The Impractical but Indisputable Rise of Retrocomputing | Hacker News Reader

The Impractical but Indisputable Rise of Retrocomputing

nytimes.com

125 pointsdoener134 comments

It's easy to attribute the interest in retrocomputing to nostalgia, and it's certainly a part of the appeal, but I believe that there's something else much more important for many of us(1): an escape from the overwhelming complexity and neverending change in modern tech.

With an old computer, you can invest your time fixing it, learning about it, and generally tinkering with it, while being sure it won't become obsolete over night rendering all your efforts null. It ALREADY is obsolete and you already set goals that are completely independent of that status.

I think it is something that's part of the appeal of anything historical: the immutability of the past. Every discovery you make can only be made obsolete by your own incomplete understanding of the subject, not by the subject itself becoming irrelevant under your feet.

(1) I don't personally own any item that could be considered retrocomputing, but I enjoy learning about it (I'm an avid consumer of RMC and 8bitguy videos, or Xboxahoy for the retrogaming bits, for example) for the history, mostly. I'd like to own a few old machines though, but I don't have the time to give them the love they'd deserve.

Kind of like classic cars and guitars, eh?

I definitely think there is something to what your saying.

For me personally, I've been slowly progressing lower in the software stack, both in terms of language (down to assembly) and in the software I'm exploring (operating systems and firmware) partially out of curiosity but I hit a pretty big wall when I got to modern operating systems. There is just so much in-scope to learn all at once that I was overwhelmed and not making a huge amount of progress.

What ended up allowing me to start getting past that wall was researching old operating systems and old hardware. I found and modified some variants of the older hardware implemented either as software or in the more fun cases as an all-in-one FPGA design. Some of the tricks that those operating systems performed, and the way applications were designed to run are really creative. There are concepts in some of those earlier operating systems which are truly novel and if they had caught on we'd likely have a very different concept of what an operating system is. Some of those might become relevant again if our computing models evolve to a different paradigm (I'm especially looking at distributed compute and process scheduling, kind of like Erlang but for the entire operating system).

Being able to see why we have certain components in modern operating systems and how the evolution of hardware and requirements has led to what our operating systems today do has been a really fun adventure. There is still so much I don't understand but what was once a giant inscrutable black box has sort of become a collection of smaller pieces that I can toy with individually.

I've been looking into Game Boy Advance development as a way to build an indie game. There are several reasons I chose it:

* It's not extremely limited like an NES, e.g. I can imagine some of my game ideas working well on it.

* The limitations it does have restrict what I can do, helping to prevent me from scope-creeping myself out of ever releasing something.

* It's a well-known platform, with several high-quality emulators. This means that no matter how much modern hardware changes over time, it should remain playable due to the fact that emulators will be kept up to date on newer hardware.

* To your point about it not becoming obsolete in the future, it's a fixed piece of hardware. I can learn the ins and outs of that hardware, and my knowledge/tools etc. will still be useful if I want to make another game on the same platform.

My interests in retro:

- 20% nostalgia

- 30% intellectual curiosity (I know a bit about the 90s, not the 70s 80s ways, I was utterly surprised by 40s analog computers, and even a slide ruler is amazing to me)

- 30% old age taste for simple yet useful (I loathe the cost of aesthetics and the few benefits of todays most tech stack)

- 10% margin error

In the movie Back to the Future 2, from 1989, Marty travels to 2015 and sees an original Mac sitting in an antique store window with a sign saying 'antique computer, circa 1984'.

I remember that was a huge laugh at the time to think that these boring beige computers of the 80s would be collectibles someday. And yet here we are...

My dad was pretty attached to his 1984 Macintosh when I accidentally destroyed it about 25 years ago. He instructed me to always put the dust cover on it when it was not in use. I interpreted that too literally, so this particular Mac suffocated in its own dust cover while I walked away to eat dinner. It was reportedly smoking when it was found by my sister. Its final act in life was to help me catalogue my rock collection in HyperCard.

Anyways...it is still sitting around in its original box, so I’ve always wondered what it would take to resurrect it. I’d be interested if anyone had an intuition for whether such a project is DIYable, a specialist-only job, or a lost cause?

Ask any electronics place, hackaday, reddit or else. I bet solid money they'll diagnose the sh*t out of your mac. As long as there's no massive charred spot / big burned area it may be a matter of replacing the few overheated components. It's a super well known piece of equipment, always a plus.

> It's a super well known piece of equipment, always a plus.

I think they said it was the original 1984 mac.

Isn't that a pretty well known piece of equipment ?

It was a "Mac Plus" joke.

Likely fixable, probably fried analog board and the whole thing will need new capacitors. 68kmla.org is where to go

I’d say the first step is find someone with a working one - and see if the various disks are readable. If they are - move forward.

If not, it’s more a theoretical excercise.

Some of the benefits of retro computing is learning how computers work on a lower level than you might with a modern computer. While modern computers are far more complex than any retro and there isn't a one-to-one analog for how they work the fundamentals are there. I learned starting in the 8-bit era and advanced as computers advanced. Also a great impetus to learn how to write small optimized code to work within the limitations of the platform.

Conceptually all the pieces are there - modern computers have greatly enhanced capabilities and can obviously do much more - but you can often “black box” large segments of a modern when comparing to a classic.

And the classic computers run on “human scale” in that they can be understood both in the parts and a whole - perfect for learning.

The whole goal of a modern computer is to abstract away the lower level details that don't matter to most people. The benefit of growing up with those classic computers is that you got to understand the details before they were abstracted away out of sight. The nostalgia is not misplaced.

It's worth noting that learning how computers work at a lower level goes down to the electronics. I've seen some repair videos go down to digging out an oscilloscope and looking at what is on the bus. Good luck trying to connect the probes on modern equipment, never mind being able to afford the test equipment.

It is also possible to make good progress with a cheap iron and a multimeter, learn about component properties, reading circuit diagrams, and many other relevant skills. Best of all, all of the learning is being done on what was real world hardware at one time rather than circuits designed for learning or that are isolated from the system that they would normally be part of.

What is even more interesting once you know how it works at that level is to learn how electricity works at a more fundamental level.

You don't really need a full blown retro computer for all that. There are plenty of "modern" (as in "in production and in use") 8 bit embedded CPUs out there.

Arduino/atmega comes to my mind, just ditch the IDE. Instead program assembly and assemble + program the board using their toolchain. Of course, at first the analog part (CRT, old keyboard) will be missing, but these are not needed to write your own little kernel. However, I did a quick search, and it seems the Arduino can interface with a VGA display: On the hardware side of things this only needs some resistors, and software side could be deemed as an interesting exercise ;-)

There's also the charm of programming graphics and sound chips, and having the same resources available as those from the 80s. There aren't endless computer magazines devoted to learning about programming the arduino and all the interesting tricks to get better graphics. Sure we have tutorials and all the information available on the internet, but arduino is niche, while commodore 64 was completely mainstream. You can definitely learn the same concepts on both, but I think it's subjective (depending on how someone learns) which is the better platform to learn on. In fact, I'd argue to learn on both!

I think part of the appeal of the retro computers is learning to work within their limitations from memory, sound capability, etc. Sometimes having boundaries can fuel ingenuity.

Hats of to the demo scene in that regard. (Some of them just should do less drugs ^^")

The only downside to this approach is that you have to use a modern computer to do anything with that retro like hardware. Not that that is a horrible thing but it's another layer.

By far one of the most useful courses I had while pursuing my degree was on writing assembly for 16-bit DOS. The course didn't just focus on writing assembly for its own sake, but rather as a way to teach lower level concepts.

e.g. the entire concept of CPU registers, translating 1:1 between assembly and machine code, examining C compiler output, low-level debugging, disassembly, etc.

Day one of the course had us download and set up DOSBox, which was brilliant. DOSBox will run on a huge number of platforms and, as you and others suggest, locks you into a very well-known simpler 16-bit system that can't ever change (the games it's meant to emulate would stop working).

The 8-bit days were a lot more fun. Before they became yoked to the load and became 'workstations' with 'workspaces'. (Hardy-har) Before the rainbow became a tin-plated badge, before 'abstraction' for 'security', and 'performance' became 'critical'. Sic semper tyrannis.

Looks like the hobby's back, what with the numerous YTube refurb/collect/code channels and the expensive modern gear being used to diagnose their ills. Too bad I tossed out those glass jars full of logic chips a decade ago. (But not that rare Curtis chip.)

were they ? I certainly enjoyed my Apple ][+ and 8086 back in the days but for different reasons. Back in the days, we had freedom to tinker : you could rip the computer apart (you had to sometimes). You had to use a fully understandable computer. But you also had to spend days to get things done : small memory, floppies, had to work in assembly to get meaningful results, 0-standardisation, documentation hard to get by, etc. But I was a kid and this was fun nonetheless, because it was coding for the sake of beating other coders, no need to earn one's life with it.

Now I can start working on my neural network in a matter of 30 minutes, I can easily import graphics, sound, cut/paste them, etc. I can track my versions with git, got access to billions of web pages, etc. Now, however I have to earn a living with these tools... Less freedom, more work...

So what's better ?

I enjoyed the AMIGA and it took me decades to fully appreciate what a great machine it was back then. But I force myself not to get one. It's just stuff. Like a Vinyl Music Player. Yes, it's cool on some level, but I sense I may merely want it as a cheap source of dopamine because of .. nostalgia. Nostalgia is a romantic emotion but I am professionally in the business of creating the future, so unless there's something valuable to be learned from the past, it's not where I want to focus my attention on.

(by the way: For the occasional nostalgia fix there are really good and well functioning emulators such as FS-UAE that even simulate the sound of the floppy drive.)

Vinyl sales surpassed CDs in 2020. I suspect many of those sales were albums released in 2020 by artists born after 2000. Very little nostalgia would be motivating those purchases.

If inventing the future, one must be able to discern what is a classic or canonical element of the past that is presently underutilized. One could make the argument that Elon Musk is nostalgia obsessed with what has been resuscitated from NASA technology that had been mothballed.

Perhaps Descartes was absurdly nostalgic for the times of Euclid, and Einstein absurdly nostalgic for the times of Descartes. Will we lapse into the dark ages if all the Amiga 500s stop working, probably not.

If we lost the knowledge of how to tech how the ARM architecture works, as was the case prior to the raspberry pi but after the death of the Acorn line of RISC PCs, we would have lost quite a bit of important knowledge.

I think there is a type of nostalgia that doesn’t require having lived it before. I enjoy the feeling of going to 50s themed restaurants, despite not having lived in the 50s and not even raised in the US. Just movies influencing my taste.

I like hamburgers and wasn't raised in Germany but I wouldn't go around Berlin saying I have a certain kind of nostalgia for the 1940s despite not having lived it.

> Elon Musk is nostalgia obsessed with what has been resuscitated from NASA technology

being nostalgic about the tech vs the vision is different.

Exactly, and I think if SpaceX were to review designs of the Saturn 5 it should be obviously not because they are nostalgic, but because they're trying to make the best rocket for the future they can.

Plus vinyl was "obsoleted" by later tech, which is different from being mothballed but otherwise un-surpassed.

> If we lost the knowledge of how to tech how the ARM architecture works, as was the case prior to the raspberry pi but after the death of the Acorn line of RISC PCs, we would have lost quite a bit of important knowledge.

In which universe did that ever happen? ARM was alive and kicking to the point that even Intel had its own ARM designs. Heck, I worked with ARM-powered devices 20 years ago and those were far from being "lost knowledge".

Just because something isn't being hyped to edge of the solar system at a given point in time, doesn't mean it's dead or forgotten...

The Acorn Archimedes came out in 1987. Is 20ish years vs 30ish years a relevant distinction when the far newer raspberry pi serves to reify the educational goals and funding that the Archimedes was underwritten to do. Unless you are saying the pipeline for educating tomorrows computer engineers should start with M1 macs instead of raspberry pi, it seems we are in violent agreement. There is a typo where I wrote "to tech" instead of "to teach," perhaps that added confusion.

Raspberry Pi had a great image and great marketing. But it wasn't the only hobby device available at the time, and ARM was massively used in industry. I think talking about loss of knowledge there is a little weird.

(I also found a lot of the rhetoric around the RasPi at its launch quite weird, and very dismissive of all the other work that had taken place before it)

Any examples of any of those hobbiest devices at the time that had scale of educational impact that raspberry pi has had at $5-$35 a pop? Arduino is not a single board computer. It largely needs something like a pi or better just to program it.

I won't dispute they brought the prices down, but there were sub-$100 devices around, some (like the sheevaplug) included the case, power supplies and onboard storage, though no video output.

The pi was part of a continuum, rather than a revolution in its own right.

> Vinyl sales surpassed CDs in 2020.

cassette tape sales apparently doubled in 2020:

https://www.nme.com/news/music/cassette-sales-have-more-than...

Leaving aside used sales (which can make sense for CDs from a pure economic perspective).

I assume most people who buy CDs are those who want to own their music but don't want to deal with torrents and figure that, if they're going to buy a whole album, they might as well buy the CD and rip it.

Whereas vinyl and, I guess???, cassettes appeal to nostalgia and a certain physicalness of the media. CDs probably seem rather utilitarian in contrast.

As someone who has been playing records for decades, beat mixing (as a dj) is massively more satisfying with vinyl than with cdjs or a midi controller. It's not just nostalgia.

I even bought a system (traktor) that uses special digital timecode vinyl (and a 2in 2out audio interface) to play digital files as if I had vinyl copies of them, which is a weird twist on the situation.

Especially when it comes to making and performing art in a a specific genre, the devil is in the details.

Serato control vinyl might have found a happy medium or even surpassed what is capable with certain aspects of cdjs or the state of late 70s through early 2000s vinyl djing, but its not cheap, and it doesn't replicate the discovery or ownership aspect of purchasing vinyl.

It would quite odd to me for someone to say that serato control vinyl is a nostalgia oriented product.

Check out "xwax"[0], if you haven't seen it already.

[0] https://xwax.org/

Retrocomputing in the abstract is, I think, still very relevant for tech education, because it provides fewer layers of abstraction for a student to wrap their head around. That said, my feeling is that emulation's good enough. You don't necessarily need a physical ZX Spectrum when you can emulate one much more cheaply if learning to program on it is the goal.

Playing with an Amiga or ZX81 may be fun and in that regard you may be right that emulation is often enough if you just want to consume content and get a bit of nostalgia.

However, there is something to be said about having to handle the hardware and fiddle with it, fail at it, troubleshoot it until you get enough of an intimate knowledge that you finally understand what makes everything tick.

Even better, building your own 6502 or Z80 small computer is very eye opening and will give anyone not just the joy of creating something concrete but also give a solid base on which to build an understanding of how all computers actually work.

Ben Eater's[1] (and many others) work is pretty important in that regard.

  [1]:https://eater.net/

I've enjoyed reading Ben's content, as I slowly work towards building a computer of my own.

I managed to get an Arduino to drive a Z80, handling I/O and RAM access. The next step is the tricky one - working out how to design a board and wire everything up standalone. Still I'm in no particular rush, there are many single-board Z80 systems out there and mine will be nothing special if/when I actually get the design completed and assembled.

Kuddos on your journey into building your modern/vintage hybrid!

It doesn't need to compare to anything or be special. The only metric should be that it's fun and educational to you to build and hack this together and make it your own. If other find it useful, whether the end-product or the journey, then that should be side-effect of the joy of inventing something for yourself.

Skimmed the article. Interesting that they chalk it up to basically just nostalgia. I know many do it because you can be pretty confident that old hardware/software is much less likely to be phoning home and is actually something you own and control as opposed to being a service that you are licensing and can change functionality at the whim of the company you are getting it from.

Really? I don't know of anybody who's into retrocomputing for those reasons. Can you give some examples of people who are into it due to privacy concerns?

Me, but I'm not sure I count because it's more of a theoretical interest than a practical one at present.

Past me, however, did things like write an OTP generator for TI-83+ partly on the grounds that it was a non-networked device and simple enough to leave less in the way of interesting ways for malware to hide.

I'm definitely not into it because of that, but I have considered it as an added practical bonus for sure

That might be the case for mid-2000s computers, but if you're looking at 80s or even 90s stuff, almost nobody is really using them for proper work. They're just too slow and inconvenient, despite being fun!

Unless you're a writer who's using WordStar for distraction-free word processing.

Wouldn't a proper electric typewriter be even better for that use case?

Who is managing to do work on a properly old machine?

I’m most familiar with old Mac OS machines. Like, before it was called Mac OS. And they are extremely difficult to connect to anything on the contemporary internet, because none of the available browsers have the ability to work with contemporary security certificates.

This is true, but the "classic" machines do have serial ports which are still interoperable with generic usb-serial converters. I seem to recall rs-422. Should be possible to transfer files that way. For composing plaintext (i.e. Writing a novel) it could be a workable distraction-free setup.

Some of my acquaintances still use Bars'n'Pipes in the Amiga as their main to-go music composing MIDI software, since it's reliable, has a well-designed wide set of tools, and the minimalistic, clutter-free interface helps them stay focused and therefore be more productive.

> Who is managing to do work on a properly old machine?

George RR Martin still writes novels on a DOS machine with WordStar 4.

There are some other holdouts but I imagine for any not-bestselling author there's an intermediate step on a modern machine to convert files to a more modern format.

Yes, old CPUs/ICs were built on actual solid-state components, with no "firmware". You owned it, and it didn't change or spy on you. I miss it, too.

Nothing to do with the CPU or components - it's simply due to the lack of WAN connectivity.

Old computers contained firmware by the way - BASIC and the OS weren't loaded from disk, they were stored on internal ROM.

The only reason built-in functionality didn't change, was again just due to the lack of WAN connectivity. You can achieve the same level of privacy today by just not connecting to the internet and using your machine offline only.

The last part is sort of true, but there's a lot of ways for changing expectations to sneak in. The software often isn't designed for it, so it's hard to model what actions you can take and what you can't before “oops, please connect to the Internet to continue”. And once you've done that a single time, all your previous guarantees are instantly invalidated, because there's going to be a dozen unskippable updates and stuff happening in the background and so on and so on—or you can try to handle that by doing something even more awkward like moving the data off, then factory reset, then updates, then disconnect, then move the data back and hope for the best…

That said, this is something I did with a cheap laptop for a while—installed a basic Linux and Emacs and used it as a mostly-isolated Emacsing machine; I believe I never hooked it up to the network again, though I did sketch out some provisions for manually physically disconnecting sensitive filesystems in case I needed to do that very occasionally (while being aware that sufficiently clever malware could still work around this). But then the logic board malfunctioned much sooner than I'd expected, and I haven't been in a position to get another since.

And 100% air-gapping is not always desirable. Many 1990s-and-before machines that had networking capabilities were still the epitome of “local first” by comparison to the “deployment is primarily done through progressive Web apps” world of 2021. So you could have a few channels by which to talk to the outside world, but without the outside world getting its hooks deep inside you in the process: the television without the telescreen. (Security issues aside, of course—though some of that is mitigable with restrictive proxying, simpler protocols, etc. depending on how retro and how networked you are trying for.)

You could have a modern computer that you don't connect to the Internet or that you do so only sporadically.

Occasional connections invalidate the air gap since applications can spool data to be sent once the internet connection is back. Especially on windows 10 where the user has very little control or knowledge about what updates are doing. You could of course have two modern computers and use a flash drive to transfer files though

Every time I get some free time to play with the old stuff, it's amazing how much your computer felt like it belonged to you. You were your own cloud and could expand it with software you owned. Software ran right in front of you and it was magic.

This made me whistful.

I hope protocols get good enough that being your own cloud becomes a decent option again.

No password.

Software written by nerds for nerds.

Yeah, different time.

Annoywall bypass: https://archive.is/8lnga

This page is also useful https://www.nytimes.com/subscription

For the Haskell-inclined, there's a book in the works about building retrocomputers with Clash (a Haskell->VHDL compiler)

This blog post is by the person working on it and about the topic itself: https://unsafeperform.io/blog/2020-11-17-a_tiny_computer_for...

Gee. Nobody would criticize antique car repair or collecting. Nor pretty much any other historical recreators.

Makes me angry that retro computing gets special criticism.

When I was young, model railroading was a thing. When those hobbyists were young, I think the railroads may have been the high-paying high-tech jobs. (and there's even overlap: SPRINT started out life as the Southern Pacific Railroad INTernal network)

(if an old-timer is a 50 year old car, I just realised that WalterBright's will probably qualify soon, if it doesn't already)

> Makes me angry that retro computing gets special criticism.

Part of me wants to cynically say that it is because people spending time with retro computing tech will realize how ludicrously bloated and slow things are nowadays despite several orders of magnitude more computing power. Almost all of these machines boot faster, have no input latency at all, aren't riddled with complexity for its own sake, and can still accomplish a lot of the tasks we use computers for today (albeit with some limitations like only running one program at a time). Even the interfaces were often much more coherent and understandable because they lacked the same obfuscating abstraction we have today, and the non-GUI one's at least were also incredibly responsive.

I have a longing for a modern computer with modern software but with the lost simplicity of old.

Are you talking about the word "impractical?" I could certainly level a few criticisms at vintage car collecting. For one, it's a fairly inaccessible hobby. Not a lot of people have the money or space to purchase, maintain, and store more than 1 vintage car. As daily drivers, vintage cars lack modern safety features. Many are gas guzzlers, which is not only hard on the wallet, but bad for the environment. As for restoration, that takes a lot of specialized skills and equipment, which adds to both the cost and inaccessibility.

There are definitely reasons why you don't hear about a lot of people collecting vintage cars.

It's easy to understand why some enjoy using old technologies. There is no longer a market for simple systems: nowadays everything must have super complex graphics, integrated analytical systems, and consume incredible resources.

Requirements, development, goal achievement is no longer a thing. Everything needs to use trendy tech, cool graphics. Main issue is that end-user productivity is lost.

How about a much simpler and less loaded reason: because people always find vintage stuff appealing.

Vintage cars had been a thing long before cars became computers on wheels.

People collected and were fascinated with vintage commodity items of all sorts since forever.

This trend only goes to show that computers have become commodities.

Vintage cars might still have much of the same appeal because they have tended to become increasingly more complicated. Perhaps a stronger example would be antique books or furniture.

This is what I think. When a modern laptop or phone is old, except for a few avid collectors, it will be junk. An amiga has a completely different appeal and therefore becomes vintage.

But how do you know that? Who's to say that 35 years from now, someone won't have this exact same sentiment when comparing a (then vintage) iPhone 12 to whatever people will use in 30 years?

I agree, I love vintage cars because they're simple and impressive in an understandable way. I also prefer the feel, since it's more analog and connected to the road, and they often did more with less than modern cars, similar to how old computers were often more responsive with less. Cars need safety features and more complicated electronics, just like software needs security and telemetry/monetization now. And just like I'm impressed by modern CPUs and GPUs and SSDs and NNPs, I'm also impressed by modern turbo engines and things like skyactiv-x. I'd wager the reason people are always interested in vintage things is actually just that people are always interested in things. If we had access to future tech somehow, people would probably take interest in that as well

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6d-B9_iwcl8&ab_channel=The8-...

https://www.6502workshop.com/p/nox-archaist.html

My 1980's style keyboard (still the standard in 2021) has a mostly useless "Scroll Lock" key, and a numeric keypad that has an annoying cursor key mode, and I could go on about other such legacy oddities that are still around today.

I could go on about my loathing of Caps Lock.

When do I hit it? Only on accident.

Just a few days ago, a friend was having trouble with Excel on a ThinkPad: "My cursor keys are broken! I can't move to a different cell, it just makes the whole sheet move around."

I scratched my head and thought to myself, "Naw, it couldn't be Scroll Lock. Could it? That keyboard doesn't even have it."

After a quick search I suggested hitting the Windows key and typing "keyboard" to bring up the onscreen keyboard. Sure enough, ScrLk was lit up, and a quick tap on it brought things back to normal.

Turns out that Fn+K is the Scroll Lock toggle on recent ThinkPad keyboards, and Excel actually responds to Scroll Lock mode to scroll the sheet instead of moving the cursor to a new cell.

It's a mystery how it got toggled in the first place, but my guess is that she meant to hit Ctrl+K and hit Fn+K by mistake.

And of course there is no indicator light or anything to let you know that the keyboard is in Scroll Lock mode. Thank you modern keyboards!

I’m all about the emulators now, since Lisp machines can’t even found on eBay. There is something to be said for actual hardware though - isolation from the internet while hacking old machines is sublime.

Take a look at this as well

https://github.com/lisper/cpus-caddr

FPGA based MIT CADR lisp machine - rewritten in modern verilog - boots and runs

Also take a look here

http://www.unlambda.com/cadr/

Coincidentally, out of the blue I spent weekend playing Settlers 1.

I used to play it as a young kid and didn't understand too much of what was going on. I enjoyed pretty graphics and seeing buildings being slowly constructed.

Its interesting how games improved over time. I am not sure that even now I would fully learn how to play it without the manual. Some of the features are quite hidden and some are simply a pictogram that you need to know what it means to know what it means :)

But I am not really criticizing the UI after-all they did so much with so few pixels.

I don't suppose there's a VAX 11/780 simulator running VMS out there anywhere, is there? Wouldn't that be fun for some of us.

http://simh.trailing-edge.com/vax.html

Haven't used it, but here's the simulator. For some software options:

http://simh.trailing-edge.com/software.html

Here's the way to get VAX/VMS, with all the goodies

http://www.openvmshobbyist.com/news.php

[Edit]

Wrong place, though that had some interesting info

https://www.hpe.com/h41268/live/index_e.aspx?qid=24548

They are ending the Hobby License program at the end of the year. 8(

[Update]

The Hobby License program will be replaced before it ends according to

https://vmssoftware.com/about/news/2020-04-22-vsi-announces-...

Last I heard, this replacement program will only have support for Alpha, not VAX, and will expire after 1 year, meaning you have to get a whole new VM every year.

Maybe they changed their minds on that, though.

I find it amazingly frustrating that an OS with no real commercial value, but immense historical value, is locked up, and subject to the whim of whoever bought it last.

We might never see the source code for VAX/VMS, which makes me sad.

If you can find the source for early Windows NT, I bet a lot of that is similar. Albeit with a vastly deficient file system, permissions, command line, help system and so on ;)

I'm kind of sad they write such an article without mentioning the demoscene.

http://demoscene-the-art-of-coding.net/the-demoscene/

Love me some LGR. Love me my retro computing too (8-bit Atari guy here).

Apple II Forever!

Probably doesn’t quite count as retro, but I recently purchased a mini PC pretty much exclusively to play Diablo 2 single player.

Prices were quite low so I wanted to make sure the specs were adequate. Looking into it, I got a laugh that the game requirements were less than Windows 10 itself.

Diablo 2? That takes me back. I remember running it on a 600 MHz machine with a gigantic, 75 lb CRT monitor, and a Voodoo 5 card. That video card gave me a real advantage playing on Battle.net, because I could pump more frames through that card than most people could in Glide mode than most people could with the shiny graphics cards of the time. There could be 100 mobs on the screen, and I wouldn't lag.

Good times.

2 random, unconnected thoughts:

1. I’d kill for a good SE/30. I wonder if I could get it booting off a CF card for better speed/latency…

2. What fails hardest in this old hardware? Hard drives seem the most obvious, but are there issues with capacitors or other electronics that fail over time?

> I wonder if I could get it booting off a CF card for better speed/latency…

Depends. CF, electrically, is just PATA IDE. But Apple used SCSI back then. Maybe you can find an SCSI SSD?

The SCSI2SD devices are what you're looking for in the case of SCSI disk replacement: https://store.inertialcomputing.com/SCSI2SD-s/100.htm

Capacitors fail frequently. Bit rot corrupts floppy disks. Rubber foam used in various places turns to goo. Also batteries on the motherboard often leak, which can be damaging as you might imagine.

for portables, batteries need to get replaced somehow.

This works but uses a microSD instead. It can emulate a Mac HD in addition to various other drives.

https://www.bigmessowires.com/shop/product/floppy-emu-deluxe...

I have a Seagate 40 MB Hard Drive running on a Laser XT, purchased from Sears originally. I've had to low level format it a couple of times as it begins to diminish into the West. When it goes, it's unretrievable. As for capacitors, those are easy to replace and there is a niche market for replacing them in old systems as well as vintage tuners.

Electronics has a short life, especially 1970s electronics. Phenolic boards from the pre-FR4 era were just too fragile. By the 1980s, the PC board manufacturers had that under control.

I have five working Teletype machines I've restored, and they were manufactured between 1926 and 1950. All the wiring in the 1920s models had to be replaced, but by 1935, Teletype had that solved, and later Model 15 machines just did not age. Especially the WWII models that not only got the factory Parkerizing for rust prevention, but the Army coating for the tropics.

Annual maintenance involves 600 oiling points, though.

Lithium BIOS / RTC batteries that have exploded in storage and corroded nearby traces and components. I am become Varta, destroyer of boards. Capacitors are a near second, especially metallized film VIFA caps in the ‘80s.

One thing which really grinds my gears about old hardware is the commonplace use of brass screws. If you've ever tried to unscrew one that hasn't been turned in decades, it's an utter pain. Sometimes the only recourse is destructive.

How doable is to start producing these parts again? Let's say instead of original Intel 386 cpu some custom vhdl stuff? Soundblaster, Graphics card... Is there a market for it? On Ebay vintage machines go for 400-700$

There is a market considering it's already being done, but people pay more for the originals so it's not as lucrative as you might think. There's also projects like the commander x16, which I think are awesome

I really don’t get it but if it makes people happy then I’m all for it

Nice to see MsMadLemmon get a mention!

it,s not that impractical...

Impractical isn't the right word. The Voyager 1 spacecraft is still working, and it's practical.

It’s impractical in that it doesn’t make much sense to use them from a “productivity” standpoint. I’m not going to code up my website on an original Macintosh. They only really make sense from a historical standpoint (but productivity in the form of making videos about them does exist).

The Voyager 1 is still practical because it would take too long to get something that’s better that it to where it is.

>I’m not going to code up my website on an original Macintosh.

Yet people still make games, and hardware, for cold hard cash for vintage systems like the Commodore and Atari computer lines.

For example https://atariage.com/store/ is full of newer titles and in the various forums you can find all sorts of modern hardware and titles being discussed, and sold, for various vintage systems https://atariage.com/forums/

Some of us find these machines very practical, some are even still being used in commercial settings. At some point I recall one of the people being interviewed on ANTIC The Atari 8-bit Podcast ( https://ataripodcast.libsyn.com/ ) mentioning they either recently stop using, or were still using, an Atari computer in a commercial setting because if it isn't broke, don't fix it.

I mean, people even still make peripherals for these vintage machines. I had a brand-spanking-new-from-the-factory joystick show up just this past week for my Atari machines from https://retroradionics.co.uk/

Sure, you might not create a flashy website for a client, or some machine learning, design the next app to IPO at a billion for, or develop the next social media platform on one but they absolutely still have a practical, functional, use for many users.

> it doesn’t make much sense to use them from a “productivity” standpoint

One famous example is George R.R. Martin writing Game of Thrones using WordStar 4.0 on a computer running MSDOS.

He could've just as well used a typewriter - literally just writing doesn't require a computer at all. Writers in particular don't have to care about words-per-minute or error correction, grammar or style (there's lectors for that anyway) and they don't do serial letters or mail merge either.

There's no good metric for measuring "productivity" for writers with respect to the tools used.

Error correction and ease of duplication of the entire manuscript can be make or break.

That's why I explicitly wrote electronic typewriter.

Electronic office typewriters did have interfaces for monitors and some came with integrated digital storage (e.g. disks) and had a similar feature set to that of early word processing programs.

I think a distinction needs to be made between electric typewriters (basically electrified mechanical typewriters to not tire out the fingers) and electronic typewriters (more advanced devices, usually with a buffer to correct typos before they are committed to paper, might have spell check or other intelligence, sometimes feature a full-blown built-in display). The latter are basically computers, but they are self-contained with regards to the peripherals and printing.

On the other hand, a DOS operating environment, while slightly more complex, is far easier to integrate into a modern workflow. The environment can be emulated (= easier to lug around a 4MB DOS disk image than a 20kg chunky suitcase, easy to use modern peripherals like 4K screens, KVM switches/Alt+Tab, and WiFi printers), data backup is very straightforward (vs a machine-specific process or paper photocopy), and the data is far easier to convert to modern formats for incorporation into modern workflows (US ASCII + Markdown can be turned to PDF, HTML, ODT, or kept as is).

If I had to incur the complexity cost of a more advanced platform, a DOS editor would be preferable over an electronic typewriter.

> He could've just as well used a typewriter - literally just writing doesn't require a computer at all.

That's completely silly and strange.

One thing about retrocomputing that is hinted at in the article, and is genuinely interesting, is that people used to pay as much as you might pay for a car to get a computer that could, for example, run WordStar. For those who write for a living, the productivity boost over something like an electric typewriter was that big.

I'm not trying to be offensive, but I am guessing you've either never written much with an electric typewriter, such that you would be capable of making the comparison to writing (and more importantly - revising and editing!) with a word processor, or you've never written much period.

> I'm not trying to be offensive, but I am guessing you've either never written much with an electric typewriter, such that you would be capable of making the comparison to writing (and more importantly - revising and editing!) with a word processor, or you've never written much period.

Right back at you - in fact electronic typewriters came with a similar feature set to that of early word processing programs (of the 8-bit era): from monitor connections to integrated digital storage to the ability to run programs.

Modern electronic typewriters have error correction buffers, too.

Some authors (and that's who we're talking about here!) prefer typewriters for other reasons, too: seeing their work directly on paper and not having to worry about any kind of leaks (unless someone breaks into their house).

With authors in particular, what matters just as much - if not more - than just typing their work down, is making notes and keeping track of story arcs, characters, world-building, etc.

A word processing program doesn't help with that and this requires either specialised software or a different workflow altogether that doesn't benefit from traditional word processing functionality anyway.

I actually used some of the hardware you must be referring to. I never found any of it to be very good at all, and I grew up with access to both 8-bit (and later, 16-bit and 32-bit) computers and a few electronic typewriters. (contrariwise, I do have fond memories of the IBM Selectric, as does anyone who learned to touch type on one, I'm sure)

But I am utterly interested in what typewriter model you'd nominate as equal to the DOS + WordStar/Word/Sprint + PC combo of its era! If it's hardware you used and liked for some reason, that'd be something to hear about... not a lot of people reminisce about that hardware. (because it was horrible... ahem)

It depends entirely on personal preferences.

You might find it baffling because some authors were early adopters of word processors and PCs in general, but others were not and some prefer to not use computers to this day.

I don't argue that there is no use for word processors in writing, what I'm (obviously very poorly) trying to communicate is that productivity (measured by what exactly in this context?) doesn't depend on using these tools.

Quentin Tarantino once told Reuters that he prefers to use pens and a notebook (the paper kind). Similarly with Joyce Carol Oates:

> I always sketch out material “by hand.” Why is this so unusual? Every writer has written “by hand” until relatively recent times. Writing is a consequence of thinking, planning, dreaming — this is the process that results in “writing,” rather than the way in which the writing is recorded. [1]

Creativity doesn't seem to suffer when not using a PC.

Neil Gaiman shares this sentiment [2], so even quality sci-fi doesn't require much tech.

Danielle Steel managed to write 179 books without using a computer [3] - quantity isn't it either.

George Clooney apparently has his writing partner do the typing as he himself prefers to write everything out by hand as well:

> I'm probably the least computer literate writer there is... Literally when I cut and paste, I cut pages and tape them together. [4]

So the superiority of word processing software simply doesn't materialise for everyone who's in the business of writing.

Writing is, after all, first and foremost a creative process and everyone has a different approach to get the most out of their creativity. The tools used are the least important part in determining whether that productive (e.g. successful) or not.

For some (including me, most of the time) technology is a welcome helper and improvement, while others do just fine without.

[1] https://www.salon.com/2012/09/13/joyce_carol_oates_romneys_g...

[2] https://www.verbaltovisual.com/neil-gaiman-on-writing/

[3] https://www.glamour.com/story/danielle-steel-books-interview

[4] http://www.reddit.com/r/IAmA/comments/1wdzwq/hello_reddit_ge...

I see what you mean! I thought you were strictly arguing a point about word processor hardware.

It’s true enough that some fairly productive authors use longhand. I believe Neal Stephenson and Joe Haldeman both use fountain pens and good paper. I think Stephenson pointed out that the best paper money can buy will never be a ruinously expensive luxury for an author. People just cannot write that fast.

I think if I were to try this it would be to test myself, to see if I could avoid the habit of constant, on the fly revision... but I’ve never loved my own handwriting.

Do you think, perhaps, if he switched to some modern novel writing software, with character and plot tracking, that he might actually finish the "Song of Ice and Fire" series in this lifetime?

C64, Apple II and others can still be enjoyable for retrogaming. So maybe not productive but still practical.

It's worth remembering that a large amount of the reason that's impractical is because society shifts to expect the new thing. In turn, part of the reason society gets to expect the new thing much more instantly nowadays is because past new things started including “always the newest by default”, so it became an active choice to want to keep anything around or not instantly change your behavior to match. I'm not sure how much of this is ‘actual’ values versus power conflicts versus broken equilibria though I know at least one influence was the rolling infosecpocalypse.

There's a post elsewhere on “The Amish, and Strategic Norms around Technology” which has some not-bad short description of ways this isn't universal, and potential for application to current-day (potentially America-centric, etc.) society, without going into too much depth: https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/36Dhz325MZNq3Cs6B/the-amish-...

> It’s impractical in that it doesn’t make much sense to use them from a “productivity” standpoint.

I think it depends on what you're trying to do. If you're creating pixel art for a game, working on a "retro" computer might be more practical. E.g., if the software you're using does everything you need, you get some nice benefits like fast startup time, often lower latency feedback, not having to worry about automatic updates rebooting your machine while you're working on something, having a machine that's much easier to understand/modify to your needs, etc.

It may not be practical to have a "retro" computer as your only computer, but for certain tasks I can see them being more practical than a modern computer. And it's honestly kinda sad that modern computers provide such a subpar experience in a lot of areas.

Retrocomputing is how a non-programmer (me) ended up here.

If anyone has a Xerox Alto (curiousmarc?) for loan, do not hesitate to reach out.

Retro computing is how I first got into coding too.

Though at the time we just called it "computing" ...

Sadly, the only working Alto I know of is in the Computer History Museum in Mountain View. It really is a cool machine.

I'm sure there are many people who are going to jump at the chance to finally be able to loan their USD 75000 worth of computer out to a throwaway HN account...?

I'm mostly joking sir. But I make a mean apple pie (butter) if you're interested in trade!

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