The key is that you used them. The retro community is for people who lusted after those machines, but we’re stuck with something much more affordable and much less powerful.
And now they’re well into middle age and they have money.
And now they’re well into middle age and they have money.
Yes for some people who used these machines once, they might just think of them as old machines, the same way an ancient Roman still alive today might not think much of mundane Roman tech.
But getting into retro-computing as a hobby is more like being a historian or archaeologist. There is endless lore to discover, and restoring old hardware is an art. Some of these people were never old enough or even existed to lust after these machines.
Someday, all the people who used these machines will be dead, completely dead, and the machines will be all that remains. Blessed are those who keep them running in their memory.
Take a look at the Commodore 64 developer manual and quickly realize that without much difficulty, one can learn the full assembly instruction set along with all BASIC commands.
https://www.commodore.ca/manuals/c64_programmers_reference/c...
The machine is completely open to experimentation. You can write to memory anywhere including the active display terminal. The chips are easy to mix, match, swap. Hardware and software is malleable, not a locked-down black box of complexity and TPIM modules!
Those are how younger people are going to get excited for the hardware - the software is available to anyone willing to run an emulator.
It's the people now with full time employment, who couldn't afford them when they were 16. Now they can, and the cars in good condition are more scarce.
But I think my current passion has more to do with the simplicity of it, and being forced (well, more or less) to learn 6502 assembly. (Oh, and Christ an original KIM-1 is a good deal more than $400 now, ha ha. But there are nice reproductions you can build yourself.)
What a breath of fresh air the thing is — having so little between its hex keypad and its six character display.
But once I went through Vogons and had the impression that many of them lacked any taste. A lot of PCs (and Macs) were total shite back then. If you want to dink around, you can now get the best old stuff.