Any retrocomputing fans in the house?
First and foremost: I'm not certain whether this belongs in ~hobbies or ~comp. As I consider this a hobby, this seemed like the more appropriate spot, but I'm more than happy to move/repost in ~comp.
So for the past few years, I've really been hit by the computer nostalgia bug. It originally started as me just wanting to dive back into MUDs, and the whole retrocomputing fascination probably came from me wanting to recreate the "good ole' days" where I would pull up the Windows 98 terminal app and connect to my favorite MUD.
Now I've got a room in my house dedicated to this old, esoteric hobby that happens to take up a lot of space. Admittedly, I don't know a TON about hardware but I've been having a blast tinkering around on old machines. It's even more fun to see how I can push the limits of the computers given a few modern tweaks here and there.
Here's what I've currently got sitting up in the Upstairs Museum of Retrocomputing:
- A Compaq Prolinea 5/75 Pentium - this was given to me by a friend who had it sitting in the basement. To my surprise, everything was still in working order and it fired right up (Windows NT 4.0!) on the first try. Of course, I ripped out the old barrel clock battery and put in something safer. I'd say I tinker with this one the most on the software side, while still trying to keep the hardware as close to original as possible.
- A Compaq Prolinea 3/25s 386 - I just picked this bad boy up and am working on getting an OS installed. It had some damage from a leaky clock battery but I don't believe anything was irreversible. I'm not too confident in the whopping 4 MB of memory, but I'm planning on installing Windows 3.11 on this one.
- A Tandy TRS-80 CoCo 2 - It works, but I haven't spent a ton of time with it because I don't have an old TV or monitor with a coax connection. I'd love to figure out how to create my own cartridge with a homebrew version of Zork or Adventure.
- A Power Mac G5 - It's not ancient, but I think it's still worthy of being in the museum. I haven't had a chance to play around with it yet because I don't have the right video cable. I'll get around to it eventually.
- A Generic Pentium 4 - I actually found this one at a Goodwill store. This one fired right up and had a copy of Windows 2000 installed, including all of the old work files that the person left intact. This one has been the easiest to mod because it's somewhat closer to modern and uses a common form factor. So I've plugged in a new OS, new ethernet, etc. At some point the technology starts to blur and you start questioning why you aren't just using a modern computer.
What's next on my list? I'd like to start playing around with computers/OSes that I'm unfamiliar with. I grew up in a DOS/Mac OS 7-10/Windows world, so I'd love to get my hands on a NeXt, BeOS, etc. or even an Apple II.
But first I need to get the damn 386 running again.
I would love to seriously get into retro-computing as a hobby, but until now I haven't really had the space, time, or money I would want to dedicate to it. But that hasn't stopped me from enjoying it how I can! I love watching breakdowns of older systems on YouTube, for example The 8-bit Guy, and beyond that I've watched just about every Ben Eater video and have come very close to buying his 6502 kit (very relevant to this discussion is his most recent video on running Apple I software on a breadboard). In addition I love reading or watching shows about this era. One of my favorite books is The Soul of a New Machine by Tracy Kidder. Non-fiction, it follows a team of engineers in 1980-1981 as they race to get a new minicomputer to market and devote almost every waking moment to it. Seriously, this book reads like a thriller and I highly recommend it if you're interested in the era. In addition one of my favorite shows is Halt and Catch Fire, which I also highly recommend to interested parties.
I'm just waiting for the right moment to jump in and get a system of my own. I think my ideal "retro" computer would be the original Apple Macintosh. Its still sleek looking even today, and I would love to play around on one. I think my infatuation with retro computing stems from the fact that these computers are still simple enough that one can have a pretty accurate mental model of how they are working, all the way down to the "bare metal", while still being complex enough to do really interesting things. Very early computers (as in, 40s/50s) are also interesting to me but mostly from a historical perspective, whereas recent computers are less interesting to me from a "how do they work" standpoint but obviously very useful in terms of capability and practicality. There's a sweet spot somewhere around the late 70s to early 80s that just endlessly fascinates me.
I'm so glad you included Halt and Catch Fire in there because I was going to recommend it to you otherwise. That show, especially the first two seasons, really nails it from a tech perspective.
This was one of my lightbulb moments when tinkering around with one of the old computers. I was replacing some parts, and it occurred to me that it's literally just a bunch of electricity following some circuits. I'm not hardware inclined to begin with so this was pretty revelatory.
OK, if you like the show then you will love this Halt and Catch Fire syllabus I found a couple of years back. I have yet to go through close to everything but its a great collection of related materials and reading that ties in to each episode of the show.
Well this is just a delight to learn about today!
That show really made me want to get a Tandy TRS-80 Model 4. Frankly, I'd love to find one that doesn't work and build a modern computer in it's shell. I think it'd be rad to have a place in the house where one still has to go to the internet, rather than just pulling out a phone for every little thing I want to Google.
This is more or less the reason why some universities use them in computer-architecture-related lessons nowadays. They indeed are really good for this purpose.
You have to have watched LGR, right? He's my favorite retro computer guy. It helps we are near the same age and have pretty similar tastes.
Retrocomputing geek checking in!
I love old Unix workstations, so I'm rocking a Sun SPARCstation 10 and a SGI Indigo2. I've been trying to find a period-appropriate CRT monitor for them, but it looks like there's also a recent retro gaming movement that has sent CRT prices sky high. With the help of tgcware, I've been able to get some modern software running on Solaris 7. There's also fun stuff to play with, like Internet Explorer for UNIX and Macintosh Application Environment. I'm even toying with the idea of using it to host my personal website.
I also have a SE/30 that currently boots System 7 off a BlueSCSI, but I'd really like to get A/UX running on it. Unfortunately, A/UX doesn't seem to like the GGLABS MACSIMM I have installed in it. Maybe I just need to obtain a second classic Mac...
I have a BBC Master and accompanying CRT, but no space to tinker with it unfortunately
I have a stored Mac Plus with an external floppy drive and a Mac SE plus a lot of original 3.5" floppies with programs as old as MacPaint and even a few manuals. I even have a carry case for the Mac Plus that allowed me to haul it home, sometimes on my motorcycle, making it possibly the heaviest "portable" computer Ive ever lugged around.
Those were the machines I brought into our computer lab when I was teaching basic computer science courses to junior and senior high back in the 'olden days' when the Mac vs. PC wars were in full tilt and MANY people were predicting the death of Apple now that PCs were so ubiquitous. Guess they were wrong.
I haven't pulled them out in ages and I recently read there is a battery on the motherboard that can wear out and wreck the board so I really hope that hasnt happened to them.
Yes, it's the old style of CMOS battery that would eventually leak battery acid all over the board, potentially destroying other stuff along the way. You should definitely at least remove the old one and clean up the battery acid -- sooner than later if possible. Here's a quick guide from an even quicker google
You got me motivated to dig the ol' clunker out of the closet. Cant find the Mac Plus but I found the SE/30. It fires up and the screen works but the hard drive didnt engage. I found a System 7.5 startup disk among the hundred or so floppies and it did indeed get it to the desktop. And boy is it SLOW running on a floppy.
But really, my only goal was to keep it long enough to show my grandkids. Looks like, even on ebay that they're not really worth that much - although I do have an original wide body Apple Imagewriter, as well as an Apple Modem, a whopping 300 baud! and still shrink wrapped in its original box, and stickered at $250.00 to go with it.
I have a lot of nostalgia for old Commodore 64 games, but I'm not sure I'd enjoy trying to play them again on an actual 40 year old computer.
From vintage computing, I'm less on hardware and more on software. I've more specifically targeting old mini-computer operating systems to run. At one point I had a Sun Ultra 60 workstation, a couple SGI Indy workstations, and an SGI Challenge L (Indy sized server). All the hardware has since moved on.
On the UNIX side of things, I'll probably look at eventually spinning up AIX on Qemu. There's a few writeups on it where they had AIX 5 and 7 working. Still want to get Irix going but that hasn't happened so far. Shame, too.
For those not aware, SIMH does hardware simulation of a load of old systems. Lots of DEC PDP hardware in there as well as DEC VAX if you've got a copy of OpenVMS around. There's a load of other mini / mainframe computers it supports as well. Data General 16-bit systems along with all the supported Data General operating systems, a really old IBM mainframe, HP 2000, HP 3000, CPC mainframe, and a few others I'm forgetting off the top of my head.
Outside that, there's Hercules for emulating IBM mainframes from the 360 architecture to the current z/Series architecture. MVS 3.8j is the last available IBM mainframe OS available to pull down, stripped of copyright bits like ISPF and RACF. There's also old versions of VM and some pre-MVS OSes like DOS. That said, you'll have to have those higher OS'es and they're not freely available.
There's then a load of separate emulators for various other minis. I've found them for Pr1me computers with Pr1me OS and old Crays from before Unicos. There's also an emulator for running MULTICS which is what Bell Labs was helping with until they got pulled to create UNIX instead. Probably a load more I'm missing off the top of my head and I've only managed to download / bookmark many of them.
I was able to get IRIX running in MAME, but it was excruciatingly slow. I found the performance to be not worth it for tinkering in IRIX, but it did boot up and all.
Honesty, that's impressive given we used to run MAME on Irix at an effects place I worked at in the 90s. Then the fun with bzflag games after hours. Good times.
Hopefully someone eventually gets Qemu going well enough to boot it. Though at least with AIX, it's still around and updated. Irix has been done for quite a while.
COCO2... OMG.
I remember going to the mall with my parents and then standing for hours in front of Radioshack playing Sokoban on the Coco. I believe that is also where I learned the words "Bossa Nova" (IYKYK).
You definitely need an XT-class machine (8088 processor) and get MS-DOS 6.22. You have to struggle with EMM386 and HIMEM.SYS and figure out how to work the two floppy drives (because not all of us were lucky enough to have the 10MB hard drive dammit). You can then go down the annals of pre-Windows OSes in desperate search for something that can multi-task, because downloading Police Quest 2 from your favorite Warez BBS takes hours on your dial-up and you want to learn how to use WordPerfect at the same time. DESQview was promising at one point, GEOS not so much. Somewhere along the lines you learn about OS/2, install it, hate it, and go back to DOS. Terminate and Stay Resident (TSR) programs were also a thing at one point but the utility ultimately got overshadowed by Windows.
I think computing on the XT taught me everything I needed to know about using computers at the time. OS-level pipes, redirections, DEBUG.exe, interrupts, drive letter assignment, paths, environment variables, etc. Every class of computer beyond that were just variations on a theme.
Yes sir! I'm a retrocomputing fan, although I prefer 90s/early 2000s retro computing. Basically windows 95-early XP era.
If that counts, I have Abit BP-6 board with two 366MHz Celerons and 384MB RAM and two Seagate 20GB harddrives in it. I got it sometime around 2010, the board that is. I got CPUs as scrap for free and board cost me 20USD back then. Later I got GeForce 256 SDR (the first GeForce) for it. It gathers dust but it was running Linux for some time just as a fun project.
I also have some unspcified HP dual Pentium 3 server (700MHz I believe) with ECC RAM and actual SCSI RAID card and 4 HDDs. Never used that for anything, I just got it for free around probably 2012.
I also have PowerMac G3 (333MHz I believe) and G5 (dual-core). G3 has original system on it, I tried some MacOS X on G5 andthen compiled Gentoo Linux on that but failed to boot (due to no being able to setup open firmware or whatever...). G5 functions as nice decoration in living room, I love the aesthetics.
Nothing older or more retro, I'm too young for that :-) My first PC encounter was 286, though.