The ZX80 is another old computer that can be made very close to the original ( there are no special chips inside, and most of them are still being manufactured. The DIP version of the Z80 CPU is famously no longer being manufactured since last year and the RAM chips probably aren't either, but there's no shortage of new old stock for both).

If you want to make your own: http://searle.x10host.com/zx80/zx80.html

My build log (including Gerbers based on Searle's foils): https://blog.qiqitori.com/2024/03/building-a-new-zx80/

They do appear to mean emulator.

The PDP-8 was hardware replicated many times. In the '80s it was a common final year project. There's a classic textbook that works through designing and implementing a clone of the PDP-8/I [1]. I've run into a number of threads over the years where hobbyists have done it with TTL to varying degrees of completeness.

The Apollo Guidance Computer was recreated by a hobbyist from the original designs using a modern logic family but gate-equivalent -- and I can't find it online anymore! Anyone know?

You can still build an original Apple II. [2] Being from the late 1970s there was no custom logic; it's straight TTL plus a 6502, and all the chips are still in production except for the ROMs and DRAM, which are easy enough to work around or find used.

[1] https://www.amazon.ca/Art-Digital-Design-Introduction-Top-Do...

[2] https://www.reactivemicro.com/product/apple-ii-plus-rev-7-rf...

replica / new hardware that looks the same, with lights and buttons. Behind the panel is (from the one I looked at) an Arduino running an emulator. Don't know if the blinking lights respond the same or if the hardware switches, ports, etc work.

It's worth looking at this from multiple angles, though.

Intuitively, I'm also extremely said that "workstations" aren't a thing anymore. That there are no professional, well-engineered, powerful Sun or SGI workstations anymore. In a sense, they even felt similar to sports cars: You drooled for them, often from a distance.

On the flip side, I don't miss exactly that: Not being able to afford such a thing, or even if you theoretically could, having to shell out tens of thousands of dollars (not even accounting for inflation yet).

Extremely powerful PCs are now available to nearly everyone who wants one, especially if you take into account that even a 10+ year old dumpster PC does more than almost all these past workstations in several regards.

We'd probably be lamenting the opposite if that wasn't the case. But yes, the shine and magic is mostly gone...

Workstation-class machines are very much available, at workstation-class prices.

You can buy a 64-core 7985WX Threadripper Pro with Nvidia RTX6000 and 256GB RAM for $30k or so.

Upgrade to an A100 if you're in a hurry.

They're not unusual in commercial video and animation, machine learning, and general science/engineering.

TBH you could reasonably class the $4k M3Ultra Mac Studio as a low-end workstation-grade machine for some tasks.

Some early machines were programmed by directly entering binary code. A number of switches to set location in RAM, more switches to set value that goes there, then push button / toggle a switch to write.

Same for machine functions: enable/disable certain features, write-protect some RAM areas, etc. Think old PC's turbo button, multiplied.

I was just thinking how looking at these scratches the same itch that looking at synths does.