The best thing about old computers is they're so damn simple, and there are a ton of projects out there to enhance them - for $50 you can get a BlueSCSI which gives you hard drive/optical/network emulation on many machines.
Also, new tools are way more capable and cheap - all you need to fix an old computer with a sub-50mhz bus clock is a multimeter/scope, soldering iron, and other bits, which can easily be purchased new for $200.
There is certainly a nostalgia that I feel about tech from when I was 8 until 15 years old. This corresponded with Radio Shack 100-in-1 electronics kits, the Mattel Big Trak programmable vehicle, Mattel handheld electronic games, the Vectrex gaming system, the ZX-81 and the Commodore Amiga 500 computer. And I will throw in old Edmund Scientific catalogs for good measure. I was pre-Nintendo and Sega and certainly pre-Playstation and Xbox by a generation
I imagine the current crop of college students that I teach today will feel the same about Minecraft, Angry Birds and the original iPad when they reach their 40s or later.
I wonder if my kids will feel the same about their iPad 8 or whatever version this is... My guess is not.
Technology feels so "all worked out" today, with the right to repair out the window, everything is fused, and just dies one day and that'll be it.
I do fantasise about being reunited with my 386 DX 33, 4MB of ram and 40MB of hdd! It was the cream of the crop. Oh, that reset button has seen some action.
This resonates so hard with me! Except in my case it’s the Apple ][.
I’ve decided it’s completely unnecessary to justify this retro computing passion, there’s nothing wrong with venerating the ingenuity, ethos and craftsmanship of the time.
The excitement we felt at the breakthroughs that were coming fast and furious back then, the community and camaraderie of fellow nerds, the realization that those massively constrained systems with 10,000 to 100,000 times less power than we have today still managed to offer massive value to us as users and programmers - that’s pretty amazing.
Another reason to love that era was that there was still genuine idealism in the industry and everything was far less corporate than today.
It's interesting how more "amateur approachable" both old cars and old computers are. Old cars can be worked on by anyone with some basic tools and know-how, and old computers could be understood and programmed the same way. MacPaint was made by one employee.
I think this is partially why people want these types of objects. You can actually own them. You can understand them. You can mod them.
Modern cars, games, computers, etc. aren't owned anymore. They always have updates, and could be bricked at any moment if the manufacturer wishes, gets bought or goes out of business.
There's nothing preventing this from being the golden age of computers. The capabilities of the hardware are near magical. We just need to bring back the concept of ownership.
An old car can still drive on current roads. There's may be no aircon, only AM radio and no airbags, but there's still horsepower and size to do what cars do.
Then, cars rust and naturally become rare and expensive to restore to a running state, and almost all of the appeal is that you can show off in them, displaying how much money you can afford to spend on a hobby.
Old computers are pretty cheap and are limited to old software, and there's nearly no showing off other than on HN.
Just because you can't find a useful purpose for an old computer doesn't mean they don't have any. For example, any computer, regardless of age, can be used to write a novel.
I returned the MacSE30 that I bought at the Apple Store back in 1989 or 1990 when I went into grad school. Compared to the Epson that I bought at the same time it was a fantastic machine that would do almost everything that I needed to do out of the box whereas for the Epson I needed to buy other software. It helped that I already had Mac software though.
I returned it because I couldn't afford it. The cost with peripherals was almost 3X the price of the Epson so I took advantage of Apple's return policy and let it go.
I still have my original computer though, a 128k Mac that I upgraded to 512k within a couple months of getting it back in January 1985. I have the printer, an external floppy drive, and maybe something else. I used it to introduce my kids to computers, teaching them to type and use a mouse and to play the one or two games that I have for it. I have several software applications that are not Apple software including one with capabilities that I made good use of back in the day. It was mathematical software that I could feed the software points defining a line and it would compute the equation defining that line out to the nth order polynomial. It understood linear, logarithmic, and exponential scales so all you needed as input were the points in x,y space and the scale for each variable. It was very powerful and there was nothing like it in DOS land or in early Winland. I used it find the equations of lines in published nomographs and then used those equations to write and debug QuickBASIC software to calculate reservoir properties on an old Compaq 286 (later a 386 and 486, etc).
I don't remember the name of the software but it was very a good mathematical application. I still don't think there is similar software for Windows unless Wolfram Alpha can do the same thing. I haven't needed to try in a long time.
- WriteNow! a very nice word processor that was originally developed for Next computers, before word took over it was the favorite.
- ClarisWorks/AppleWorks - One of the better pre office integrated apps - the database was REALLY easy to use, and interfaced well with the vector graphics module, spreadsheet, and word processor...
- FoxBase+/Mac - Before Microsoft bought Fox Software they got "Mac religion" and it shows in the incredible FoxBase+/Mac its amazin how much capability fits in a floppy.
- SuperPaint - great bitmap paint program though not as accurate as later graphics apps. (fractional/grid positioning was an issue)
- Ready,Set,Go! A great alternative DTP program to PageMaker/Quark. Never used others but I hear I think it was FrameMaker that had some sort of template/database feature to manage/generate catalogs. There were some interesting things back in the day.
- Stepping out - virtual larger desktop
- PowerPrint - Hook into epson compatible parallel printers with serial->parallel adapter.
- Comic Strip Factory - way before there was ComicLife there was Comic Strip Factory - a nice clipart based comic strip compositor.
- HyperCard - Never got into it but it had quite a community.
- Of course programming languages like Pascal, Logo, and BASIC in various flavors.
Of course you have the early greats like the Adobe programs and Microsoft Word/Excel/Office.
Take an SE/30, add some mass storage (something above 20MB), plug in a postscript printer, add ClarisWorks, maybe Filemaker, and you have something that, even today, would do 80%+ of what human beings use computers for.
Outside of the internet.
Get a network adapter (which pretty sure exists for the SE/30), and, like, Eudora(?), and you MIGHT even get email. Struggle there is everyone (rightly) does email over TLS, so there’s that.
BUT, add a raspberry pi as an email gateway, telnet to it for some Lynx love, and, boy, that’s a lot of computer utility.
Glaring gaps are anything graphic intensive, notably photos, and graphical internet.
Betting there’s some nice games that run on the SE.
Have 2 Apple ][e, Lisa, Apple NeXT Cube, Fat Mac 512K, Mac IIci, Mac LC and an Apple Xserve, as part of my Apple collection. Along with Sinclair ZX81 and an Atari 800. Many decades of collecting and maintaining them. Unfortunately kids are not interested in inheriting them after I'm gone, even as I have shared with the some of the great origin stories behind some of these machines. They don't see the value. Their logic is that they can always spin up an emulator and try the software, instead of keeping these old dinosaurs around.
I also have a collection of Macs and NeXT computers, including a Macintosh SE and a NeXT Cube. I was just a baby when these computers were being manufactured; I first learned about these computers in high school when Mac OS X was new and when I was completely taken by the idea of a Unix with a nice GUI, coming from the world of Windows 9x.
While emulators are definitely convenient (especially when living in apartments), there is something about using physical hardware from the era and appreciating their technological limits compared to modern hardware. I also feel it is beneficial for young people who weren’t around to experience these machines during their heydays to experience them, to get a feel for what computing was like and how things have changed, for better and for worse. I miss the Living Computers Museum in Seattle, which was in operation before the COVID-19 pandemic and the passing of its owner, Paul Allen, cofounder of Microsoft.
Also, I love my mechanical keyboards from the era! I have a few old mechanical Apple keyboards (including the legendary Apple Extended Keyboard II) and two non-ADB NeXT keyboards.
I know what he means. I don’t have the room (or time) to restore and keep an old Mac, but I am 3D printing little replicas (and tweaking the models out there) to build something to toy with: https://taoofmac.com/space/notes/2025/06/22/1830
Mine currently runs System 7 and After Dark 24/7 (while acting as a Tailscale exit node) on my shelf, and I’m currently (slowly) designing a facsimile mouse for it. I love tinkering with the thing even if the screen size is atrociously small for practical use because _everything just works without any bullshit_,
Then again I have a long history of having something like this around (I used to have the same Pi setup as a Plan 9 terminal solely for SSHing into my homelab without distractions), but there is something about that particular era of computing that makes me not just nostalgic but genuinely interested in re-living it to a degree.
I don’t really miss the Sinclair or Ataris I had before, nor any of the other 8/16 bit computers I used—-not even the games—-but there is something about the early Macs (up until the IIfx) that is indelibly burned into my brain.
We had rudimentary Internet, Mail, NNTP, all the barebone stuff, and being on the cusp of the browser era was very fun (I do miss my NeXT too, but hardly as much in comparison).
I also own a vintage iBook G4 (maxed at 1.5G RAM so it's pretty powerful) and I'm struggling to find meaning in owning it.
Originally I was thinking about getting touch with PowerPC architecture and check out how Apple did the 68K emulator. But now I'm completely burnt out from work, I simply have no interest in programming at all, and the laptop sits in a drawer collecting dusts.
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[ 6.4 ms ] story [ 48.6 ms ] threadAlso, new tools are way more capable and cheap - all you need to fix an old computer with a sub-50mhz bus clock is a multimeter/scope, soldering iron, and other bits, which can easily be purchased new for $200.
I imagine the current crop of college students that I teach today will feel the same about Minecraft, Angry Birds and the original iPad when they reach their 40s or later.
Technology feels so "all worked out" today, with the right to repair out the window, everything is fused, and just dies one day and that'll be it.
I do fantasise about being reunited with my 386 DX 33, 4MB of ram and 40MB of hdd! It was the cream of the crop. Oh, that reset button has seen some action.
I’ve decided it’s completely unnecessary to justify this retro computing passion, there’s nothing wrong with venerating the ingenuity, ethos and craftsmanship of the time.
The excitement we felt at the breakthroughs that were coming fast and furious back then, the community and camaraderie of fellow nerds, the realization that those massively constrained systems with 10,000 to 100,000 times less power than we have today still managed to offer massive value to us as users and programmers - that’s pretty amazing.
Another reason to love that era was that there was still genuine idealism in the industry and everything was far less corporate than today.
Perhaps my acquired hate of low profile non-buckling-spring keyboards is misplaced?
I think this is partially why people want these types of objects. You can actually own them. You can understand them. You can mod them.
Modern cars, games, computers, etc. aren't owned anymore. They always have updates, and could be bricked at any moment if the manufacturer wishes, gets bought or goes out of business.
There's nothing preventing this from being the golden age of computers. The capabilities of the hardware are near magical. We just need to bring back the concept of ownership.
Then, cars rust and naturally become rare and expensive to restore to a running state, and almost all of the appeal is that you can show off in them, displaying how much money you can afford to spend on a hobby.
Old computers are pretty cheap and are limited to old software, and there's nearly no showing off other than on HN.
Whatever rocks your boat I guess.
I returned it because I couldn't afford it. The cost with peripherals was almost 3X the price of the Epson so I took advantage of Apple's return policy and let it go.
I still have my original computer though, a 128k Mac that I upgraded to 512k within a couple months of getting it back in January 1985. I have the printer, an external floppy drive, and maybe something else. I used it to introduce my kids to computers, teaching them to type and use a mouse and to play the one or two games that I have for it. I have several software applications that are not Apple software including one with capabilities that I made good use of back in the day. It was mathematical software that I could feed the software points defining a line and it would compute the equation defining that line out to the nth order polynomial. It understood linear, logarithmic, and exponential scales so all you needed as input were the points in x,y space and the scale for each variable. It was very powerful and there was nothing like it in DOS land or in early Winland. I used it find the equations of lines in published nomographs and then used those equations to write and debug QuickBASIC software to calculate reservoir properties on an old Compaq 286 (later a 386 and 486, etc).
I don't remember the name of the software but it was very a good mathematical application. I still don't think there is similar software for Windows unless Wolfram Alpha can do the same thing. I haven't needed to try in a long time.
Thanks for this reminder.
- WriteNow! a very nice word processor that was originally developed for Next computers, before word took over it was the favorite.
- ClarisWorks/AppleWorks - One of the better pre office integrated apps - the database was REALLY easy to use, and interfaced well with the vector graphics module, spreadsheet, and word processor...
- FoxBase+/Mac - Before Microsoft bought Fox Software they got "Mac religion" and it shows in the incredible FoxBase+/Mac its amazin how much capability fits in a floppy.
- SuperPaint - great bitmap paint program though not as accurate as later graphics apps. (fractional/grid positioning was an issue)
- Ready,Set,Go! A great alternative DTP program to PageMaker/Quark. Never used others but I hear I think it was FrameMaker that had some sort of template/database feature to manage/generate catalogs. There were some interesting things back in the day.
- Stepping out - virtual larger desktop
- PowerPrint - Hook into epson compatible parallel printers with serial->parallel adapter.
- Comic Strip Factory - way before there was ComicLife there was Comic Strip Factory - a nice clipart based comic strip compositor.
- HyperCard - Never got into it but it had quite a community.
- Of course programming languages like Pascal, Logo, and BASIC in various flavors.
Of course you have the early greats like the Adobe programs and Microsoft Word/Excel/Office.
Outside of the internet.
Get a network adapter (which pretty sure exists for the SE/30), and, like, Eudora(?), and you MIGHT even get email. Struggle there is everyone (rightly) does email over TLS, so there’s that.
BUT, add a raspberry pi as an email gateway, telnet to it for some Lynx love, and, boy, that’s a lot of computer utility.
Glaring gaps are anything graphic intensive, notably photos, and graphical internet.
Betting there’s some nice games that run on the SE.
Wish you could swap innards like you can swap engines with (some) cars.
While emulators are definitely convenient (especially when living in apartments), there is something about using physical hardware from the era and appreciating their technological limits compared to modern hardware. I also feel it is beneficial for young people who weren’t around to experience these machines during their heydays to experience them, to get a feel for what computing was like and how things have changed, for better and for worse. I miss the Living Computers Museum in Seattle, which was in operation before the COVID-19 pandemic and the passing of its owner, Paul Allen, cofounder of Microsoft.
Also, I love my mechanical keyboards from the era! I have a few old mechanical Apple keyboards (including the legendary Apple Extended Keyboard II) and two non-ADB NeXT keyboards.
Mine currently runs System 7 and After Dark 24/7 (while acting as a Tailscale exit node) on my shelf, and I’m currently (slowly) designing a facsimile mouse for it. I love tinkering with the thing even if the screen size is atrociously small for practical use because _everything just works without any bullshit_,
Then again I have a long history of having something like this around (I used to have the same Pi setup as a Plan 9 terminal solely for SSHing into my homelab without distractions), but there is something about that particular era of computing that makes me not just nostalgic but genuinely interested in re-living it to a degree.
I don’t really miss the Sinclair or Ataris I had before, nor any of the other 8/16 bit computers I used—-not even the games—-but there is something about the early Macs (up until the IIfx) that is indelibly burned into my brain.
We had rudimentary Internet, Mail, NNTP, all the barebone stuff, and being on the cusp of the browser era was very fun (I do miss my NeXT too, but hardly as much in comparison).
Originally I was thinking about getting touch with PowerPC architecture and check out how Apple did the 68K emulator. But now I'm completely burnt out from work, I simply have no interest in programming at all, and the laptop sits in a drawer collecting dusts.
I feel sad for it and myself.