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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?

#31

Post by kolleykibber »

I pulled an Amstrad cpc464 out of the loft at the beginning of the year and headed deep down the rabbit hole. For me the most interesting thing is interfacing with modern microcontrollers. Pics, stm32, esp(s) etc. There's something about telneting to BBS over the internet from a machine from 1985. The wargames effect maybe. Standouts for the CPC include the M4 board, the dandanator and the USIFAC. I have a lot of respect for those who built these. Despite an engineering degree and a 25 year career my low level knowledge has expanded greatly from playing with these things. It's also been a lot of fun.

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

#32

Post by stevekemp »

eismcc wrote: post #18

Z80 machines w/ CP/M and the IMSAI 8080. I like the old IMSAI 8080 machines and got to use one many years ago and it’s fun and visceral to program with machine code. direct understanding.

I've spent the past few months playing around with a simple single-board Z80-based system, running CP/M 2.x

I even wrote a simple text-based adventure game for it, first in C, then in z80 assembly.

I grew up with the ZX Spectrum, so the Z80 is a processor I remember fondly.

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

#33

Post by redis_mlc »

johng wrote: post #2

Wanted to pick up some old SGI stuff but it’s still hard to get and very expensive.

A lot of Open Source code has been hard to build on SGI since around 2000. So don't get too excited if you're planning to use it for anything aside from museum exhibits.

And if you're in SV, you can always visit the Computer History Museum to see them.

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

#34

Post by albertkoz »

kolleykibber wrote: post #31

I pulled an Amstrad cpc464 out of the loft at the beginning of the year and headed deep down the rabbit hole. For me the most interesting thing is interfacing with modern microcontrollers. Pics, stm32, esp(s) etc. There's something about telneting to BBS over the internet from a machine from 1985. The wargames effect maybe. Standouts for the CPC include the M4 board, the dandanator and the USIFAC. I have a lot of res…

Amstrad is definitely one of the machines I want to buy at some point. I really like the design.

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

#35

Post by albertkoz »

kiawe_fire wrote: post #21

I grew up during the monolithic Windows XP / 7 era, so vintage computers (especially 80s) has fascinated me. 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 fas…

I got my first computer in the early 90's, so for the very same reason vintage computers fascinate me. I started with C64 as it's cheap and got amazing community around. To this day, couple of brand new games are released every year. Mine got wifi card and SD card reader. I actually got already 3 different commodore64 models, as I couldn't decide which one I like the most. Amigas are great, but they also are getting expensive. I bought my c64 for 50 Euro with the cables etc.

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

#36

Post by albertkoz »

drunkenmagician wrote: post #25

Classic Mac plus, NeXt cube, Sun IPS workstation. All from the computer era when I got started. These are the machines that inspired me. Would love to have working versions of any, but near impossible now I’m living in Singapore :(

I got classic Mac, unfortunately I find it quite boring. I would love to get NeXt but these are really expensive nowadays.

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

#37

Post by agent008t »

kolleykibber wrote: post #31

I pulled an Amstrad cpc464 out of the loft at the beginning of the year and headed deep down the rabbit hole. For me the most interesting thing is interfacing with modern microcontrollers. Pics, stm32, esp(s) etc. There's something about telneting to BBS over the internet from a machine from 1985. The wargames effect maybe. Standouts for the CPC include the M4 board, the dandanator and the USIFAC. I have a lot of res…

Are there any active BBS that you can still telnet to?
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