Comment by rbanffy
6 hours ago
How niche is retrocomputing?
I absolutely love my ancient machines, and I use them to explore period applications, much more than games.
I also love to restore and preserve them. There’s something magical about a Sun workstation Solaris 2 a Frog Design Trinitron monitor. or a Microvax running VMS and DECWindows. Or a multi-user Altair Z80. I think it’s sad a lot of software was lost and some platforms were denied the documentation that’d enable their preservation (looking at you, IBM - document the AS/400 and release old OS to hobbyists).
I have a lot of fun with my old PDP-11s. Being able to run an original version of Unix on a machine with actual core memory (that I restored to working order) is a real kick for me. Gives a sense of depth to the software I run on my modern Linux laptop.
I have a working Apple II with some of the original games, manuals, etc. Let me know if there's a way to contact you. Happy to send it your way if you cover shipping or something along those lines.