Hey retro people! I am enjoying the site and the overall chatter.
Are you a lurker? Please say hello! Let us all enjoy one another and talk up our favorite gear please. I will drop a comment to start and lead by example in a few moments.
(If this breaks the rules, I apologize and won't repeat it. I'm pretty sure it's obvious but just know my intent was benign just to enjoy everyone a little bit more, that's all.)
PS: Thank you for keeping it active.
This is a really intersting machine. Do you have/use the Apple IIe emulator card ?
No, I've actually never heard of that before! I'm just running System 7.5.3 on it.
Retro machine of choice. Atari 800. First computer that was mine. Want revive machine to be real….
Day job is working on COBOL and Fortran centric LLM to keep the lights on after I’m gone.
Click, clickety, click, click...
The SIO system was really nice for the time.
The retro machines I am mostly interested in are BBC Micro, Sharp MZ80K, KIM-1, Research Machines 380Z and 480Z.
Is there one running somewhere maybe? Super interesting hardware for sure.
Should you ever need help, I am open to that, though I can't think of a thing right now and that probably means you got this.
Thanks again. Much appreciated!
Was a video game dev in the 90s. Co-hosted a computer TV show for a short while🤣
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1q6yPcUwatg
I miss hanging out with Kate Russell, she's an absolute darling. The show was ridiculous fun to do, only got paid 15 quid an episode, but the studio folks would treat you like a king from the moment you arrived.
Thanks for linking it. Very fun watching.
I started with a PDP-8e in the old old days and then worked a lot on PDP-10 (DECSYSTEM-20) hardware before eventually landing in Unixland on the VAX 11/750, so I suppose I'm much more of a retro big iron guy.
I did touch some personal computers in the old days, though, including the C64, and I owned an original IBM PC.
Yeah, big iron! I am interested but lack the space, so I watch others with great interest.
I did get really into Sgi machines, but those are a newer breed. They do have that big iron feel. At one point I had quite a set, Origin server, Indy machines, an O2... purged it all in the early 10's and went small, embedded after that.
I’m a fairly regular contributor of links and collect lovely old bits, with a focus on pre-Intel Macintosh and Newton devices.
I need to contribute more links...
Thanks for answering the call.
I have roughly a decade on you. I really need to explore the Speccy one day. I love bitmap games on the Apple 2 and always felt the Speccy and BBC Micro would be great to explore.
I do have a PAL capable PVM now and must say it looks a bit sharper for sure, but I love my 60Hz!
Retro DOS is my next target. I need to get a 386 or lower machine with ISA slots.
It is hard to find time for me too. I go in phases. When I find time, I use it. And one thing I learned is get your gear when an opportunity comes up. It may never again.
Happened with my Apple. I had snagged cards I wanted, then ended up with a machine.
Big fan of all of computer history but especially '90s to early 2000s machines. There's definitely some element of nostalgia to that since it's what I grew up on — System 7 at school, Windows 98 on the family PC, and various DOS/Win3/Win95 on my hand-me-down personal 486.
I also feel like that's the point when computers became recognizably modern and where the progression of technology stopped being entirely in my best interest, like the emergence of spyware which used to be rare enough to deserve its own term but is now just literally everything all the time. I love researching the evolutionary dead ends of computing as inspo for my personal projects, because there are so many cool ideas lost in products that didn't make it for marketplace and/or monopoly reasons.
The machine I've been spending the most time on lately is a HITACHI FLORA 270HX NW5, 900Mhz PentiumⅢ which is actually ACER OEM in disguise: https://www.hitachi.co.jp/Prod/comp/OSD/pc/flora/prod/oldmod...
Pixx:
— https://i.imgur.com/chwdeJT.jpeg https://i.imgur.com/N9sFQYZ.jpeg (I have two of them, using the other as the stand there lol)
— https://i.imgur.com/LEBbY9x.jpeg https://i.imgur.com/BODkAVB.jpeg
— https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=O_JixyzbcAM
The Nicad battery still works!
Had Apples in school, learned a ton, got one for home and have been using both ever since.
Today, I run an Apple 2 Platinum with a FastChip that can run Applesoft basic at 16 Mhz! That is fun. Have FujiNET devices on both Apple and my Atari 800XL.
I program in assembly for a lot of chips and enjoy hacking around on retro gear of all kinds. Also CRT displays are great. Mine still work and I hope that continues.
I really want a Tek vector storage computer some day. These are beautiful and I worked on one doing sheet metal back in the day.
And I want a CRT terminal I can augment into a full computer just for fun. (Without removing its original capability.)
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=QMEgysuCwZA&pp=ygUJdGVrIDQ...
What do you have, what do you want?
What makes you feel like playing?