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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 8086/80
by 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 agoA 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 agoThe 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 agoI'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 agoI 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 agoI 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 agoIts hardware is also much simpler than the Amiga’s.