Questions for vintage computer geeks, and a question for more current geeks.

[matt819]

I actually mean geeks for vintage computers.

But vintage geeks works also.

Cleaning out some storage units and came across really, really vintage computer stuff.

Taxan monitor, 12", monochrome amber, 34 years old. Powers up. No idea if it works.

IBM PC XT keyboard. No idea if it works.

Here are the questions. I think I can get a DIN5 to a mini DIN6 PS/2 adapter, and then add to that a PS/2 adapter to USB. That might allow me to see if the keyboard works. What do the geeks think?

Having come up with that, I wonder if I can do the same with the Taxan monitor, which has a horizontal 4-pin connector. I think I'd have the analog to digital problem connecting to a modern Dell PC. But I'm open to suggestions.

I also have an Okidata Microline dot matrix printer. I haven't taken a close look at that to see if I can get it working.

I haven't yet come across the vintage PC XT that these peripherals went with. Not sure where that might be hidden. I have a photo of my younger self with my new PCXT in around 1983/84 looking cool and smug, cutting edge, state of the art. And very young. What happened to that guy? Getting old is definitely not for sissies.

BTW, the only reason I want to see if I can get them working is to sell them. Working items get at least a little money on ebay. Non-working and it's hardly worth the effort. For example, a new in-the-box keyboard like the one I have goes for $400 online.

New question, unrelated, about more recent computers. I pulled hard drives out of 3 10-20 year old laptops so that I can dispose of the laptops. I got to thinking that I can problem retrieve the data on the drives and get this to my kids (two of the computers were theirs in college, the third was mine from the mid(ish) 2000 aughts). I found cables on Amazon that claim to connect most any 2.5" SATA drive to a PC. Does this really work?

Thanks.

[Girard442]

1. Bad news on the keyboard:

The IBM PC and XT had a fairly simple keyboard protocol. The AT and PS/2 series had a much more complicated one (which, as far as I can tell delivered exactly zero extra value to the end user beyond lighting up the caps lock, num lock, and scroll lock lights).

USB and the PC & XT are from such different geologic eras I doubt that there's anything that would work there.

I've had good luck pulling drives out of dead PCs and laptops and putting them in external chassis with USB connections, even the dirt cheap ones.

On edit: There may be issues pulling files off your kids's college PCs that are....errrrmmmmm...nontechnological.

[matt819]

2. So. . .

Don't even try the adapter thing? It'll be a hoot if I could find the computer and then put the whole thing together.

Re the computers - yeah, I was just going to download it all and then given them the external hard drive. Believe me, I know by now (my kids are 33 and 30) that the less I know, the better. I will do my best to do all this blindfolded.

Thanks for the caution.

[RainCaster]

3. Sorry Matt, these are junk

If you can find some place that will take them for free, you will come out money ahead. Most places these days charge to dispose of this sort of scrap. I have given away several color monitors (very old) and I just toss the keyboards.

I have a stack of extra keyboards as spares in case one of mine fails. They were free. I used to work for a company that was setting up a server room full of computers. All of them were connected to a KVM Switch (Keyboard - Video Monitor) and so none needed the keyboard. They left stacks of these outside the server room for anyone to take.

[mahatmakanejeeves]

5. I have a lot of old stuff too. to get rid of it, I do a Craigslist curb alert and

put the stuff out at the end of my front sidewalk. Sometimes it goes, and sometimes it doesn't.

Old stuff isn't worth anything. I speak from experience. Give it away, if you can.

I unloaded the MS Office Suite for Windows 3.1 several weeks ago. It had fallen between the cracks, and I figured I had no use for it. It didn't go right away, but I sweetened the deal by putting a laptop on top of the carton holding the boxes of instructions and floppy drives. Then the whole shebang disappeared.

In the curb alert ad, tell people what to expect. Sometimes people want it for ... well, I don't know what they want it for.

[TreasonousBastard]

4. With all the old stuff, it may be a bit more than just getting the connectors to fit...

The keyboard might work, but I doubt you'll get anything on the monitor.

I loved my dot matrix printers, and the better ones could actually fake a typewriter if you didn't look too closely. Howsumever, the first problem is converting USB to Centronics. Believe it or not, I actually saw some USB2 to parallel adapters that claim to work and are only around 10 bucks. Cheap enough to experiment.

If you're running Win10-- there may be a printer driver built in, or at least a generic dot matrix driver.

[mahatmakanejeeves]

6. The Applewriter was so ubiquitous, I suspect that there will be a driver for that.

I hope the OP doesn't have to configure any DIP switches.

I remember printing stuff on a daisy wheel printer. Whooo - that was nice stuff.

[eppur_se_muova]

7. Try pinouts.ru if you're making your own adapters.

https://old.pinouts.ru/Video/Att6300Taxan_pinout.shtml

Apparently some of their info comes from this source, which looks interesting:
http://www.hardwarebook.info/

[hunter]

8. I have maybe five IBM XT keyboards in a box buried under other crap in my garage.

Those keyboards are simple and very well built so they probably work. It's the old inexpensive clone keyboards that die in storage as the old rubbery plastic components disintegrate and the cheap capacitors self destruct.

I also have a few XT machines and clones in my garage. One of my XTs has the old full height floppy drives.

My oldest computer is one I built in the later 'seventies. I sometimes wish I'd saved earlier computers, but no, not really... they took up a lot of room and didn't do much. When I was high school I spent many hours converting a small reel-to-reel tape recorder into a data drive that never did work very well.

I got rid of a lot of interesting hardware years ago, most of it as e-waste. Some of it was taken off my hands by fellow enthusiasts and hoarders. If any of it had any $$$ value I don't want to know about it.

My stash of old computers is still large, including various Atari 800 machines and an Amiga that was used in video production, mostly advertisements for local television. The Amiga was very expensive when new but worth nothing when I got it. I e-wasted the high quality but bulky CRT monitor it came with.

For a few years I was repairing old CRT monitors but that's a useless skill these days.

Any old computer stuff, including CRT monitors, can be made to work with modern computers using a two dollar micro-controller and junk box components but I always end up thinking "why?" even after I've wasted time doing it.

I have every interesting computer I've ever used emulated on my Linux Desktop machine. Whenever I update to a new machine I transfer everything over. Bits on a hard drive take up a lot less room than computers in my garage. My oldest files are from the 'seventies.

I could set up one of my old Atari machines if I had a sudden urge to write a Turbo-Basic XL program but it's a lot easier to click the Atari icon on my Linux desktop and write it in the emulator.