Who is into retrocomputing?

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I was wondering how many people on WP are into retrocomputing? Tell us about your collection or particular area of interest in vintage computers.

I just stayed up till 2am backing up floppies form my Radio Shack Color Computer 2 onto a laptop over the serial port using a neat tool called DriveWire. I had to take apart and scrub down the drive controller cartridge with alcohol before it would even come up and start reading disks.


for those that don't know the Color computer is a 6809 based 8 bit microcomputer that connects to a TV set. and can run a multiuser multitasking real time operating system called OS9 you can find lots of info on it at http://www.coco3.com

Retrocomputing? Oh-yeah! Big Commodore fan here, who started out 23 years ago with the SX-64 (a portable version of the well-known Commodore 64). And I still enjoy coding stuff in assembler on that little 8-bit, ~1 MHz machine! I even have a Commodore 64 emulator in my cell phone!

Besides the SX, I have one of the standard "breadbox" C-64's, along with a 1701 monitor, a printer and a few disk drives for the 64's. Though most retrocomputing takes place on an emulator on my modern pc; both because I'm lazy, and to minimize wear-and-tear on the old equipment.

I have several C64 systems. I got into retro stuff when is was young because I was poor and wanted to learn computers. so I would go to flea markets and goodwills and pick up all the computing equipment I could find.

mostly 8bit micro stuff but also some more interesting thing like old sun workstations and CP/M machines.

I really like the feel of using the actual hardware. but I have to admit to doing the emulator route a lot of the time. the coco is currently the only 8bit system I'm doing anything with at the moment. the other systems I like are the VAX and the PDP10 I have a VAXStation 4000 which is a desktop sized VAX which I use to run OpenVMS. and the PDP10 of course is just an emulator (which you can find at simh.trailing-edge.com)


I have created a TOPS-10 distro for simh with a lot of extra layered software installed like the fortran and cobol compilers and a lot more but I don't want anyone finding me here through google (mainly worrying about future employers) since this isn't a members only forum. you can PM me if you are interested.

I have an old PC and several old Macs.

I have a Macintosh. The original Macintosh model.

We used to have a TI99/4A too.

That's about all.

Dad's still using my old Leading Edge Model D...22 years old, and still working...

I love to collect old machines from the late 80s to about 2000. You don`t find a lot of Used Computer equipment in my area due to the fact that Thrift Stores don`t sell it due to the fact that the equipment could break any second and won`t even bother to recover it. Flea Markets are just way to stingy to give away computers at fairly good prices.[ $140 for a 400Mhz PII w/ 128Mb Memory.] If its not that the Flea Market owners/ people who sell stuff won`t even sell anything that is new enough to have 2 USB Ports and just hoard them for there own home computers or give them to other flea market people.

Still have a MSX lying around somewhere. It is somewhere beneath my desk, so finding it would be a challange. I have also a case of data-cassettes, but they do not work anymore... ah well, nothing fancy lost; most of it is available as ROM anyway. And with my current COBOL skill I surpassed my early BASIC skills by far

I am, but don't have the means to persue it.

I'm actually amking htis post from a 1997-vintage beigebox running Windows 95. My dad has a pair of mid-90s vintage Macintoshes in his basement which I would love to get up and running someday. He also used to have a Mac Classic (or similar) and a Commodore 128, but he acutually THREW BOTH OF THEM AWAY. I was really upset when I found that out....

I mainly into MS Basic and MS-DOS computer. You know if programmers programmed like they used to 500Mhz machines will be the cpu in robots and we would already have super realistic video games with CPU carachters near the intellect of humans. However that will take to long to do.
I still like to use 5.25 Inch floppies and computers from the ms-dos/win 3.X days.

I still have a Schneider Turbo XT and occasionally boot it and play with it.

@gamefreak: I think they should still program like in pre-VM* times. So many programmers do no longer care about memory leaks...

*virtual memory

I bought an old IBM PS/2 for $5 from a charity shop, broke it trying to upgrade the memory. It had an 85mb hard drive drivespaced to 150+mb, it was a 486 dx 50 with 2 mb RAM and Windows 3.1.

I also acquired an old 486 dx 66 with 4mb of onboard (yes, onboard) RAM and a 500mb hard drive. I ran muLinux on it and it ran sweet as a nut. It was smart enough to realise if you'd swapped the keyboard and mouse connectors around. I sold that in a box of other computer crap at the auctions.

I love buying old computer parts and putting them together. I get a real kick out of building computers and watching them come to life.

Yeah, I agree. It doesn't matter if there's 2 gigabytes of memory or 2 megabytes... you should always make your programs clean up after themselves.

I mainly collect old UNIX workstations (non x86 processors) particularly Sun and SGI workstations. I also have a lot of 8 bit microcomputers although the only one(8 bit) im really working with right now is my Color Computer 3 and Color Computer 2 which you can see a picture of on the floppy disk thread.

as far as the UNIX workstation hardware I still use it as my primary desktop. I'm retiring my Sun Ultra 10 as a spare. I havent gotten round ot making my SunBlade 2000 my router yet so the Ultra 10 is still running.

my first non PC unix box was a tadpole SPARCBook 3GX which is a nice portable laptop that is a lot like having a portable SPARCStation 5. with a 110Mhz sun4m processor (I think its a TurboSPARC, or a microSPARC cant remember), I then inherited a much slower and older SPARCStation 2 which is a 40mhz sun4c, at the same time I got a new desktop at a satrtup company around 2002 it was the Sun Ultra 10 that I use as my main desktop. they were given to us by Sun to work on a project for them.

the Ultra 10 was one of Sun's first 64 bit desktop workstations back in 1998 before most people even thought of 64bit desktops. DIGITAL beat them to the punch with the alpha CPU but Sun is still around and digital is not.

that Ultra 10 was fast enough to do most of what I wanted until recently. and I got me the SunBlade 2000.
the blade 2000 came on the market in 2002 I have the 20th anniversary edition version of it. it can take up tot 16GB of ram if you use 4GB DIMMS it has two 1.2Ghz UltraSPARC-III+ processors with 8MB of cache per processor, a crossbar memory bus so that both cpus have fast access to memory at the same time., internal fiberchannel disks, ultra wide scsi internal and external, two firewire 400 ports, 4 usb ports, extdernal FC-AL over copper connector, two serial ports one parallel port. one 10/100 ethernet port and a quad fast ethernet card with four additional 10/100 ports. I have an XVR-500 framebuffer installed which is a fairly fast for its time 3d card with nice 3d and 2d accerlation based on the 3d labs wildcat chip. the machine can hold up to four framebuffers. and for diagnostics and for remote control has full serial console support. if you unplug the keyboard while booting the firmware will work through the first serial port. and you can see very detailed diagnostics through the serial port, stuff you wouldn't see on the screen if the system was in really bad shape. the firmware is OpenBoot which is an OpenFirmware imeplementation. (people with Macintosh computers should recognize Open Firmware as thats what the PPC based macs used)

even though this box is from 2002 (last sold in 2004) I would say it competes in speed with a similar clocked PC of today certainly gives my AMD Sempron box a run for it's money.

when I buy used equipment I tend to go for stuff that used to be the top of the line this box cost over 34,000 new from sun. i got it for around 1k and it should last me for many years to come since Ive found it really hard to kill Sun hardware in fact all of the equipment Ive listed above that ive used over the years I still have and it is in working condition. except for the tadpole which has a failing backlight on the TFT screen.

It's mostly the PC equipment that fails on me. which is why I prefer to use commercial Sun hardware with Solaris for my desktop. I know that the hardware will be fully supported by the operating system and that it will be built to last. no playing guessing games and installing the patch/firmware of the week for this particular weird chipset and having to track down drivers for everything I have.

so if a 2002-2004 workstation is retro I'm definitely working retro.

I've always wanted to get into Sun hardware, but they're expensive and postage is too cos they're so heavy. I'd like to get one to try CLFS (Cross-compiled Linux From Scratch)...