RV Road Trip: Buying 20 Vintage PCs in Oregon

Overview

I took my 2020 RV on a 6-hour road trip from Northern California to Oregon to pick up an incredible haul of vintage computers. Twenty machines total: 286s, maybe even 8088s, 386s, 486s, Pentiums, several Mac Classics, a dot matrix printer, CRTs, and even a Star Rider arcade machine. This is a vlog-style video documenting the journey, a Goodwill stop along the way, and the reveal of all the computers packed into my RV.

Key Moments

• Fueling up the RV: $113 for 25 gallons (50-gallon tank)
• 6-hour drive from San Francisco area to Oregon
• Goodwill stop in Fairfield: found a screen with built-in DVD player, The Last Samurai, FrontPage 2000
• Loading 20+ vintage computers into the RV
• Computers everywhere: in the bed, on seats, in storage compartments
• 5 Mac Classics, tower cases, Leading Edge computer
• CRT monitors (multiple)
• Old dot matrix printer
• Star Rider arcade machine
• Nice tower cases (the kind I always wanted growing up)
• Planning future videos on each machine

Full Transcript (Edited)

The RV was half full, and I just—we drove $113 worth of gas, 25 gallons, and the tank was half full according to the dash. So that’s a lot of gallons.

[Music]

Hey everybody, so today I’m going to be mixing a little bit of car and tech. I am in my RV which I bought in 2020, and I got it good enough that I can go on some road trips. Today I’m going to be going on a road trip up north to Oregon. It’s a six-hour drive one way. I’m planning to pick up about 11 or 12 vintage computers that I found a guy selling up there, and I’m going to document my trip there. I’m right here in northern California right now, actually near San Francisco. I’m going to go north towards Oregon right now and take you along.

Hopefully I won’t break down—I don’t want to make that part of this video. But we’ll see. I just put $113 worth of gas. It’s super full now, 25 gallons. I think this is like a 50-gallon tank, so hopefully these computers won’t cost me more than I thought they would just because I’m taking this monster thing up there. But I want to make the best of it. I’m gonna be staying overnight, that’s the plan anyway, at an RV place for the first time with this one. Let’s get started!

[Road trip montage]

Okay, just stopped at a Goodwill, and this is in Fairfield. I’m just doing some shopping along the way. Got some nice cool stuff, I hope it works. I’ll show you in a second.

Alright, so this is my pickup from this Goodwill in Fairfield. I got a screen with a built-in DVD player—they didn’t have a power cord, so I gotta stop somewhere else and get the power cord. Hopefully that’ll work. I got a movie—if this works, then tonight I’m going to be watching The Last Samurai. And I got some software: I got FrontPage 2000, some casino games for old computers, and pinball. That’s it. I’m gonna keep on going and see what we find next.

[More travel footage]

Alright, so here I am back home after a few days. I made it. We did not stay in an RV camp, but I did end up staying in a hotel. I’m going to show you inside the RV here.

As you can see, I have computers everywhere! I have computers that are scattered everywhere. Some of them did fall during transit, but I don’t think they were too damaged—they were just slightly scratched, maybe, who knows. But they look pretty good.

I have computers even in the bed over there, and up there I got a big CRT right here. Yeah, I have to make my way through this. I have these five little Macs down there that I have to take out. I have a Star Rider, and even underneath the bed, on the outside storage, I have an old dot matrix printer.

Yeah, I even got myself a little Leading Edge computer here. This one’s kind of interesting. Let me see if I can open this. Yeah, look at that. It’s kind of beat up a little bit there, but we’ll see if I can get this running correctly.

If you like this kind of stuff, I’m gonna be going through each one of these in detail. There’s more down here, another CRT there. I’m going to be going through each one of these in detail in a future video, and we’ll see what I got. They all seem to have components and everything inside, so there might be some cool stuff in these machines.

If you like this kind of stuff, subscribe, hit the like button, and leave me a comment below. Let me know what you think and what I should start with. Some of the older ones are down there—like 286s, maybe even 8088. I got some newer machines. I got these nice cases here with tower designs. I really wanted one of these when I was growing up. I had a desktop 386, but, you know, I’m probably gonna start with one of those or take a look at those old beasts and power up one of these CRTs. Take a look at those.

Yeah, let me know what you think. Till next time!