Classic Computer Replicas

I have a few of these and enjoy them — the PDP-8 (emulated: PiDP-8), Altair 8800 (emulated: Altair-Duino), KIM-1 (more or less the real deal modulo the 6530 RIOT chips that are no longer available: PAL-1 and PAL-2).

These, as kits, are fun to assemble, fun then to play around with.

by "replica" you mean emulator or something else?

They do appear to mean emulator.

The PDP-8 was hardware replicated many times. In the '80s it was a common final year project. There's a classic textbook that works through designing and implementing a clone of the PDP-8/I [1]. I've run into a number of threads over the years where hobbyists have done it with TTL to varying degrees of completeness.

The Apollo Guidance Computer was recreated by a hobbyist from the original designs using a modern logic family but gate-equivalent -- and I can't find it online anymore! Anyone know?

You can still build an original Apple II. [2] Being from the late 1970s there was no custom logic; it's straight TTL plus a 6502, and all the chips are still in production except for the ROMs and DRAM, which are easy enough to work around or find used.

[1] https://www.amazon.ca/Art-Digital-Design-Introduction-Top-Do...

[2] https://www.reactivemicro.com/product/apple-ii-plus-rev-7-rf...

Old mini-computers, one of my favourite topics! Obligatory plug for doing achieving something similar today on a budget https://rodyne.com/?p=1751 discussed here https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42672366

It's worth looking at this from multiple angles, though.

Intuitively, I'm also extremely said that "workstations" aren't a thing anymore. That there are no professional, well-engineered, powerful Sun or SGI workstations anymore. In a sense, they even felt similar to sports cars: You drooled for them, often from a distance.

On the flip side, I don't miss exactly that: Not being able to afford such a thing, or even if you theoretically could, having to shell out tens of thousands of dollars (not even accounting for inflation yet).

Extremely powerful PCs are now available to nearly everyone who wants one, especially if you take into account that even a 10+ year old dumpster PC does more than almost all these past workstations in several regards.

We'd probably be lamenting the opposite if that wasn't the case. But yes, the shine and magic is mostly gone...