Well, you can find a lot of 80's era 8-bit retrocomputers on Ebay for not too much money, outside of the more rare and in-demand models. I recently picked up an

Well, you can find a lot of 80's era 8-bit retrocomputers on Ebay for not too much money, outside of the more rare and in-demand models. I recently picked up an Atari 800 for a couple of hundred dollars, for example. Eying an Atari 1040ST as my next one... Outside of buying an off the shelf machine and playing around with it, you could just build your own machine, using a popular CPU from that era, like a z80 or a 6502. I'm more of a z80 guy in that regard, so I can speak more to that world. There, I can say that there is a LOT of information, manuals, plans, books, videos, etc "out there" to help you with the process[1]. The same is probably true for the 6502 but I have less experience with that world, so can't say so from first hand experience. Another interesting thing to do would be to follow Ben Eater's Youtube series[2] where he walks through building an 8-bit computer basically from scratch. He really digs down to the very lowest level of how things work as he builds up his machine. Finally, I might recommend the books Code by Charles Petzold and The Elements of Computing Systems: Building a Modern Computer from First Principles by Noam Nisan and Shimon Schocken, and the associated website for the latter[3]. Neither is "about" retro-computing per-se, but both books work on explaining computing fundamentals at a very low level, in a way that's generally easy to follow, and which maps pretty cleanly to understanding something like an 80's era 8-bit CPU. And, of course, once you have a handle on simple 8-bit machines, and have the basics mastered, you could start looking to branching out into building and/or buying more sophisticated machines based on 16 or 32 bit architectures. People have done some wild stuff in the name of retro-computing. You'll hear stories of people who put IBM mini-computers like an AS/400, or even a full-fledged IBM mainframe[4] in their home. Be careful, this can be addictive... :-) [1]: http://www.z80.info/ http://www.z80.info/ [2]: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLowKtXNTBypGqImE405J2565dvjafglHU https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLowKtXNTBypGqImE405J2... [3]: https://www.nand2tetris.org/ https://www.nand2tetris.org/ [4]: https://www.channele2e.com/technology/datacenters/college-student-installs-ibm-mainframe-in-parents-basement/ https://www.channele2e.com/technology/datacenters/college-st...