One thing about old computers is how hackable the hardware is. On old PCs, things like parallel ports, serial ports, joysticks and so on are trivially easy to

One thing about old computers is how hackable the hardware is. On old PCs, things like parallel ports, serial ports, joysticks and so on are trivially easy to interface to and have great performance. Even further back, generating and measuring periods in the sub-microsecond range was just a quick bit of assembler on 4MHZ Z80's back in the early 80's. Although that sort of hacking is still very possible now, it's the province of things like PICs, Arduino's and Pi's which are all relatively specialised and require far more effort to get started with than sticking a couple of wires in a parallel port and doing an outportb().