I question why people go through the trouble of doing this. Then I remember back to when I was a pimply teenager, lugging my C64, 1541, and 13" TV to a user group meeting on a crisp Saturday morning. We would share warez and see awesome demos and oogle the C128's and inevitably someone would bring an Amiga. We'd gather around while they played the latest games and show off the full capabilities of that machine. We had some Apple users there too with their IIe's and IIc's. I never saw a Mac in real life until much later in college. And that's a part of my life I'll likely never live again, but now I get why people want to build these machines today, for nostalgia.
I still remember the first time I played a couple of Psygnosis games on an Amiga 500: Blood Money, and Shadow of the Beast. Those two blew me away. The sound and the graphics were absolutely stunning for late 80's.
I have a MIST, Vampire board, and still play around with UAE from time-to-time... but there's nothing like seeing the "real" hardware for the first time when you were a teenager. Even with all the hardware I've had over the past 30 years, everything else has felt so incremental.
>And that's a part of my life I'll likely never live again
Back then, very few people had these. Now, nearly everyone has something much much more powerful in their pocket/purse or on their wrist.
I do pity younger kids today not having that feeling. The was a mystique around them. Now, it's just part and parcel of everyday life. Everything new now is just an upgraded version of something prior. Back then, it was all so new. I can't think of anything that would have the same feeling for kids today.
Assuming continued forward progress, this feeling is true of each generation. But when I get nostalgia about all the progress the world made since my early childhood in the 80s...I think about my great grandfather who was 8-ish when the Wright Brothers made their first flight, 40s when the atomic bomb was developed, 73 when the first man walked on the moon, and then lived another 20 years!
I also believe there’s some value in reassessing how systems like that function. There’s some value in a challenge like: what can you do on older hardware with todays knowledge? Maybe there’s something to be learned and applied to modern problems.
Also, it’s a good introduction to understanding full systems, from the electronics—soldering, voltage, current, etc to assembly programming. The system is simple enough for them to ship circuit diagrams in the developer manual—along with all the opcodes and kernel routines.
There’s a resurgence across all fields in artisanal craftsmanship. Carpenters, blacksmiths, printmakers, cobblers.
Retro-Computing is exactly that—artisanal electronics and programming. There’s something meditative and enjoyable about it.
I think an underappreciated value of growing up in that era, was that the entire machine, top to bottom, was simple enough that a single person could understand it. Without even making it their life's work. There's simply nothing today like that.
So the older machines are an important conceptual building block. And they're not academic exercises taught in theoretical simulation but never experienced, they're real physical machines that did useful things for people who are still around and can walk you through doing the same things on the very same machines.
The other magical thing about home computers of that era, was that they were ROM-based, with very explicit operations to commit data to nonvolatile storage. You couldn't accidentally delete a system file and render the machine unbootable, and that encouraged experimentation in a way that subsequent PCs harshly punished.
Also, while 8-bit home computers weren't really toys, they were _almost_ toys, in that very few folks were running a business on their C64. (And again, even if they did, all they had to do was lock the business disks in a cabinet at the end of the day.) So the consequences of even a major screwup were limited, again in a way that the next generation of PCs dramatiaclly reversed. I knew kids "grounded for life" (actually a few months) in the 90s because they hosed up the family PC that mom or dad was doing the taxes on or whatever. That simply wasn't a thing in the 80s.
All of learning is making mistakes. One hundred percent. And modern machines don't allow it in the same way. We were privileged to learn in a real-but-nearly-consequence-free environment, which today's kids will simply never experience.
Agree. I was born way after the C64 came on scene and never touched one until I bought one ten years ago. I'm in it for the perspective it brings (and I like fixing things).
Retrocomputing isn't just about nostalgia, a midlife-crisis rewind back to your pimply-faced youth. People are still getting more out of those old systems than was ever thought possible back in the day, using powerful modern systems to solve for packing ever more complex code or data structures into 64k or less. Kids are being introduced to old platforms. They can't deliver the graphical fidelity of the Xbox Series S, but if Minecraft and Roblox are any indication, post-zoomer youth do just fine with simple, abstract, representational graphics.
