Ask HN: Which vintage computers do you find interesting?

I grew up with an Atari ST and I've enjoyed revisiting it. Growing up I stuck to really simple stuff, so it's been fun to to learn more about how it all works. There's a library called Atari Game Tools (AGT) that can do some really impressive things even on a stock STFM. With cross-compilation tools it's possible to build software on a PC in a few seconds before testing in an emulator.

The VIC-20 is another fun machine to work with. There's not much memory and the way it handles graphics is quite interesting.

[1] AGT: https://bitbucket.org/d_m_l/agtools/wiki/Home

Pretty much all of them, to my partner's chagrin.

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?

Oh, most of those mentioned in comment here are exotic. Atari? SGI? Mine isn't anything special. I have an old, 386DX MS-DOS PC with a large 5" Floppy Disc that somehow still turns on and work. Takes about a minute with cracking noise when booting up. I do that every few years and play around with it. I am pretty sure it is from the 80s. So that is coming close to 40 years. The old monitor is barely working though. But I have a Sony Trinitron CRT that still work. And I refuse to throw them away. ( Yes I have emotional attachment to them ) It was fun installing DOS Games you have to put in the Disc one by one, and I remember somehow getting Games running require some fiddling with IRQ.

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.

Game Boy, Game Boy Color, Game Boy Advance.

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.

I grew up in the 8-bit era, so that's mostly what I'm interested in from a retro computing perspective. Pretty much the whole Acorn lineup starting with the BBC and then going to the early ARMs is interesting, plus a bunch of the other early UK-built weird machines like home computers using Forth (I think that was the ORIC).

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.