But there's definitely something fun about running the old hardware with an old spinning hard drive, clacking away while it boots up for 2-3 minutes.
And then launching Microsoft Word 5.1 and wondering if it locked up, while each toolbar loads in one by one!
Honestly though, if you just wanted to do word processing, it's fine for that, and with modern tools like FloppyEmu, BlueSCSI, and some of the networking hacks with modern cheap hardware, you can get one of these things to transfer files to and from a network share very easily.
I'm using a netatalk server on my Raspberry Pi to serve up Samba shares over AppleTalk. Very simple to do nowadays! https://github.com/geerlingguy/apple-pi
It provides a distraction-free environment for writing.
Save it to a 720kb floppy that my linux box can still read, and move it to a "modern" system for editing and such.
On the flip side, all the original hardware is now ancient and at least somewhat broken (or going that way), and it's a pain to keep it running as an ongoing prospect. CRTs, floppy disk drives, floppy disks, hard disk drives, key switches, mice with balls, aging capacitors, batteries, little plastic bits inside the keyboard that you didn't even realise were there until they crumbled into dust - they all go bad in the long run, and the repair always eats up at least a bit of time. (Even assuming it's actually repairable! Battery damage can be literally unfixable. Parts supply generally can be an issue. Mouldy floppy disks are time-consuming to rescue, and can damage the drives as you attempt it. Those little plastic keyboard bits are theoretically 3d printable, but you'll need to figure out what shape they were originally and how to glue them into place. And so on.)
The long-term prognosis for modern computers is uncertain too - but the nice thing about them is that you can always just buy another one. Turns out they're always making more of them!
But these are complicated to keep working, especially when you know nothing about electronics.
As the years are passing by, fewer and fewer of these are still working (yup, I did remove the batteries when applicable). And they don't bring much, if anything, compared to a modern one.
My most prized possession is however a vintage arcade cab, complete with its CRT screen and both original (and bootleg) vintage PCBs and a Raspberry Pi with a Pi2JAMMA (an arcade cab standard) adapter and thousands of arcade games on MAME.
There's something about an actual arcade cab with a CRT and proper joysticks that a modern PC with a 4090 GPU cannot reproduce. Say playing Robotron 2084! with two 8-directions joysticks (one in each hand): that's simply not an experience you get on anything else but a proper full-sized arcade cab.
Even kids, who have no nostalgic appeal to vintage arcade cabs, are drawn to that thing.
That cab I plan to keep working for a very long time. But all my 8 bit and 16 bit computers? I'm not so sure.
Apple 2e for the win! 1 MHz is (apparently) enough for anyone. ;-)
discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25290118
Fortunately there are FPGA implementations, though you might want a non-USB gamepad and keyboard, and a CRT (or maybe a 120Hz or better HDMI display?) to get closest to the original performance.
Were it not for the size (it’s 1/3 scale, so the screen is tiny), it would be pretty “usable” with Word and Excel.
Fresnel[1]?
steeleyespan•5mo ago