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corgski
Feb 6, 2007

Silly goose, you're here forever.

Retrocomputing is a hobby:ins:

It is probably not a hobby you should have unless you have lots of space and an unusual love for the smell of blue smoke and offgassing ABS plastic. It also has significant crossover with retrogaming, but that's not required. Plenty of people have collections that feature computers known for being almost unusable for games, such as nearly every word processor, the Apollo guidance computer, and the Commodore Plus/4.

But why? :iiam:
It's really neat to preserve pieces of computing history and save these devices that were designed to last maybe 5 years at most from meeting their end in a burning pile of trash at a gold recycler somewhere in China. As a bonus, a lot of these systems still have some utility today, whether it's for retrogaming, word processing, image editing and printmaking, data recovery or even just as a spotify frontend.

Where can I learn more?
Vintage Computer Federation (VCF) - probably the easiest place to find info on retrocomputing in general, it's an organization devoted to the preservation of historical computers. They hold several large gatherings a year where people can show off their collections, swap gear, and more.
VOGONS - A discussion forum that is like VCF's forum but focused on retrogaming specifically.

In addition there are tons of forums and mailing lists for specific platforms, be it Commodore, Atari, Apple, IBM PC, or anything else you could imagine.

So, show off your collections of dusty old circuit boards and computers. I can't wait to see!

corgski fucked around with this message at 15:49 on Oct 18, 2021

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corgski
Feb 6, 2007

Silly goose, you're here forever.

Here's a non-exhaustive look at my collection. I focus primarily on old Apple Macintosh computers, although I also have 3x Apple IIgs in storage as well a couple late 90s-mid 2000s PCs for retrogaming purposes.

Oh and all the photos were taken with a Sony Digital Mavica camera, the one with the floppy disk drive.

The (mostly) Apple Products:


Left to right: 1984 Macintosh, Macintosh Plus, Macintosh Classic
The first two are non-working but repairable, the Classic is only good for spare parts.


In the foreground is a Macintosh 512k with a memory expansion and the Macintosh Plus ROM upgrade, in the background is a Performa 637CD with a matching monitor - this is the system I play most of my early mac games on.


And an iMac G3 for later mac games. (at least ones that don't require 3D acceleration)


And on top of that desk, I have a PowerMac G5 with dual water-cooled 2.5GHz processors, a Power Macintosh 7300/200, and some old Dell Optiplex with an early Pentium 4 which I use to play windows 98 and XP games, all connected to a KVM.


The most aesthetic part of my collection is this G4 Cube with the matching CRT monitor. It works, but I have nowhere to display it while we're renovating our house so it lives in the attic instead of the living room. :cry:

The non-apple:

Who doesn't love a good ol HP Touchpad running the original WebOS?


And my trusty LaserJet 4+ with the optional Postscript ROM.

corgski fucked around with this message at 05:35 on Oct 18, 2021

corgski
Feb 6, 2007

Silly goose, you're here forever.

The SE could be used for word processing, retro graphics, some really early mac games like brickle, cannon fodder, a variety of infocom ports, and glider, and with a compatible network adapter and a raspberry pi, email, IRC, discord (via bitlbee,) telnet, and possibly even some light text-only web browsing.

If you upgrade to the SE/30 you could run a graphical browser with something like Web Rendering Proxy running on the Pi.

And of course you could always come up with a RetroChallenge project!

corgski fucked around with this message at 03:38 on Oct 19, 2021

corgski
Feb 6, 2007

Silly goose, you're here forever.

New addition to my collection, a 13" Magnavox B&W television. Perhaps I'll make a clone Pong board to connect to it.



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