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As a retro enthusiast, I've been asked "why bother with old technology" a few times and, in my opinion, the best answer is simply "because I like it". There are

As a retro enthusiast, I've been asked "why bother with old technology" a few times and, in my opinion, the best answer is simply "because I like it". There are probably some underlying objective reasons behind that which I'm not consciously aware of (like maybe studying old technology makes me a better tech person today, some kind of indirect pedagogical effect), but I can't really pinpoint that specifically, and it can be a bit tiresome sometimes. Next time I guess I'll link them to this article!

chevill 5y ago
Got any recommendations for a good vintage computer to get started with that's more advanced than the C64? I took a course on C64 assembly and it was pretty good but I wanted to learn something a bit more complex but not as complex as a modern architecture.
- kordlessagain 5y ago
  The Amiga had a 68000 chip in it and dedicated graphics and audio hardware which enabled it to be quite a bit faster than the C64.
- daggersandscars 5y ago
  Any of the 68000-based machines may be worth a look. Atari ST, Amiga 500/1000, early Macs. There are also SBCs available that use the 68K. An early-ish 8086/8088 PC clone is a possibility, but the Atari/Amiga/Macs will have better graphics options and won't have segment/offset memory addressing.
  - buescher 5y ago
    A 680x0-based workstation could be really interesting for someone into that kind of thing, but an Amiga would probably be the most fun.
    - rbanffy 5y ago
      The advantage of Unix workstations is that they are still useful as X terminals. But then they aren’t much simpler than our modern desktops running their own Unixes.
      - buescher 5y ago
        I'm thinking an eighties workstation like a Sun 3. If you can find one, an SGI Indigo or early NeXT cube. Much closer to an Amiga than to a modern system, but even more funky and exotic hardware. I wouldn't consider an X server running on one of those "still useful" but others might disagree.
        rbanffy 5y ago
        I used an IBM PPC-based 43P as a work machine for some time. It can't run a modern browser, but back then using NetBeans running on my laptop was perfectly doable. Using Emacs and a terminal will work really well. Using one of these machines as a workstation is not much different from an older Raspberry Pi - you'll need to do the heavy lifting on the other side of the network anyway. The killer feature of this specific 43P was that it came with a gargantuan Intergraph CRT monitor.
  - Hublium 5y ago
    I feel like the Atari ST is the second easiest one to get into (after x86), because they share the floppy format with PC's.
    - rbanffy 5y ago
      Its hardware is also much simpler than the Amiga’s.
- Lio 5y ago
  I'll add to the other suggestions with any of the Acorn Risc OS line[1]. They're the original Arm based computers (not counting the development processor for the BBC Micro) and some of the earliest system on a chip computers. Might be fun if you fancy playing with Arm assembly language. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RISC_OS https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RISC_OS https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Acorn_Archimedes#Later_A-series_models https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Acorn_Archimedes#Later_A-serie... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Risc_PC https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Risc_PC [1] I say Risc OS but they actually also supported a Unix like called Risc ix.
- NegativeLatency 5y ago
  I’ve been working on getting a Macintosh II to boot A/UX a sys v Unix. My eventual goal is to use it for doing the K and R C exercises, and just generally see what Unix was like.
  - chevill 5y ago
    That sounds like a really interesting project.
    - NegativeLatency 5y ago
      http://aux-penelope.com/ http://aux-penelope.com/ There are some resources here if you’re curious and want to see screenshots. (Not my site)
  - kjs3 5y ago
    AU/X was a pretty weird Unix, an SVR2 base with various SVR3 and BSD bits bolted on, all topped off with a mostly-functional (classic) MacOS 7 emulation layer. It wasn't much like other, contemporary Unixen. I did some rather serious time with it in a previous life, and really grew to hate it.
    - NegativeLatency 5y ago
      Got any other old Unix recommendations? Was hoping to find xenix or some other old x86 one I could use. What did you use A/UX for?
      - kjs3 5y ago
        SCO Unix (or OpenDesktop or whatever they're calling it now) would be an example of a 'state of the art' x86 Unix before Linux matured. I, however, was always more fond of Dell Unix SVR4 for x86; a more 'pure' Unix. Install images are 'around'. It's new enough to be familiar and comes with a bunch of extras (like a pile of ported GNU tools). Interactive or Microport SVR3 are a little more old-skewl, if that's where you're at. Xenix is very old school, and shows you what you can to with very limited x86 hardware (esp Xenix for the 8086 or 80286), and you'll find a lot of tools you might want don't compile for various reasons (like a K&R C compiler). Other folks shipped an x86 SVR3 or SVR4, but they generally added very little to the AT&T code base. If you go the emulated route (e.g. SIMH), I'd go with BSD 4.3 or Sun SunOS 3.5. That's where I started out with Unix so there's a lot of nostalgia there.
- dTal 5y ago
  Not quite sure what you're after but you can get a Voyage 200 graphing calculator for not much more than a RasPi now - it's got a Motorola 68000, a qwerty keyboard, a sunlight-readable screen, a serial jack, a useful OS with many games, a C IDE, a disassembler (both onboard!)... and it runs on 4 alkaline batteries.
- danielrpa 5y ago
  Try the Commodore Amiga!
jerf 5y ago
One possible advantage is that it can be easier to learn the fundamentals when they aren't as obscured by as many later layers of smoothing over and/or complexity. For instance, it's very common for schools to teach assembler based on older tech, because it's simpler to deal with. Older tech will more directly expose you to the underlying issues with the foundations of the technology. For an example of something that smooths a lot of things over, using a nice, high-level USB library is abstracting away a huge amount of the issues involved with that sort of signaling. If you want to deeply understand how computers communicate with each other over wires, you're probably better off studying RS-232 first.
- jdsully 5y ago
  When I was first learning how to program I felt this way. High level languages were unsettling in that I knew they were doing a ton of "stuff" but I didn't know what. Old 8-bit micros get you closer to understanding how computers work.
- WalterBright 5y ago
  I tried to learn PDP-10 assembly language. I was just baffled by one concept after another (what's an accumulator? what's an addressing mode?). But then I did some programming for a 6800 with something like 40 simple instructions, and I "got it", and the -10 became simple, too.
  - jerf 5y ago
    I've been doing web development since the late 1990s. I don't know every fiddly detail of every current web technology, but I can pretty much pick up any of them, read the docs for an hour, and have them going in just a bit more time, because I've got a solid foundation from working on things back when even XMLHTTPRequest was but a fever dream. I was recently speaking online to someone trying to get into it from a fresh start, and they lent me their perspective (kinda like a rubber duck debugging session), and I was a bit appalled at how hard it is to get into web development at this level now. I ended up recommending an approach in which one recapitulates the browser's development cycle if you want to really understand what's going on out there... it isn't the best choice technically in the short term because it's a long path to tread just to do "this one thing", but if you want to be similarly flexible and know how to work with the mess of technologies out there, for path-dependent and historically-contingent reasons (that is, opposed to any other good reasons), I think it may still be the best way to go. And to be honest, there's still a lot you can do with server-side generated HTML, the tags in modern HTML, and a bit of pure Javascript. There are good reasons to move beyond that; I don't mean that in a "back in my day" sort of way. But if you do start there, the rest of the stack makes a lot more sense than trying to start directly with React as your first intro to the web, as fine as React may be.
rbanffy 5y ago
One fascinating feature of some old computers like the 8-bit Commodores and Ataris are the intelligent peripherals. The computer wouldn’t need to wait for IO operations as long as the data would fit in the peripheral’s buffers.

chevill 5y ago

Got any recommendations for a good vintage computer to get started with that's more advanced than the C64? I took a course on C64 assembly and it was pretty good but I wanted to learn something a bit more complex but not as complex as a modern architecture.

kordlessagain 5y ago
The Amiga had a 68000 chip in it and dedicated graphics and audio hardware which enabled it to be quite a bit faster than the C64.
daggersandscars 5y ago
Any of the 68000-based machines may be worth a look. Atari ST, Amiga 500/1000, early Macs. There are also SBCs available that use the 68K. An early-ish 8086/8088 PC clone is a possibility, but the Atari/Amiga/Macs will have better graphics options and won't have segment/offset memory addressing.
- buescher 5y ago
  A 680x0-based workstation could be really interesting for someone into that kind of thing, but an Amiga would probably be the most fun.
  - rbanffy 5y ago
    The advantage of Unix workstations is that they are still useful as X terminals. But then they aren’t much simpler than our modern desktops running their own Unixes.
    - buescher 5y ago
      I'm thinking an eighties workstation like a Sun 3. If you can find one, an SGI Indigo or early NeXT cube. Much closer to an Amiga than to a modern system, but even more funky and exotic hardware. I wouldn't consider an X server running on one of those "still useful" but others might disagree.
      - rbanffy 5y ago
        I used an IBM PPC-based 43P as a work machine for some time. It can't run a modern browser, but back then using NetBeans running on my laptop was perfectly doable. Using Emacs and a terminal will work really well. Using one of these machines as a workstation is not much different from an older Raspberry Pi - you'll need to do the heavy lifting on the other side of the network anyway. The killer feature of this specific 43P was that it came with a gargantuan Intergraph CRT monitor.
- Hublium 5y ago
  I feel like the Atari ST is the second easiest one to get into (after x86), because they share the floppy format with PC's.
  - rbanffy 5y ago
    Its hardware is also much simpler than the Amiga’s.
Lio 5y ago
I'll add to the other suggestions with any of the Acorn Risc OS line[1]. They're the original Arm based computers (not counting the development processor for the BBC Micro) and some of the earliest system on a chip computers. Might be fun if you fancy playing with Arm assembly language. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RISC_OS https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RISC_OS https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Acorn_Archimedes#Later_A-series_models https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Acorn_Archimedes#Later_A-serie... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Risc_PC https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Risc_PC [1] I say Risc OS but they actually also supported a Unix like called Risc ix.
NegativeLatency 5y ago
I’ve been working on getting a Macintosh II to boot A/UX a sys v Unix. My eventual goal is to use it for doing the K and R C exercises, and just generally see what Unix was like.
- chevill 5y ago
  That sounds like a really interesting project.
  - NegativeLatency 5y ago
    http://aux-penelope.com/ http://aux-penelope.com/ There are some resources here if you’re curious and want to see screenshots. (Not my site)
- kjs3 5y ago
  AU/X was a pretty weird Unix, an SVR2 base with various SVR3 and BSD bits bolted on, all topped off with a mostly-functional (classic) MacOS 7 emulation layer. It wasn't much like other, contemporary Unixen. I did some rather serious time with it in a previous life, and really grew to hate it.
  - NegativeLatency 5y ago
    Got any other old Unix recommendations? Was hoping to find xenix or some other old x86 one I could use. What did you use A/UX for?
    - kjs3 5y ago
      SCO Unix (or OpenDesktop or whatever they're calling it now) would be an example of a 'state of the art' x86 Unix before Linux matured. I, however, was always more fond of Dell Unix SVR4 for x86; a more 'pure' Unix. Install images are 'around'. It's new enough to be familiar and comes with a bunch of extras (like a pile of ported GNU tools). Interactive or Microport SVR3 are a little more old-skewl, if that's where you're at. Xenix is very old school, and shows you what you can to with very limited x86 hardware (esp Xenix for the 8086 or 80286), and you'll find a lot of tools you might want don't compile for various reasons (like a K&R C compiler). Other folks shipped an x86 SVR3 or SVR4, but they generally added very little to the AT&T code base. If you go the emulated route (e.g. SIMH), I'd go with BSD 4.3 or Sun SunOS 3.5. That's where I started out with Unix so there's a lot of nostalgia there.
dTal 5y ago
Not quite sure what you're after but you can get a Voyage 200 graphing calculator for not much more than a RasPi now - it's got a Motorola 68000, a qwerty keyboard, a sunlight-readable screen, a serial jack, a useful OS with many games, a C IDE, a disassembler (both onboard!)... and it runs on 4 alkaline batteries.
danielrpa 5y ago
Try the Commodore Amiga!

jerf 5y ago

One possible advantage is that it can be easier to learn the fundamentals when they aren't as obscured by as many later layers of smoothing over and/or complexity. For instance, it's very common for schools to teach assembler based on older tech, because it's simpler to deal with. Older tech will more directly expose you to the underlying issues with the foundations of the technology. For an example of something that smooths a lot of things over, using a nice, high-level USB library is abstracting away a huge amount of the issues involved with that sort of signaling. If you want to deeply understand how computers communicate with each other over wires, you're probably better off studying RS-232 first.

jdsully 5y ago
When I was first learning how to program I felt this way. High level languages were unsettling in that I knew they were doing a ton of "stuff" but I didn't know what. Old 8-bit micros get you closer to understanding how computers work.
WalterBright 5y ago
I tried to learn PDP-10 assembly language. I was just baffled by one concept after another (what's an accumulator? what's an addressing mode?). But then I did some programming for a 6800 with something like 40 simple instructions, and I "got it", and the -10 became simple, too.
- jerf 5y ago
  I've been doing web development since the late 1990s. I don't know every fiddly detail of every current web technology, but I can pretty much pick up any of them, read the docs for an hour, and have them going in just a bit more time, because I've got a solid foundation from working on things back when even XMLHTTPRequest was but a fever dream. I was recently speaking online to someone trying to get into it from a fresh start, and they lent me their perspective (kinda like a rubber duck debugging session), and I was a bit appalled at how hard it is to get into web development at this level now. I ended up recommending an approach in which one recapitulates the browser's development cycle if you want to really understand what's going on out there... it isn't the best choice technically in the short term because it's a long path to tread just to do "this one thing", but if you want to be similarly flexible and know how to work with the mess of technologies out there, for path-dependent and historically-contingent reasons (that is, opposed to any other good reasons), I think it may still be the best way to go. And to be honest, there's still a lot you can do with server-side generated HTML, the tags in modern HTML, and a bit of pure Javascript. There are good reasons to move beyond that; I don't mean that in a "back in my day" sort of way. But if you do start there, the rest of the stack makes a lot more sense than trying to start directly with React as your first intro to the web, as fine as React may be.

rbanffy 5y ago

One fascinating feature of some old computers like the 8-bit Commodores and Ataris are the intelligent peripherals. The computer wouldn’t need to wait for IO operations as long as the data would fit in the peripheral’s buffers.