Old computers how do they work?

[twiglets]

A previous in my role chose to store a few seriously old computers, Acorn etc, in our loft and I need to remove. Did these old ones contain hard drives? I have monitors, keyboards, disk drives etc. I see the second hand market likes such things and rather than dispose of, recycle them. Any ideas on what they should do if I plug them in?

[seedfut06]

They would have had BASIC os. the acorn was the same as the bbc micro to a certain point. The biggest issue you may find is getting a crt monitor as i found my Pong game wont work on any tv now.

[Vera]

They would probably be floppy disk boot or tape deck load.

Power them up and see what comes up on the screen then shove them on ebay. there are buyers for this type of equipment.

[twiglets]

Thanks, I do have computers, monitors, hard drives, printers and quite a few of Acorn, BBC, Club monitors etc. Ribbon connections attached. Just wanted to know about storage due to data being stored and passing on names etc that might be stored.

[twiglets]

Should have said I don't have any floppy disks by the looks of things.

[Keyolder]

Should have said I don't have any floppy disks by the looks of things.

I suppose if they have a hard drive for program storage it is your duty to get the hard drives wiped for data protection. But having said that we had a few Acorn and BBC B computers and as far as I can remember (it was a very long time ago) they were just put in a skip.