grid 1520 laptop, some misc PC parts like ISA NIC’s and some IDE/Floppy cables. Also a VERY cool red Bell System Call-box, I will be mounting this
Bithistory.org Warehouse photos:
Got everything moved over to the new backbone switch, it’s just temporarily installed on the wall until we get the 19″ rack cabinet moved into the basement (it needs to be disassembled first to fit down the stairs). Should be some noticable power savings too, this uses 1/4 of the power that the previous Avaya/Nortel 5510-48 switch used.
We had a basement flood about 2 months ago now caused by a burst water heater, it destroyed some of the infrastructure systems for our house, unfortunately my NAS servers, some network gear, and house mechanical systems were all flooded and damaged/lost.
Luckily my Router, CCTV surveillance server, and domain controller were all sitting on top of the NAS servers and were spared from the flood.
I have an old slow HP Microserver L40N acting as my NAS for the time being, however, I will be picking up something faster, and rack-mountable, since I was able to get a “1/2 rack” that was being disposed of from work. I have a new network switch (with 4x10G SFP+ ports) on the way, I will be installing all the current and future equipment into the rack once I get it down into the basement (it needs to be disassembled, it will not fit down the stairs in one piece). I will be keeping equipment (other than maybe a UPS/PDU) out of the bottom 12U just in case we ever flood again.
My friend Ryan and I drove the ~4.5 hours from Minneapolis, MN to Appleton, WI to visit our friend Garrett to geek out and dig through his Bithistory.org warehouse. We had a great time hanging out as usual, and hauled home some goodies.
Our apologies, the UPS running our: modem, router, switch, and the raspberry pi running this server died yesterday morning (ungrateful thing, I just changed out it’s batteries and special 24volt fan too).
We’re running on utility power for now, the UPS will have to be replaced soon.