i'm kinda in this battle at the moment. i got a palmos m125. i've tried running palm desktop under wine on linux. tried j-pilot and for the life of me have not been able to get sync working.

pascal and forth but no basic. in the 1980s that was almost a death warrant right there.

soft modem like winmodem and winprinter is a term that strikes terror into my heart. ibm thinkpads experimented with softmodems making the sound card pretend to be a modem. they were awful awful devices. was not surprised when they went back to real modems installed.

bring back bbses, usable at 2400baud :-)

while it might be too far into the weeds for some, it does show a need to fit large things into small computers that is a skill and mindset that a site dedicated to antique and smaller computers should bear in mind when they hit a wall. :-)

i strongly suspect people will work magic with 3d printers and rasp pi long before the last stacy turns off for the last time.

i suspect people will start resurrecting older already dead ones to get them back in use.

i'd buy it in a heart beat if it had a spectrum plus keyboard instead of the original rubber one. i might still buy one but i've already fought my battles on the rubber keyboard back in the 80s.

i remember the hype and there was an article saying that sir clive sinclair of zx spectrum fame was looking at the transputer idea as a way to jump back into computing after the sale of sinclair. my thought that he was just about crazy enough to do it, make it work and sell it for a pittance :-)

i bought computer shopper at a corner shop newsagent near where i worked. a staff member stopped me one day and asked about as she couldn't believe how big and heavy it was.

so i had to explain that it was a gathering of every computer advert from every company with a tiny magazine scattered throughout it's pages. i showed her that that month it went index, 50 or so pages of adverts, news section, 50 pages of adverts, reviews, 50 pages of adverts. articles on minor platforms between blocks of adverts and then columns followed by some more adverts.

it was dead handy for finding obscure hardware and software in a time before the internet. and as the internet is filling with a.i. slop i hope someone finds a way to make a profitable curated list which is as useful as computer shopper was in it's heyday.

nokia's snake would say phone gaming existed long before the nintendo ds. mobile gaming existed long before nokia with palm and psion having a fair number of games. nintendo game and watch and gakken had mobile gaming in the 80s pretty sewn up.