Even switching from home computers of the era to workstation class system, it’s pure frustration at the limits on what can be done. Don’t get me wrong, for a lot of my computing needs I could probably get along just fine with a next cube or a late model Mac II. But on the other hand you’ll pay hundreds or thousands of dollars for these systems, while I can go on Amazon and spend ~$200 for a mouse, keyboard, cheap monitor, and a raspberry pi zero w and I’ll have a more capable system in every way. For just a little more money I can buy a tiny PC that is able to emulate near perfectly all the computers of my youth.
Thank you for attending my Ted talk.
It is fun to look back but we tend to forgive a lot of things that kind of sucked. It is like how some people who live through Hurricanes and then a decade later speak about how fun it was coming together even though it was just horrible. Memories can be deceiving.
"When you wear rose tinted glasses, red flags just look like flags" - Bojack Horseman
(Although credit where credit is due, Nintendo's recent Game Boy Advance releases ship in one of most accurate GBA emulators around.)
OTOH, maybe I'm just weird.
To run software, emulation is great. To develop software, emulation is great. Anything that deals directly with hardware, well, emulation isn't going to cut it.
Then there are the other reasons, ones that have nothing to do with the hardware itself. Personally, I use vintage computers as an escape from modern computers and as a reminder of what the technology could have been. I'm not talking about it being slow, unreliable, or downright difficult to manage. I'm thinking more along the lines of being simple enough to understand and a lot more personal. A lot of what we call progress is a mixed bag. Yes, the performance of modern computers is amazing and it comes at the cost of complexity. On the other hand, we have a lot of complexity that is not necessary for day to day use. Yes, having access to a literal world of information at our fingertips is amazing. On the other hand, our computers are also at the whim of the outside world. In other words, there are a lot of tradeoffs.
For some things, emulation is the perfect solution. For other things, it simply won't work.
the new low power SoC systems with actual connectivity are much more interesting... probably why they can barely keep the stuff in stock. as a bonus, they can run emulation just fine. old, and new, in one package.
And chunky plastic builds with easily user-replaceable parts.
And nice full 7 row keyboards that felt good to type on.
And rounded laptop edges so it doesn't kill your wrists.
And ports, lots of ports.
Some were replaced by cheaper, easy to mass produce but somewhat inferior products.
Others by some insane reasons by manufacturers to increase their profits or differentiate amongst themselves, pushing for thinner, lighter devices. i would gladly use bulkier devices for better specs and reparability.
Equally, to me the point of devices like this, or fantasy consoles, or old limited machines is in being a puzzle, providing an intellectually stimulating pastime. Spending time on them is more fun and likely more useful in various senses than activities like solving Sudoku or watching TV.
Fast forward to 2023, and everything runs on top of a non-realtime multitasking OS, causing periodic little glitches as background stuff hogs up resources. Graphics is too complicated to guarantee consistent 60 frames per second. And web is incrementally loaded from shared servers, often with delays of many seconds. Animations introduce intentional lag.
Modern hardware could be of course amazing at being fast, but nobody put in the effort into software designed for that goal. Plus obsession with device thinness and fanless designs introduces thermal throttling that no software can overcome.
A lot of effort has being thrown that way, it's just that their definition of "go fast" is "having lots of throughput", not the things you are looking for: goodput, low latency, low jitter.
We got faster mainframes instead of faster minicomputers - computers and network systems that are optimized at doing batch jobs.
We can submit a whole bunch of blocks and the graphics processing unit can display accelerated smooth video for us. Or we can push a whole neural network to a tensor processing unit and have it do inference in very few operations, after the model is loaded. But both of those operations while having smooth output have horrible startup latency.
I think is very naive to call what the devices have today as a "single computer" when in fact, for a long while they're several interconnected computer components joined with lots of buffer.
People just had more patience back then.
45 minutes to LHARC my text file? Sure, I'll talk to my wife.
Four hours to download an ILBM? OK. I'll read a book.
Today we're so used to living at the business end of a digital firehose that if something takes too many clock cycles we walk away. Some people can't even sit in a chair in their own homes without having music on.
That 95% of the retro computing scene seems devoted to games tells me that people just crave a quick hit of digital content and then move on.
That said I'd also like to see some modern advancements brought in… for example a reproduction of a mid-90s 68k or PPC Mac using components manufactured on a much smaller node would be incredible. It wouldn't even have to be anything cutting edge like 3/5nm — even the now-ancient 14nm or 30nm would be amazing compared to say the 350nm node that the PowerPC 603ev was manufactured on.
Of course if you never tried it, you wouldn't notice the difference and think I have some sort of OCD. But it is really noticable. I don't know if it's 100ms or 200 ms but there is a difference.
If you are in Linux, you may want to turn off your display compositor (KDE/XFCE), or use a lightweight xorg window manager like fluxbox or i3. This isn't necessary when using a fast GPU, but even then you may dislike animations.
Use a text editor with a real GUI toolkit (not electron or similar) like emacs or gvim/nvim-qt. Unfortunately, emacs can struggle rendering syntax highlighting, but outside that it is lean and snappy. Hopefully the recent progress with tree-sitter will resolve that.
I have met very few people who care about latency the way I do. I think most of it comes from my nostalgia of DOS-era computing. The most satisfying hardware purchase I have ever made is a good looking 2K IPS/VA 120hz/144hz+ freesync display. Millions of hours of my life experience were noticeably improved.
Do you feel the same latency with eg. Notepad++, Qt Creator, or Kate?
Sure, the pixels were huge and slow, but the contrast ratio was really good without it being too bright. It’s hard to explain why it was so good. I suspect it was a bit transflective.
I imagine if you just wanted an old laptop for wordstar or something, they’d be amazing due to their clarity; but I remember trying to play commander keen on them and getting a headache.
Update: apparently there's a hacky way to play digital audio through these FM synth chips, and several games and music players for DOS do just this.
I've often used "onion", but this is much more accurate :)
Why not just use an FPGA?
Any modern Intel laptop should be able to run the same software, without emulation.
Unfortunately not, UEFI-only BIOSes and locked-down bootloaders are a thing today.
If you aren't booting quite literally whatever the hell you want you aren't x86'ing right.
Source: 80186 hardware refence manual, appendix A "Differences between the 80186 family and 8086/8088"
The product is not even marked obsolete.
It’s an 8088 running 4.77Mhz, on a not really great system architecture. Head to head the original PC was slower than competing Z80s at 4Mhz.
The truly singular advancement the 8088 brought was more precious, precious memory. The PC itself was a different phenomenon. What it lacked in performance it made up for in many other ways.
For most applications, particularly early on, the 8087 did not bring a lot to the table to improve performance. GW-BASIC did not recognize it, for example. Wasn’t going to make Wordstar any faster. And it was an expensive add-on.
Numeric coprocessors we’re always pretty niche until they came bundled with the 486 and 68040, even then the 486SX and 68LC040 continued to sell, and did not have bundled FPUs.
And Jetpens. I hate Jetpens too. I can't believe how many...
western equivalent would be trapper keepers with their pencil pouches.
They don't mention the battery capacity or specific 8086 variant used but modern ones use to average 2W of consumption; there are zero power saving modes; and the guy even says that when using 8087 the mini-laptop must "be plugged in all the time".
So I rather doubt real hardware is the most efficient way, specially when e.g. with virtualization you can easily have 20+ hours of DOS on a subnotebook.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AlphaSmart.
Way better battery life and ease of use with USB. It's my go to note and writing machine.
[1] http://www.texteditors.org/cgi-bin/wiki.pl?Blochek
[2] http://web.archive.org/web/20221113215247/http://laaca.sweb....
EDIT: VGA only, though :-(
The 8087 too: https://www.rocelec.com/part/REILD8087
I suspect the ones in this laptop are either NOS or recycled, however.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Toshiba_Libretto
I bought one on the gray market in 1996, and I think I managed to double my money in about 6 months by reselling it within the US. It was supremely handy to have around, but with only one PCMCIA slot you had to choose between wired networking and a CD-ROM drive.
I'm having much more fun tinkering in Linux on a 150 EUR Chinese laptop with a fairly anemic CPU.
If there's an itch for retro computing I'll just use an emulator.
The only thing I'd probably enjoy using old tech for would be stochastic super-optimization of programs i.e. to find the very best combination of machine code that executes a certain algorithm maximally fast or with minimum memory.
They're both beautiful machines!
I found them a couple of days ago, and the 386 was already sold out. I was hoping to eventually pick up one of the 8088s; but it looks like they'll disappear now too.
Modern as in built for 2002?
This machine could be useful especially for testing. While emulators have their merits, usually competitions use real hardware.
I am into the C64 and Amiga demo scene, and did some stuff on PC DOS during the 90th. Testing becomes more and more important.
I think it's not really the same sort of thing. It's got a 4MHz CPU, for starters. I'm sure it's good for the exact cases you're mentioning, but the Raspberry Pi, even the W, is much more powerful and versatile.
In particular, 640 kB really is enough, as the bundled software runs in real mode, doesn't support extended or expanded memory, and predates tricks like loading DOS in high memory by a number of years (not that they'd work on an XT in any case).
The disk read/write code and some of the simpler filesystem modules run on the ISA card itself, essentially an 8085-based SBC with a rather flexible (no pun intended) floppy controller. Here, 64 kB is necessarily enough for everything.
The fun part is that, assuming an Intel MDS 80/ISIS-compatible toolchain, the card can easily be coerced to run arbitrary code. And, while working Intel "blue" hardware is thin on the ground, I have personal experience with at least one working emulator (MAME) able to run ISIS.
Let's be real for a moment; you wouldn't be getting a true vintage mobile computing experience if you weren't tethered to an electrical socket!
Still some vintage used ones around:https://www.ebay.com/sch/i.html?_from=R40&_trksid=p2380057.m...
Also amusing is that the keyboard has a Windows key.
https://www.pouet.net/prod.php?which=65371
Since it is presumably real hardware, it should, but it isn't a CRT, so the NTSC color bleeding trick to get extra colors may not work.
Just now I thought 8MB is still enough to be useful, then I checked myself MB not GB.
I know pcem can do a pretty decent job with voodoo these days, bit would be nice to have something that Just Works so I could play Messiah and Sinistar Unleashed in their full glory again.
Just look how expensive the fancy alternatives are:
I'll take it with the co-processor.
And this arrives today. Going to buy one.
I'm desperate to have a cheap, open, frugal device that I can program easily that fit into my pocket.
I'm not willing to use Android studio just to make a simple app, or godot, or JavaScript or nodejs.
It's 2023 and Carmack is still right, there are way too many layers of crap, we just cannot use our phone like we want. It's awful.
It's such a paradox, smartphones are amazingly fast... But it's impossible to find something open and slow. Capitalism makes this impossible.
