🚀 go-pugleaf

On Wed, 27 Jun 2018, AndyW wrote:


> I was the same with an Acorn Atom, it also could be overclocked to 2MHz by 
> the addition of a physical switch, some wires and careful soldering and a 
> capacitor or two.
> I still have it and a second one I bought on impulse on ebay but never used.
> ...and yes Nostalgia is funny. I loved my Atom and loved playing games and 
> programming it (with a built-in assembler you could do a lot with a few kB) 
> But I fired it up recently and it is not a good experience.
>
In the nineties, and early 2000s, I was finding lots of neat old 
computers.  Well, someone gave me their old Apple II, but then I got a 
IIGS, an Amiga 500 and there were certainly others I could have bought 
cheap, like that Macintosh II or the Mac SE/30.  Someone gave me a pair of 
Sun 3/50s, but it would have cost me to get the needed peripherals to put 
them in operation.

These were all computers I lusted after in some way when they were new. 
But I never did anything with the Apple II, I had enough nostalgia to keep 
it around but I didn't feel like spending the time to get good at it, and 
even then it wouldn't be like a recent computer.  It's the same with the 
others, probably more so because they were less familiar.

I used a Radio Shack Color Computer (II and then later a III) 
until late 1993, when I was given a broken Mac Plus (the connector to the 
deflection coils was intermintent).  So I stuck with the CoCo longer than 
many.  I would have liked to stick with Microware OS-9, but the optinos 
were too expensive, it was Radio Shack that made that OS cheap.  The Mac 
Plus was kind of a step backwards, since I had to get a hard drive to use 
it, and while it was more advanced, the resources went into the graphics, 
so it wasn't so much faster than my previous computer, and didn't really 
do anything that the CoCo couldn't, though finally I had a "mainstream" 
computer, albeit behind the times.

I used "older computers" because that's what I could afford or scrounge 
up.  I miss the days when there was a variety of computer types and 
operating systems, but I don't want to go back.  I finally got a computer 
"good enough" to run Linux in mid 2001, it was a long wait, and that 
fulfills my interest in computers as an end in itself.  I don't need to 
run Linux, or a quad core computer running at 3.4GHz with 8gigs of ram, 
but I had the money two years ago and moved up because I could.

39 years ago, when I got my first "home computer", it was an end in itself,
in part because with only 1K of RAM I couldn't use it for anything much in 
practical terms.  So I spent time exploring computers.  It wasn't until 
1984 and my third computer that I had enough of a system to actually do 
things, which meant writing.  My needs are pretty simple, but I like 
running the full system with Linux because it costs me nothing in terms of 
learning.

   Michael