Comment by mrandish

> I have one of these again, with the stuff I had as a kid, and more (like the voice synth) and it's so limited even for the era, but still iconic.

Growing up I had a retired uncle who'd collected and restored a few classic cars of the 1950s to cherry condition. He kept them in a separate four car garage out back where he'd work on them in his spare time and then take them out for a drive on Sundays. Being a nerd kid, I couldn't really relate. Those old cars couldn't go very fast, weren't very comfortable and didn't have important features like an 8-track tape player (oh, and seat belts). Even the radio was only AM! I was more interested in the latest Amiga computer, so my Uncle's deep affection for these old old cars was just a quirky eccentricity.

Starting in the late 90s I gradually began acquiring classic 8 and 16-bit home computers of the 1980s when I'd hear of someone throwing one away. To me, that now-useless trash was still a treasure! At first I just "saved" the ones I'd actually owned but once I had those, I expanding to the models my teenage self had lusted over in Byte Magazine but could never dream of affording. eBay and thrift stores circa 2000 were overflowing with them for $5 or $10.

Once I had all those, I just kept going and picked up every model I'd ever even heard of and then a bunch of foreign ones from Europe, Japan, South America, Eastern Europe and Russia I'd never heard of. And I never paid more than $25 for any of them. They were just so interesting, I couldn't resist. Each platform was a unique evolutionary branch with its own opinionated design choices, operating system and vision of what 'personal' computing might be.

So... now I can finally understand my Uncle's fascination with his weird, old, not-very-good cars. :-)