Retrocomputing

So, this happened at an inopportune time. It was a couple years after I’d gotten rid of my very nice Amiga 1000, with the cool Amiga monitor and external floppy and a whole mess ‘O’ disks.

Yeah, oops.

So anyway, Win10 had just come out, and I was depressed at how my computer had “upgraded” itself from 7 to be persnickety spyware. So, I wondered, “Just how far can something like a Commodore 64 get you on the internet these days? What’s out there? Can you get that stuff online?” I missed the old days of cookies being something you ate and being easily able to spot anyone peering in my window and ramming a stick in their eye. So I started looking into what was possible with new software on old hardware, and realized there was a lot of new software, and new hardware besides! And I felt like a big, stupid idiot for letting go that A1000. I went full time on Linux. And I started grabbing old battlestations.

Now I have a few. First was my Mac SE. I never cared for Macs, them being objectively shitty computers in the early days running a good user interface, and being an Amiga person. I asked for and received a dead-as-it-gets Mac SE, because I wanted to harvest the case to put a Rpi into and do a retroarch thing. Then I had a change of heart, and fully restored that thing. I got an “enhanced keyboard II” and replaced every keyswitch. Found a new mouse. A BlueSCSI. Even a 68030 accelerator. Then it shit the bed and I still need to deal with that. But that started the ball rolling…

I got a MISTER. Still waiting for Steve Jones to make the next run of checkmate cases. Got a PiDP-11. Built a wee little pocket sized CPM machine. Got a Nabu while they were hot. Ended up with two. Found a cool, basically new in box Roland(!) branded amber monitor. Then the MSX2 machine. I have big plans for that, a replacement of the missing disk drive and a 2+ spec upgrade. I’ll maybe see about figuring out some kind of mechanical keyboard if I can, because the one it has is GROSS. It feels like poking old plastic into a kitchen sponge, because that’s basically what’s going on. Ick.

Finally, I got a deal on an Amiga 600. I have mixed feelings about it. Not because it’s not great, I actually think that as Amigas go in the retrocomputer hobby, it’s kind of ideal. It’s a better machine now than when it was new. But I still crave that 32 bit goodness, and after having a seller stop the sale of a 3000 (booooooo) and getting outbid over and over on a 1200, I want that dopamine hit. I have a mister, it’ll do the thing, but it’s not quite the same…

At any rate, I’ve gotten a lot of cool stuff and cool accessories, not just because I want to relive my misspent youth or play games, but because I actually want to turn them into daily drivers. I want to do my day to day internetting on them, secured by obscurity and free of the sea of absolute manure that the internet has become. When I fix my Mac, I’ll put it to use as a MIDI sequencer running my home studio. I used to randomly have a boxed copy of a MOTU sequencer, years ago, no Mac. My ex pitched it at some point. Wish I still had it. And a lot of these old machines have fediverse clients written for them, so you can do social media on there, but not to the point really of it being unhealthy because it’s not quite easy enough to be worth just doomscrolling it.