Hacking the Book8088 for better accuracy

Is it socketed?

Nostalgia aside, the PC was (and continues to be) a far easier machine to clone. For an electronics hobbiest, this is a fun project. For programmers, it is a challenge to see what can be done with a platform that was rarely pushed to its full potential (hardware upgrades and compatibility were more important in the PC world).

Contrast that to the Amiga. The custom chipset makes it harder for the electronics hobbiest (unless they're using original hardware) and I get the impression that the demoscene has uncovered most of the potential for software development.

I think people get into retrocomputing for different reasons. Certainly the allure of nostalgia and revisiting childhood memories and experiences is enough to explain why someone would want to re-experience the IBM-compatible PC, even if it wasn't as glorious or novel as an Amiga. But more than being about a specific machine, I think the drive for retrocomputing is as much about the old computers as it is about the new ones.

Because, for all of the many faults and flaws of IBM or old Microsoft, there's something I think most people can agree on: while it may not be completely dead and gone, the magic of computing has suffered immensely in recent years. All of the bullshit associated with modern always-on computers that can't be repaired, are difficult to program, and yet swamped with security issues and ridiculous glitches and bugs and advertising and tracking and etc. has been killing the magic of computing and programming. Almost everything about computers feels like it's designed to sell you something. It happened pretty gradually, too, so it's easy to have not noticed. Just about as soon as computers had always-on internet connections, software had begun checking for updates and begging you to register them, or worse, requiring online activation to even use them. It was all bound to happen.

So when you boot up an old machine, even just some random unremarkable Wintel OEM machine, it may seem pointless. Who cares? Even the nostalgic or at least alluring aesthetic elements (the somewhat annoying yet soothing whir of old HDDs, the knocking of the floppy disk drive seek test, the piezoelectric beep as the machine passes POST, the bang and click of a CRT monitor turning on) are something that you could just wear a good pair of headphones for and listen to on YouTube if you wanted. Does anyone actually want to use, say, an old crappy version of Windows today?

Yep. Now, I grew up with Windows ME and later XP (and well, later, Linux; no Windows on my computers these days), because I'm still relatively a youth. So, if I go too far back, it gets too primitive for me to really appreciate. I feel the same way about video games; I can still somewhat enjoy old NES games, because I played a lot of that when I was younger, but Atari VCS/2600 games are before me and feel just a tad too primitive to enjoy for very long. But if I boot say, Windows NT 4 or 2000 or something, and get a decent development environment going for some oldschool Win32 C++, it feels very enjoyable. The latency is VERY noticeably lower for both the mouse cursor and typing, which is just, very pleasing. The operating system stays very out of the way: no pop-ups about Windows Defender having scanned my device, no slowdowns, no weird network fetches, it's just me and the text editor. The compiler produces worse executables and is buggier, but it's really fast and the integrated debugging works very well. Old C++ and Win32 sucks to code in... but now with my more modern programming knowledge, I have a better feel for how to do it "well", even with worse tools. I have the programming discipline of someone who has experienced modern tooling and proven patterns for writing better code, so I can go back and do things "right". And I can do them just for me. I don't even bother posting the code, I just spend an afternoon writing a small program or something just for fun.

I'm not arguing there was nothing crappy about Windows in the 90s, either, for what it's worth. OEMs loaded computers with tons of crapware that made them slow, and as early as 2001 were begging you to register online at first boot and other dumb things. Microsoft themselves engaged in a fair bit of anti-competitive behavior that would become infamous soon after. But now that it's firmly in the past, it's easier to see it as a historical artifact rather than an ongoing threat; more of a reminder than an annoyance. I don't know if we'll feel the same way about today's variant of crapware, if only because due to the internet-connection-required nature of much of it, the entire experience will disappear with it.

I do just enjoy retrocomputing in general, and I've got machines that I never used when I was younger, especially from Commodore. They're fun and interesting to explore, maybe in a different way from crappy old PC compatibles that I actually grew up with. Still, they have the same thing in common with a lot of older machines. Sometimes, it's not even really about what they have, so much as it is about what they don't have. Computing used to be fun and have a mystique to it before everything was striving to be like an iPhone or an iPad, and retrocomputing makes you remember that.

But ultimately, it's definitely going to be subjective, just like any kind of hobby. There's people in it for different reasons that get different things out of it. To me, I can't see it as being significantly different from other kinds of hobbies in the same vein, like being into classic cars. I'm sure most people who are into classic cars focus on cars that were more interesting or notable, but there's always going to be that guy who has or would love to have some unremarkable vehicle that nobody else would really care about. And just for a bit of fun, I actually googled "unremarkable classic cars" and found this thread from only five months ago on Reddit discussing exactly that!

https://www.reddit.com/r/cars/comments/12g42vs/what_are_some...

Most people don't even provide a particular reason, but plenty of them do:

> Dad had one when I was a kid and we all loved that little truck.

> Used to see them everywhere.

> To me, they represent a manufacturer understanding what their young demographic wanted and giving them exactly that, an affordable but capable car with tons of tunability.

> My first working vehicle.

> I had a base model I bought off a co-worker in 1988. Had it as my daily until that deer stepped out in front of me in '92.

It may seem kind of silly or even stupid today, but all of these reasons can easily apply to retro computing. "I used to see those beige boxes everywhere." "It was my first computer." "It was an affordable but dutiful machine with a lot of expansion capabilities." "I had a lot of fun on it until the hard disk crashed and we replaced it and put it in the attic."

There are surely some people who just never saw computers as being some kind of mythical object, and more like tools. And those people may also see cars as a way to get from point A to point B, too. That's fine, but I think if you're one of those people, you'll just have to live with us weirdos that attribute personality and emotion to inanimate objects.