Right now I have my eyes on Acorn. Mostly because they were the first ARM/RISC computers available in the market (to the best of my knowledge), but I would also love to hear other recommendations. I want to acquire something interesting, that would be challenging and rewarding to program with.
Right now I'm interested in the Phillips MSX systems and PC Engine, as they both have a catalogue of unique platform-specific games (such as the original Metal Gear!) and are less-trodden territory for retrocomputing which, alas, makes them a little pricier. But part of the fun of retrocomputing is that it can be a passive hobby where you set some price alerts on ebay and craigslist and then try and go for the score.
If you haven't, be sure to check out https://old.reddit.com/r/retrobattlestations/
I never hear them mentioned these days which strikes me as odd though it may be just that I'm not really plugged into the vintage community. It could also be that there are simply none to be had anywhere now. I never hacked on them myself - we already had quite a few 1st-gen PCs in the lab and I worked on those. I seem to recall that our CS9000 app devs were coding in some version of Pascal (possibly cross-compiled from a mainframe) and that there was some form of proprietary connectivity with the site's local System/370.
At some point the lab also obtained a "portable" PC (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IBM_Portable_Personal_Computer) which was a god-awful, big, heavy beast. However I can't say that I find those "interesting" and IIRC most of the devs even then were mainly interested in avoiding having to use it.
I used to think it was strange that, considering it was already selling CS9000s, IBM didn't base its entry into the general-purpose PC market on a stripped-down version of the hardware and on CSOS.
It turned out they made modems, quite successfully for a while. I'm sad I botched the interview, I would have been doing destructive testing, so much fun! 8)
I still feel nostalgia for the Kaypro 2, even though I have millions of times the compute in a device the size of 2 legal pads.
But to answer the question, here’s what on my wishlist:
HP-86 - recently sold my HP-85 with serial and GPIB expansions which I regret and will hopefully pick up an HP-86 to replace it eventually. Finding the serial and GPIB cartridges again my he a task.
Lisp machines, particularly a MacIvory - no chance I get my hands on one anytime soon.
One of the Tektronix Smalltalk Workstations - Will probably never even see one in my lifetime.
DEC VAXstation - May be purchasing one of the larger ones later this year. Will probably stick NetBSD on it.
DEC AlphaServer - Particularly models of which I find aesthetically pleasing. Not a Compaq or HP AlphaServer. The ones I like are always just a bit out of my price range. Will probably stick NetBSD on it.
IBM 5100 (running APL) - rare and always too expensive on the occasion I see one for sale
PDP-X - Actually a chance I might be able to run into a DEC PDP machine and be able to afford it someday.
I kinda want an early AS400 , but will settle for a not quite retro iSeries.
Not quite computers, but I also want:
HP 700/70 - A windowing terminal which was based off an old window standard for terminals called AlphaWindows (for which I also need to find the spec because the current implementations are currently commercial software). I’ve see a few listings for these terminals, but always super shady.
X.25 Equipment - PAD’s, switches, etc. I’m starting to thing X.25 was a legend because I have yet to find anything hardware related to it.
Anyway my end goal it to have a crazy home network with all the crazy protocols I hack on sectioned off and connected to the main (modern Ethernet) LAN with my retro stuff sitting on various networks.
Early UNIX workstations are also pretty interesting, like the early SUN stuff, SGI, early NeXT if you're more interested in that type of machines.
In the past two years I rebuild, from parts I sourced in various places, a fully working; 286/16, 386SX/20, 386DX/40, 486DX/100. I also have the parts for a Pentium 100 except for the CPU.
It was fun collecting and sourcing the parts and building the machines up. In my opinion the PC industry in the 90's was most interesting, not because it was "my" time but because technology was advancing leaps and bounds during that period.
1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Analog_computer 2. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Differential_analyser
Had a PDP-11/40 in college that I sold for rent money, one of my biggest regrets. Still have a lot of game dev hardware, some old Sun systems, a Mac 512k, an Alpha workstation (that I tell myself I keep around for a good reason, due to it's famously weak memory model), a POWER4 server, a bunch of prototype supermicro boxes with a redundant PCI-E fabric that they share, etc.
Would love some more mini computers, maybe a Data General?
I was not allowed to even think about touching it.
It was good at sifting genome sequences... and so it was used by the Legal Department. For patent (intellectual property) searches...
I had actually been teaching myself some early back propagation stuff for neural network training. That had been in 1989.. So when I found myself in the same room as Danny Hillis' brain, and then was told how it was being used...
I'm still twitching.
As a programmer, these are machines that you can understand in their entirety down to the metal (I don't mean the hardware internally, just everything that's visible to the programmer), because they are relatively simple. It's also hardware that many grew up with and can relate to. They're well documented and ready to develop for, including very good emulators and debuggers. They're cheap, or you can just use an emulator to play around with them.
GB original is fun because it's so limited, and it's like a puzzle to figure out what you can do with it (including making graphics that prayers can actually recognize). Writing asm for it is like an adversarial puzzle.
GBA is based on ARM so it is a relative of modern cell phones, but running only at 16Mhz. You can still do a lot with it, because it's still pretty powerful (e.g. it runs Doom). It also has a very powerful 2d graphics chip that's still easy to work with and try to figure out effects for. Writing asm on it is a joy.
They made really unique choices for user experience… the default mode for the system is actually a typewriter rom (!), and you can switch to a word processor mode. The system uses Atari style rom cartridges and had an integrated cassette drive, as well as an optional floppy. The weird thing was that a daisy wheel printer was the power supply and was required for the whole thing to work.
Even crazier was that they had a version where you could attach your ColecoVision game console into a dock and convert it into a general purpose computer.
Bruce Damer's Digibarn Computer Museum in Scotts Valley CA has been looking for someone to take over its collection since Bruce has redirected his personal research effort into AI from digital computer history.
Of course there is also the Computer History Museum in Mountain View, CA.
Wikipedia has a list of computer museums.
The Compuseum in Philadelphia is the latest new museum. (https://thecompuseum.org). It is the brainchild of James Scherrer who has done an amazing job collecting resources and support. Philadelphia is the original home of ENIAC (John Mauchly and J. Presper Eckert, Jr.).
And a word of caution. Real vintage machines are made from parts no longer manufactured, consume large amounts of power, are often water cooled, and need a large amount of physical space. They date from a time when the resource (compute cycles, storage) was so precious that having a staff of hardware engineers to keep the hardware working could be justified. On the software side, most systems were unique, non-standard, and supported by a team of five or more systems programmers. Economics forced a "small is beautiful" style on everything: those gifted programmers who could solve big problems with small speedy programs were in great demand.
Would love to have working versions of any, but near impossible now I’m living in Singapore :(
Haven’t tried one yet though.
NeXT’s computers[1] also seems very cool. Haven’t tried them either but I’ve used both WindowMaker and macOS.
A really interesting one might be Apple Newton, they have been quite powerful for their time. I think a few years ago I read that there is still a vibrant community around it.
In my opinion, the filing system of "hit SAVE and write whatever you want, up to 254 characters in a record, and search for them later with FIND" is literally an offline, portable Twitter-esque infodumping tool. Simply elegant.
I do some programming on them for fun and try, when I have the time, to make them really workable. With Symbos and some cheat hardware, this works pretty well.
I always wanted to play with HyperCard too, shouldn’t be too tough to get an old G4 mac booted into it, right?
Beyond that, I've been tinkering a little bit (emphasis on "little") with building a home-built ad-hoc z-80 machine. By ad-hoc, I just mean, not specifically modeling after any well known design from back in the day. Just taking a z-80 CPU, attaching memory, etc., and trying to build something that can - at a minimum - blink some LED's in response to code I write. The plan (for now) is to write code and cross-compile from a PC and burn the code to an EEPROM which the z80 will boot from. Not sure I plan to go as far as implementing keyboard I/O, a display adapter, etc. Maybe. Time / focus will be the big factors.
The C64 was my first, and I'm still using the platform, but I've moved to the ultimate64 fpga implementation.
Other than that, I really want an Olivetti M24SP with amber monochrome screen, because that was the first computer I owned as a kid.
Glad I’m not alone!
Haven’t acquired any myself yet, but I’d like to. In fact I’m glad to hear you’re having fun with the C64 since I figured that would be my first one.
Recommendations?
The lisp machines are really cool, and I believe the MSX has been mentioned.
However one that I keep coming back to with fascination is the Sharp X68000, a Japanese computer based on the Motorola 68k.
It used hardware very similar to late 80s and early 90s arcade games, and in fact has excellent ports of things like Street Fighter 2.
But the whole aesthetic of it, along with what it could output for graphics and sound - as an outsider, it looks like it was way ahead of the US and UK computers of the time (the closest contender being the Amiga).
Would love to pick one up and try writing some code for it someday, although I expect I’ll need to brush up on my Japanese.
Recently I've been fascinated by the PLATO system, although I have never used it in hardware or emulated form.
Unfortunately you can't personally emulate it because the system images are not publicly available. There seems to be a public access emulation however.
I just got a gift card from my company so decided to order a C64 mini. Partly because I heard it's a fascinating machine, and partly I figured it's a good option to introduce a retro machine to my son when he grows up a bit. Although it is in fact an emulator but I think it's the best option unless I can afford a few hundred bucks and know how to fix the authentic C64.
But I also wouldn't mind a Cray-1.
The VIC-20 is another fun machine to work with. There's not much memory and the way it handles graphics is quite interesting.
Laptops can be annoying due to the nonstandard parts and limited expansion capabilities (save for PCMCIA cards), but they are very compact and self-contained and I'm currently living in a small house.
- The Acorn BBC system sounds like a very rich environment for an 8-bit of its era.
- The Jupiter Ace that ran FORTH instead of BASIC.The easiest way to get started would be an emulator.
If you don't need hardware, there might be more interest in programming on simulators for various old systems.
Also, it's kind of fake retro, but I'm pretty excited for the Commander X16, again, mostly because the community is so cool.
I recently bought an SUN E5500 with 8 CPUs for 200E. The big advantage (and disadvantage) of big machines that they tend to be too big to forget somewhere in an attic and sometimes can be had for little money.
https://www.old-computers.com/museum/computer.asp?st=1&c=345
- 128K of RAM
- single, 360K floppy drive
- 16 color CGA
- a mouse
- only 4 arrow keys on a full size keyboard
- loads DOS from a cartridge!
I don't currently, and don't anticipate ever having the power and space to own one myself though.
Aegis may not be the best general purpose system, but let's hear it for niche.
That Sony CRT is attached to a MUCH faster, insanely great PC with Intel Pentium MMX. All I could remember was MMX was suppose to be the holy grail of CPU and solve every single god damn computing problem. At least that was how it was marketed at the time. And a S3 Verge, actually I am not even sure if it was a verge or something before that, Trio something? Doesn't matter it was a S3 Graphics card, and at a later date upgraded with 3DFx Voodoo 3D Accelerator!. The era of OpenGL vs Glide! And a Sound Blaster Sound Card ( Where is Creative now? ).
I was always a PC guy back then, because you know Apple Mac used to be insanely expensive. I mean if you do price adjusted for inflation the Mac today are down right cheap. And I really like to do tinkering. What really took me to Apple was teaching parents / elderlies how to use a computer. There is a (edited) tweet which sums things up very nicely.
>"I spent a week with my parents teaching them to use a Computer. It took much of the first day to get them to learn to map the horizontal plane of the desk to the vertical plane of the screen and to stop lifting the mouse in the air."
>"Left Click, Right Click, and Double Click might seem like three trivial things, but to them it was like trying to solve three body problem in physics."
I admit I was frustrated with their stupidity at the time. ( Yes I know, that was naive of me ) Some how after Steve Jobs came back to Apple in 1997, he was talking about the user experience and how people have trouble using the computer. That was when every thing clicked for me. I got them a Mac. And it was somehow much easier for them to use it. At least easier than a PC, but still difficult in their view.
Then I made myself a hackintosh when they announced their switch to x86. And later bought a MacBook Pro.
After years of some of the most frustrating support calls to my mother-in-law to explain her Mac to her, we got her an iPad, to which I’ve not had a single tech support call in 10 years.
The iPad was really revolutionary in many ways. Those who never had to support their family and friends with computer problems might never grasp how frustrating it is. The touch screen and home button was the single biggest computing invention of the century. Anything messed up, press home button and you return to the original state. No worry or hassle.
Ok, this is turning into a long post of personal computing history.
