Recycle old pc

A 10 year old PC in 2023 could still be a decent bit of kit. My primary laptop is about that old. Put the specs up and we can value it, but I'd be surprised if you can't get a few quid for it.

I’m talking Personal Computers here, known as the “PC”. Of course, as I said above, there were computers before that!!! DOS was the first OS of the IBM standard PC, the basis of the computing we all do nowadays. We are not using the progeny of Acorns and Commodores which were standalone formats which were popular with wealthier families with boys. I used to look at the cost of them, astronomical, and they were divergent formats never going to be the basis for a standard going forward, not until Steve Jobs & co created the incredibly user-friendly Mac which was especially beautiful to use for desktop publishing. Almost parallel to that came the IBM standard “PC” which is the basis for the most popular computing we see nowadays.

Old PCs had serial and parallel ports for keyboard, mouse, printer and limited space for add-ons for likes of a hand scanner. DOS was the resident OS for most PCs on the market, back in the day, and typically with that you might edit batch files to boot up to programs as you wish, most often including the launch to Windows, but I had a few options as I had non-Windows programs there too which I enjoyed using. You would typically manage memory allocation on DOS too.

Subsequently DOS was replaced by Windows as an operating system in itself, but originally it was not, and a program that imitated Steve Jobs’ successful Mac. Back in the day when I was getting my first computer there was the dilemma of whether to purchase an extremely expensive Mac or else a less user-friendly and relatively more affordable PC. I went for the latter, apart from price, I knew I’d learn a lot more by using it and learning to me was equally important to productivity.

Long before PCs industry had likes of punch card operated machines, famously the ESB offered what were then considered plumb jobs as Punchcard Operators, with strong opportunities for promotion in the company’s emerging IT system. They recruited from Intermediate Cert where they were keen to get young minds to train.

Trinity had one of the early IBM mainframes, and offered the first ever computer science courses in the country, stemming from the Engineering department. They used a pre-DOS operating system.

DOS certainly wasn’t the first OS, but it was the first OS of modern personal computer alongside Mac OS. Linux, developed by a Finnish guy, Linus Torvalds, from Unix (a paid commercial package such as, eg Solaris, which my organisation used) could be installed on PCs as a free (open source) operating system, now reasonably popular as well as being the basis for iOS, Android, Flight Management Systems, your car’s computer, and practically everything you use. Back in the day it was used by nerdy types who wanted to see a bit more of the underbelly of an operating system and learn to tweak it, and indeed it’s easy-to-use and versatile once you get used to it, and far far more stable than Windows.

Tell me where I said it was?

Or maybe don’t as thread has been derailed already. One thing I don’t know is the current value of used oldish computer parts, and that is more relevant to OP. I thought I had just gone down a bit of memory lane reminiscence of more vintage gone computing, and what I have said here is relevant to that but doesn’t answer OP’s question.

If OP is living in Dublin and wishes to dispose completely (I say again wipe all traces, come back here if advice is needed on that) you can bring it to Ringsend:

iOS origins are in Unix of which Linux is open source. The wobbly mess of a Mac 2 GUI was beautiful to use for somebody who had 10 minutes to learn in order to go ahead and write a book for publication and whose only previous experience had been using DOS-based databases and some word processing. Incomparable for user friendliness. Windows 3.1 was “ok” as an alternative.