One of the chillest retro hardware repair channels, love watching it.

I especially enjoy Adrian's methodical approach to identifying the root cause of a problem. That way you can learn a lot about how these things really work and fail, and not just watch somebody quickly identify a faulty chip and replace it.

I'd say the main thrust of the article is not about cost or complexity, but about the lack of a clear purpose or reason to exist. In the opinion of the article's author, it's not a good educational tool, not a cheap powerful computer and not a real retro platform with a massive game library, so what is it good for?

I tend to understand the X16 as the 8-bit Guy chasing a dream of designing his own computer, which he was successful at - and getting there is impressive. It is not a great product, though, and there are many other hobby computers today available, at lower price points and serving different markets.

Turns out, the Kansas City Standard even uses Two Stop Bits - so very apt for this site :)

Indeed, an awesome read, and with pointers to many other books and resources which also sound extremely interesting.

Makes me want to restart my efforts to port JonesForth to some other machine!

As a person interested in basically all of computing and gaming history, I've always been interested in ZZT, but never could quite "grok it".

This whole branch of text mode DOS games seems very "you had to be there" for me - quite unlike eg. text roguelikes.