shelldozer
New Member
There is a slightly odd human population distribution in "Vintage/Retro Computing" communities - they seem to be almost entirely populated by people that attended high-school between 1975 and 1986. The IMSAI/Altair generation being the oldest members and the Amiga generation being the youngest.
An entire world of TRS-80, Apple Lisa, Altair, C64, Spectrum, ZX80, Imsai, 8-bit Ataris, KIM-1 kits, an occasional PDP-11 or Rainbow, Osborne luggables, VIC-20, IBM 5150, Apple-II, Mac Classic, Atari ST, Amiga, and their contemporaries; but nothing either earlier or later.
I myself attended high-school from 1976-1982, so I'm in that generation too, but although I have memories of the ZX80, Commodore PET, ICL One-Per-Desk, my Mums' old Mac Classic, the C64 and its' irritatingly unreliable CBM 1541 disk drive, and so on, my current computer collection feels a little out of place here... "vintage" in several cases, but nowhere near as "veteran":
Silicon Graphics' Indigo R3000 (1991)
Sun SPARCstation-10 (1992, upgraded with 1996 CPUs and a 2005-vintage SATA disk drive)
Sun SPARCclassic (1993)
Toshiba 4000CDT laptop (1997)
Sun Ultra-10 PGX24 (2000)
My main day-to-day-use machine is the SS10, now over 19 years old, for which I have a collection of 15 CPU modules of 8 different types. No shortage of CPU spares there!
I wonder what will happen to all the "vintage computer" sites and fora when the human class-of-1986 visits the great swap-meet in the sky... Where have all the younger retro-computing people gone? Were they ever "here" at all?
An entire world of TRS-80, Apple Lisa, Altair, C64, Spectrum, ZX80, Imsai, 8-bit Ataris, KIM-1 kits, an occasional PDP-11 or Rainbow, Osborne luggables, VIC-20, IBM 5150, Apple-II, Mac Classic, Atari ST, Amiga, and their contemporaries; but nothing either earlier or later.
I myself attended high-school from 1976-1982, so I'm in that generation too, but although I have memories of the ZX80, Commodore PET, ICL One-Per-Desk, my Mums' old Mac Classic, the C64 and its' irritatingly unreliable CBM 1541 disk drive, and so on, my current computer collection feels a little out of place here... "vintage" in several cases, but nowhere near as "veteran":
Silicon Graphics' Indigo R3000 (1991)
Sun SPARCstation-10 (1992, upgraded with 1996 CPUs and a 2005-vintage SATA disk drive)
Sun SPARCclassic (1993)
Toshiba 4000CDT laptop (1997)
Sun Ultra-10 PGX24 (2000)
My main day-to-day-use machine is the SS10, now over 19 years old, for which I have a collection of 15 CPU modules of 8 different types. No shortage of CPU spares there!
I wonder what will happen to all the "vintage computer" sites and fora when the human class-of-1986 visits the great swap-meet in the sky... Where have all the younger retro-computing people gone? Were they ever "here" at all?