The purest “retro” experience I’ve had wasn’t retro at all: Stepping into an MIT Athena lab a quarter century ago to see an SGI Indy ready for my login.
In a way, it’s like finding out what winning the lottery would have meant for a curious tech nerd.
But HP and IBM made boring old boxes :P I did love HP-UX though.
However even in these days they are expensive, plus I don't have the space or power requirements for one of those :) There's are reason they were called "big iron".
For example, there are modern games made by hobbyists for old systems that completely outclass literally anything that was available contemporaneously. Today anyone with a computer has access to development hardware, software, documentation, and community resources that are all just lightyears beyond what was available then at any price. Changing a few lines of code and instantly hopping into a cycle-accurate emulator to test takes milliseconds versus writing out floppies or EEPROMs. Arcane tricks that only a privileged few knew (if that) are now common knowledge. That stuff leads to whole other strata of capabilities being accessible.
For me, an interest in retro tech is seeing how people did things in the past and realizing we lost some "nice" experiences along the way.
Also, in a world where everything becomes obsolete at record speeds, something so obsolete feels stuck in time.
This is true. In summer when I sit in the dark with the windows open (hot country and no AC and I don't want to attract bugs), my 4K computer monitor is totally incapable of dimming to a level that doesn't blind me. Even with white on black/dark mode and brightness set to 0. In fact, even during the day I work with brightness 0 on that thing, it seems all monitors are optimised for max brightness these days.
Meanwhile, my old VT520 terminal has an analog brightness dial which I can turn so low that I can barely make out the letters in a pitch-black room <3