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Ask HN: Which vintage computers do you find interesting?

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Re: Ask HN: Which vintage computers do you find interesting?

#121

Post by nonamenoslogan »

TheMog wrote: post #112
albertkoz wrote: post #82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I used to live in the UK for couple of years and I never heard of BBC before I living there. Right now I am hunting for Acorn and BBC and I am planning on flying to the UK just to pick them up. It's funny how these systems were so big, however only on the domestic market. I would love to get SGI but in the country I live in, it's almost imposible, same as SUN and NeXT.

For my own amusement I just had a quick look at eBay and it looks like old SUN gear has got expensive since last looked. NeXT gear has always been expensive, that doesn't seem to have changed.

Sun gear has REALLY jumped in price, especially the early 32bit SPARC stuff. I had a BUNCH of them in the mid 2000's, an IPX, SS10, SS20, Ultra1, and a beautiful full stack LX with CD-ROM and two external hard drives. Sold them all on over the years--now ONE machine is worth more than all I sold combined. I recently had a hankering for another Sparc and settled on a SunFire V100 because it was reasonably priced and I wanted to avoid buying a 13w3 monitor and Sun-Keyboard at the upper price range they are going for. Still a very capable server and it scratched my big-endian itch for the time being.

Re: Ask HN: Which vintage computers do you find interesting?

#122

Post by albertkoz »

markus_zhang wrote: post #115
xkeysc0re wrote: post #7

The C64 is really sweet - one of my goals is to eventually develop a game for it (thinking a monorail/train sim like a simplified version of https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Densha_de_Go!_2_K%C5%8Dsoku-he... ) 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 retrocomput…

I just purchased a C64 Mini. Can't afford a real C64 and its maintenance but a Mini is well in the budget. It's essentially an emulator running on another computer but I think it would be a nice place to play some classic games and write my own assembly code!

I bought mine real C64 cheaper than Mini. I live in central Europe and you can grab c64 here with cables etc. for around $40-50.

Re: Ask HN: Which vintage computers do you find interesting?

#123

Post by watersb »

quickthrower2 wrote: post #85
mikewarot wrote: post #63

Long ago, I had an interview with a startup in Chicago called US Robotics. They had a Kaypro 2, a complete computer, with a built-in display... and it was portable! So much less stuff than the S-100 systems I was used to. I was in awe. 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…

I remember US Robotics being a big modem brand, considered a good brand if I recall correctly

Oh yes US Robotics modems were some of the first consumer modems to get data throughput above 9600 bits per second.

They also created a weird but very interesting computer designed by some guy named Jeff Hawkins.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Palm_(PDA)

Which, come to think of it, is my pick for Interesting Computer.

Very fun to program, a couple of extensions to turn the Notepad into a Wiki (we would call it a Zettlekasten now, I suppose). The initial API was very much like Macintosh C programming.

Re: Ask HN: Which vintage computers do you find interesting?

#124

Post by watersb »

wisemanwillhear wrote: post #61
bediger4000 wrote: post #4

Radio Shack Color Computer III - they had a multi-tasking OS, OS-9, that worked via memory bank switching. It had a windowing system that worked via in-band signalling, which is quite different than any windowing system today.

I grew up on a Color Computer 2 (Coco 2) (Exact same specs as the Coco 1 but reduced number of chips, making it cheaper I understand). Learning to program on it as early as 7 years old got me hooked on software development. Later someone gave us a Coco 3, which was too little, too late be a market success. Still, there was something attractive about the simplicity of those old 8-bit computers. At the end of the day,…

Learning to write 6809 Assembly language programs set me up quite nicely for the wave 32-bit 68000 machines.

But yes, I think microcomputers had to get more complicated to move forward. The original Macintosh team worked like mad to keep the hardware design as simple as possible, but virtually no computer manufacturer could afford a project like that.

(The first Mac hardware prototype was a 6809 board. Not a CoCo :-)

Re: Ask HN: Which vintage computers do you find interesting?

#125

Post by watersb »

I worked at a company that actually got a Connection Machine.

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.

Re: Ask HN: Which vintage computers do you find interesting?

#126

Post by drewzero1 »

albertkoz wrote: post #84
drewzero1 wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah old Macs on their own are very dull computers. Once you start to get into third-party tweaks and games that push the hardware to its limits are where it really starts to get interesting. My favorite classic Macs are the ones with color screens and CD-ROM drives. The multimedia possibilities really start to open up! I have a Performa 575[1] that was just about perfect for this, but it suffered a fall in storage t…

Thanks! I acquired my first vintage Mac couple months ago (two Macintosh Classic) and I was very surprised with the machines. I think I need to look more into what was possible. Thank you for the ideas, I will definitely look into getting another early Mac computer.

The Macintosh Classic is my favorite compact Mac, even if the SE/30 was technically miles ahead. The Classic looks the best (in my '90s-biased opinion) and is the only one that has a working operating system in ROM, which I think is pretty cool. I traded a Mac SE (FD800) for mine and haven't looked back.

I also really enjoy the LC line, especially the pizza box form factor. They have similar styling to the Classic but have a color monitor, and still don't take up much space. There was also an Apple][-on-a-card that could plug into an LC's expansion port and allow it to run Apple ][ software... I haven't tracked one of those down yet, but I see them come up occasionally.

Re: Ask HN: Which vintage computers do you find interesting?

#127

Post by chaoticmass »

nonamenoslogan wrote: post #121
TheMog wrote: post #112

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For my own amusement I just had a quick look at eBay and it looks like old SUN gear has got expensive since last looked. NeXT gear has always been expensive, that doesn't seem to have changed.

Sun gear has REALLY jumped in price, especially the early 32bit SPARC stuff. I had a BUNCH of them in the mid 2000's, an IPX, SS10, SS20, Ultra1, and a beautiful full stack LX with CD-ROM and two external hard drives. Sold them all on over the years--now ONE machine is worth more than all I sold combined. I recently had a hankering for another Sparc and settled on a SunFire V100 because it was reasonably priced and I…

I first learned Linux (and C) on a SparcStation LX back around 2005 with Debian. I had it fully kitted out with 9.1GB SCSI Hard Drive, 128MB RAM. I sold it around 2011 for $300 and thought that was a lot. Now I see them going for 3x that amount and I wish I'd kept it.

Re: Ask HN: Which vintage computers do you find interesting?

#128

Post by markus_zhang »

albertkoz wrote: post #122
markus_zhang wrote: post #115

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I just purchased a C64 Mini. Can't afford a real C64 and its maintenance but a Mini is well in the budget. It's essentially an emulator running on another computer but I think it would be a nice place to play some classic games and write my own assembly code!

I bought mine real C64 cheaper than Mini. I live in central Europe and you can grab c64 here with cables etc. for around $40-50.

That's really neat. In Canada it's probably some 200 bucks plus delivery :/

Where do you hunt these stuffs? Ebay?

Re: Ask HN: Which vintage computers do you find interesting?

#129

Post by ralphc »

I do most of my collecting by being old and not throwing things away. From experience a good vintage computer to have is a 1999-2000 era Pentium III with Windows 98 on it. It's old enough to recognize 5.25" floppies in the bios, but also USB drives. Put Windows 98 on it and you can run old software from pure DOS, Windows 3.x, Windows 9x. I've put a big enough hard disk in it to suck up all my files and software from my older machines and floppy disks.

Re: Ask HN: Which vintage computers do you find interesting?

#130

Post by DerekL »

kgwxd wrote: post #59

Atari 2600 programming is really fun and has a super active community. I suspect it's one of the most active retro communities out there right now. 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 have the urge to write an Atari 2600 program to solve some of the recent Project Euler problems. I’ve already found that it’s feasible. The hardest part is input and output.

https://projecteuler.net/problem=759

https://projecteuler.net/problem=760

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