131–140 of 142 posts
The easiest way to get started would be an emulator.
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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?
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I had a Kaypro when I was a technical writer at Amiga. Quite an amazing machine for its time. With it and WordStar, I got a lot of writing done!
wait, you were actually at 'Amiga' Los Gatos (pre atari/commodore acquisition battle) or at Commodore-Amiga?
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.
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That's really neat. In Canada it's probably some 200 bucks plus delivery :/ Where do you hunt these stuffs? Ebay?
Local ads websites & facebook groups. More likely to get something cheap. Ebay like sites are usually full of traders, that resell them for profit.
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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 Zet…
I’m into a weird part of retrocomputing where I mess with things other than just general purpose computers. Most of my equipment is old network/telecom stuff (mostly ISDN and general T1/E1 stuff rn, but I want to get into ATM) and network analyzers. Notably my Agilent J2300E which is a massive Windows 98 machine that look like a laptop but contains all sorts of sync and async serial interfaces too expensive to put on…
Have you see the VT-103? PDP-11 in a VT-100 chassis! https://www.ebay.com/itm/124816498894
The Z80 and CP/M are where it's at for me. A couple of years ago I ported a Z80 emulator to run under Unreal Engine 4, and wrote a telnet client for it to allow it to connect out to BBS's on the internet: https://i.imgur.com/59RufvT.png
Please tell me you can wander around different rooms and there are multiple terminals like this.