I've been quite into retro- computing for a few years, and have started recently to amass a collection of my favourite machines from the 8-bit era .. and one th

I've been quite into retro- computing for a few years, and have started recently to amass a collection of my favourite machines from the 8-bit era .. and one thing I'm really intrigued about is the 'lost tech' of these machines. I remember for one of these platforms, there wasn't really a great commercial release scene - but there was a great home-hacker scene, with type-ins from magazines and so on ... and I remember having quite a small library of routines and utilities, saved on cassette tape, that could do various things - fast scrolling, tape copying, UNDELETE commands, and so on. But now these things are lost to time (still out there on my cassette collection, wherever it is these days) .. and we have to re-create them. So now one of my favourite aspects of the hobby is the reconstruction of all the 'cool utilities and stuff' that made the platform great in the 80's. Its not so easy! For some of the obscure platforms, we really have to dig deep .. fortunately though, 8-bit computer magazines seem to have been pretty well preserved on the Internet. Its just now a matter of going through them, spotting the gems for the obscure platform, and re-typing it all in, lol. ;) But that said, having a variety of 8-bit machines at hand is really a special treat. I always wanted a Spectrum machine, and now its finally affordable. ;P