4 ms·

I feel like there is a computing renaissance, so many new and creative projects, I am not sure if its because of pcbway or because of riscv, cheap parts, access

I feel like there is a computing renaissance, so many new and creative projects, I am not sure if its because of pcbway or because of riscv, cheap parts, accessible knowledge, kicad and opensource tooling, but it makes me super excited. People are having fun with computers.

Duanemclemore 3y ago
Yeah, it really feels like people are going back to the pre-5150 personal computer era and looking at things from the ground up again. This is especially exciting to me as someone juuuuuust old enough to have extensively used those machines (C64, //e, Atari 800, etc) when they were contemporary but now diving deep into an interest in the fundamentals of computing while in the middle of a completely different career. A project like this is specifically exciting because I could look at 8 bit computing from the ground up without having to worry about buying a vintage machine and a whole host of gremlins it might have built up over the years.
- mechagodzilla 3y ago
  I'm too young to have participated much with 8-bit machines the first time around, but I've played around with Z80 + CP/M machines (both vintage and new/custom) a lot in recent years. To me it is an extremely fun, human-scale design space. Machines of lower capability are mostly toys or needlessly painful, but an 8-bit CPU running at a few MHz with 64KB of RAM is enough to provided a very nice text-only computing experience. You can run self-hosting development tools (Turbo Pascal!), get access to all kinds of CLI tools, real file systems, etc, while still keeping the entire memory map in your head. I love the idea of a computing environment that just provides you with a thousand fully-independent, 64KB 8-bit machines and just drops time-slicing and task switching completely.
bluescrn 3y ago
A lot of things came together over the last decade or two to enable ever-more-impressive 'maker'/hobbyist projects. Ubiquitous 3D printing, cheap PCBs, powerful CAD software available to hobbyists, YouTube's growth as an educational resource, excitement over FPGAs, super-affordable microcontrollers and single-board computers, and a big wave of 80s/90s nostalgia often giving it direction. At the same time, modern 'mainstream' computing has become increasingly user-hostile, built to encourage spending, ad-views, and content consumption rather than experimenting and creating.
hammyhavoc 3y ago
What are some other projects you've been excited by? Love seeing what people are capable of by indulging their passion.

Duanemclemore 3y ago

Yeah, it really feels like people are going back to the pre-5150 personal computer era and looking at things from the ground up again. This is especially exciting to me as someone juuuuuust old enough to have extensively used those machines (C64, //e, Atari 800, etc) when they were contemporary but now diving deep into an interest in the fundamentals of computing while in the middle of a completely different career. A project like this is specifically exciting because I could look at 8 bit computing from the ground up without having to worry about buying a vintage machine and a whole host of gremlins it might have built up over the years.

mechagodzilla 3y ago
I'm too young to have participated much with 8-bit machines the first time around, but I've played around with Z80 + CP/M machines (both vintage and new/custom) a lot in recent years. To me it is an extremely fun, human-scale design space. Machines of lower capability are mostly toys or needlessly painful, but an 8-bit CPU running at a few MHz with 64KB of RAM is enough to provided a very nice text-only computing experience. You can run self-hosting development tools (Turbo Pascal!), get access to all kinds of CLI tools, real file systems, etc, while still keeping the entire memory map in your head. I love the idea of a computing environment that just provides you with a thousand fully-independent, 64KB 8-bit machines and just drops time-slicing and task switching completely.

bluescrn 3y ago

A lot of things came together over the last decade or two to enable ever-more-impressive 'maker'/hobbyist projects. Ubiquitous 3D printing, cheap PCBs, powerful CAD software available to hobbyists, YouTube's growth as an educational resource, excitement over FPGAs, super-affordable microcontrollers and single-board computers, and a big wave of 80s/90s nostalgia often giving it direction. At the same time, modern 'mainstream' computing has become increasingly user-hostile, built to encourage spending, ad-views, and content consumption rather than experimenting and creating.

hammyhavoc 3y ago

What are some other projects you've been excited by? Love seeing what people are capable of by indulging their passion.