Lots of great tricks here, some that any C64 demo coder will recognize, and some really involved gags like the nine sprites seemingly in the border. As he says, it's intentionally and deceptively not fancy, but it's more technically impressive than many of the showboat trackmos.

If you really want a modern workstation that's still in the spirit of the old RISC war horses, go buy a Raptor Talos II (or a Raptor Blackbird if you want something smaller). Lots of OS support, generally runs most software you can compile for it, and way more powerful than your Power Mac.

Nice work - I just use one of Bob Applegate (rip)'s RS-232 cards. They work great with the KIM and probably other KIM-like devices.

For uploading, I wrote this (plain C). It converts raw binaries to the KIM papertape format transparently and uploads (and executes) in one step, or you can hand it preprocessed papertape text files. https://github.com/classilla/kimup/

Dad's first PC was a Packard Bell 386SX. He killed it trying to install a 486 upgrade.

I use a THUM myself with a 400MHz Sawtooth G4 in the server room: gopher://gopher.floodgap.com:70/0/servertemps.txt

Yay! Two candles every year!

There's some additional issues with the piece this article quotes, in addition to the ones he mentions:

- When mentioning the 128, they don't even consider VDC mode, which did (on the flat 128, anyway) have a 640x200 monochrome mode. It didn't get used much and Commodore didn't really acknowledge it, but it was there.

- The 1.8MHz clock rate for the Atari 8-bits depended on how much it got interrupted by the video hardware.

- The color comparison doesn't include Amiga HAM.

I've got a STacy. Not nearly as ... elegant.

Hey, thank you! I will add that the MacIvory is probably the easiest Symbolics system to actually own and run. The full-size systems are VMEbus tanks, and some can be incredibly loud.

On the other hand, I hear from others that Symbolics had the best software, even if the TI Explorer series may be more liveable.

This is basically PILOT on steroids.