Are there still users/fangroups of obsolete computers?

I recall in the early 90’s that the old 8-bit Ataris, a decade old at the time, still had some users at some computer meetings I used to go to.

So, are there still people who use these ancient machines (TRS-80, Atari 8-bit/ST, Amiga, etc.)?

You have no idea.

There are legions of people dedicated to keeping those things going, especially the old Amigas which have a huge fan base. The Commodore 64 is also particularly popular (and I can see why; it is, after all, the greatest home computer ever made. Shut up, PS/2 fans.)

These nuts even built an Ethernet card for a C64 and wrote a simple TCP stack and web server for it.

The Amiga has spawned a whole community of people who keep trying to push its video and graphic capabilities, and the Amiga Demoscene continues to thrive.

Amiga Ethernet cards go for several times their original retail price. I wanted one so I could FTP artwork off of my old Amigas.

I keep some around because in spite of 20 some years of development, PCs and Macs haven’t duplicated some of the capabilities of the Amiga. They’ve bested it in raw speed, but new hardware and operating systems bring out the creativity in programmers. 99% of both the Windows and Mac software world is different programs to do the same things. But the Amiga caused programmers to invent entirely new categories of programs and add-on hardware. An Amiga 2000 with a Video Toaster is still a usable Video Switcher/Character Generator/3D Animation system…and nobody tried to do it before the Amiga appeared.

But it was in the more esoteric areas that it really shined. There’s a program called “Mandela” that I had on Amiga back in the late 80s. It used a video digitizer to capture a video image and used edge detection to allow a performer to interact with visuals on the computer…playing virtual drums, strumming strings, painting with one’s hands. I went to Wired Magazine’s “Next Fest” in 2005. This supposed “Festival of the New” had a dozen exhibitions of the exact same interactive video stuff as Mandela on an Amiga, but nowhere as clever. Higher resolution, but less creative.

I feel like firing the Amiga up and capturing video of some of the best Amiga programs to post to YouTube and try to get programmers to at least duplicate some programs like Elan’s InVision for the Live board.

To add and expand; definitely so. There was an arcade game platform based on the Amiga known as Arcadia which even now has people working on ports of Amiga games to the Arcadia platform (I’m working on one).

And then all those old arcade games you used to play - they have a similar following. I’m a member of a forum dedicated to restoring old arcade games and machines back to their full glory (http://www.jammaplus.co.uk).

We’ve got some members who even write new games for the old hardware. One guy ported pacman to a board architecture which was designed 10+ years later.

IMO the Amiga was the last computer platform which was powerful enough to attract interest and ‘simple’ / well documented enough that you could program without expensive specialist training or tools. A copy of DevPac (programming tool) was about £30 and the Hardware Reference Manual (documented all the hardware and examples of how to use) was about the same, So for the cost of a Christmas or birthday present you had a full development platform. There were publid domain compilers for C (much like the GNU software now).

There are still plenty of collectors for other platforms too. A lot of the Unix systems seem to have attracted interest. I used to have a pretty impressive range (Suns from Motorola to multi-way Sparc, SGI - always the best looking boxes, DEC Vax - for the masochists).

cheers,
tim

Hell, I used to have my amiga set up next to my PC running win3.11, and would simultaneously run eye of the beholder 1 on both of them and the visual difference in graphic play was visible to everybody … and having teh A500 HDD on it made me able to play the long games without having to flip discs because I could put them entirely into the hDD.

I really miss a 1 or 2 floppy operating system sigh

I sold my dad’s old Cambridge Z88 last year on E-bay for 80 bucks. My dad bought it in 1988 !

Check out the Vintage Computer forum - Forum – Vintage Computer Federation

I need to unload a working Apple IIe, I’ve been keeping this site in the back of my mind for when I get ambitious enough to post in the marketplace section.

SO and I were cleaning this weekend and came across the old Amiga. It was all I could do not to hook it up for another round of mechforce. Even found the old video toaster.

And about 4 years of Compute! magazines.

I have in recent years used my souped up Amiga 1200 for music.

Those Amiga folks can out-zealot even us Mac people. (And with good cause… they only went out of business due to abysmally bad biz managment, not because the Amiga platform was outclassed by PCs and Macs).

In the Mac-world the biggest concentrations of legacy hobbyists are the System 7 folks and the System 6 folks. There’s also a sprinkling of hobbyists using A/UX (an old 68K Unix build, once available from Apple as an alternative to mainstream MacOS).

Well, they did make a couple of non-backward-compatible changes to the Amiga’s expansion-slot architecture (Zorro III, anyone?) which might not have been the best idea for a minority platform. But, basically, yeah.

My own computing history goes ZX81 -> Amiga -> Used IBM XT -> PCs of various stripes -> Intel Mac. So I can zealot in several different directions, so to speak. :slight_smile:

Even if you can’t get your hands on a physical version of the old computer, there’s a huge emulator scene in existence, too. I don’t think there’s a single, old platform that I’ve not run in emulation at least once. Well, except the C=128 (shill outshined by the C=64). And that’s not limited to just computers per se, but all of the old console games, too.

If I mix them up, my zealotry could go something like this: Atari 2600 -> TRS-80 MC-10 -> Commodore 128 -> NES -> Mac SE -> Amiga 500 -> Mac Colour Classic -> Some generic PC laptops -> Some other Macs including a couple of laptops -> couple of generic PC’s - > A few Xboxes exclusively for modding/emulation -> Intel Macs. The last few are kind of muddled, because with cheap electronics, there’s a lot of overlap.

Hell, speaking of emulation, that’s why I settled on Intel Macs rather than keeping a mix of Macs and PC’s. Full speed Windows on an emulated PC virtual machine? Cool.

For your viewing pleasure, here are AtariArchives.org and AtariAge.com. And that’s just scratching the surface.

So yes, most definitely, you will find plenty of interest in the old 8-bit machines from the personal computer’s early history — even more interest perhaps than in later machines, precisely because they were first. A C64 in good working order is a prized possession to many, whereas an old '286 PC is just a boat anchor. (If that. Probably wouldn’t even make a good anchor, come to think of it.)

I myself own a small collection of Apple IIs — six altogether, five of them functional — though I’m fond of everything from the Commodore PET and TRS-80 up through the early Macs and the Amiga.

Well, strictly speaking, that’s virtualization, not emulation, since the code is meant to run on that hardware. No calls are being emulated like if you were running code meant for a different architecture.

There are people who think ITS running on a PDP-10 circa 1982 was the pinnacle of computing and everything else was an evil conspiracy dreamed up by people who not only don’t know how to program, but deliberately foist crappy hardware and software on the world. (Worse Is Better, Morons!) Others think VM/370 on a System/370 circa 1975 was the peak and the world is only now rediscovering the essential beauty of that system (well, virtualization is going mainstream, but that doesn’t justify the utter contemptuous condescension). Some think Lisp Machines (made by Symbolics, TI, and some others) were the best hardware, Genera is the only OS worth anything, and ZetaLisp is the mind of God Himself.

There are partisans of Oberon, an OS entirely written in Oberon (a Pascal-like language by Niklaus Wirth, a man who managed to absorb change but ignore progress), Multics, the 1960s-era ancestor of many modern multitasking OSes which was supposed to bring computing to the masses as a utility like water or power, the Michigan Terminal System, CTSS, WAITS, and, God help us, MS-DOS and CP/M. Just about every OS and computer has a following.

Hell, there’s even the Friends of Digi-Comp if you’re [i[really* looking for obsolete. Or far advanced, depending on how you look at it: the first all-plastic computer. :slight_smile:

Yeah. Retro-computing is still around. My ex-husband was pretty into it; this was the group he was in. Lots of people making stuff, kludging it together, having conventions and stuff. I found it kind of interesting, but wasn’t into it myself.

Though I did make him pull up The Straight Dope on his C64 when he got it hooked up to the router-> cable modem using a Palm cradle. That was amusing.

The one set of operating systems that for some reason do not seem to have an enthusiatic following yet are older versions of OS X. I’ve never met anyone running a computer retrofitted with 10.0 or 10.1, and even those running 10.2 are either owned by folks who just don’t keep up or by those whose computer is too old to run anything more recent, not by hobbyists.

I guess it’s all still too new to inspire any nostalgia.

I did mention both terms, but people keep getting hung up on “emulation” versus “virtualization,” especially in that emulators are often called virtual machines. The first VM I had for my Colour Classic was from Connectix (RealPC? Something like that) provided an emulated PC environment and featured x286 to 68030 processor emulation. Even though it’s a virtual machine, it’s still an emulator. Today I use Parallels, which is a virtual machine, and uses processor virtualization to in order to avoid the need for a processor emulator. The rest of the virtual environment is indeed an emulator, though. All of the retro-computing emulators are indeed virtual machines, but require processor emulator. See the confusion?

What’s worse, before processors featured built-in virtualization (such as Intel VT), there was still some degree of emulation even when running native code! Not in the sense of having to translate every opcode, but you had to catch some and work around them, since you’re running in user level space (you know, real mode versus protected mode).

Heck, even my Intel Macs still feature a processor emulator without the need for providing a separate virtual machine (Rosetta). My previous Macs (PPC’s) had full fledged virtual machines (“Classic”); I can’t recall if they had processor emulation; I believe they did, because I still seem to think that even in System 9 there was some leftover 680x0 code in the ToolBox. Or maybe not. I don’t recall ever trying to run 680x0 applications in Classic, and I think I dumped Classic back around 10.2 or 10.3.

There wasn’t any 68K code left in the OS or ToolBox by the time of MacOS 9, but old 68K programs were still supported (well, some of them anyway) through a 68LC040 emulator built into the OS. This emulator was also present in the Classic mode used under MacOS X.

I don’t think I ever did either, so I can’t vouch for its usability in practice.