...except that in my case, this stuff was very new when I acquired it.
Yes, for some of us this stuff may be history but for us older contributors it has been our lives. As a young man I attended a Honeywell 200 programming training course in 1965 when the marketing campaign was at its height and the H200 was threatening to ruin IBM 1401 sales. Our company was about to buy its first computer and buying this promisingly exciting new Honeywell machine rather than an old-established one from IBM made total sense and we never regretted that decision. In fact decades later less enlightened new management replaced our then well established Honeywell kit with IBM machines because IBM was all that they knew about and in a matter of years our company went broke and was taken over. The moral is that if it ain't broke don't fix it.
I am the same way. Mostly curiosity, although there is something satisfying about working with older hardware. It requires more focus on the part of the user. Using older hardware sometimes feels like driving an old 5-speed manual transmission versus a brand-new daily-driver automatic.
Er, my car has a six-speed manual gearbox and at thirteen years old is now getting to be a collector's item itself. It is certainly a daily-driver vehicle because unlike my wife's smaller convertible it meets my primary requirement, that I can load eight foot long planks of timber inside it on visits to the DIY store. I barely think about the variety of gear changes that I perform while driving it with its close ratio gearbox because I am so used to it.
I do very much resonate with this statement. However the prospect of reconstructing old systems out of whole cloth has zero interest to me. The sweet spot IMO is having enough authentic vintage hardware to ground your mind in the experience, and then getting creative from there.
I wouldn't call the vintage components that I use whole cloth. Many of the Honeywell ICs that I use have batch numbers that indicate that they were manufactured in the 1960s and I have removed them from equipment assembled in that era. The design of the ICs was uniquely specified by Honeywell and I have never encountered any other like them, so working with them is itself extremely interesting. In my experience digital ICs with analogue feedback terminals are distinctly weird although other members here may have encountered something similar.
The new logic boards that I design to hold these old components are made by a professional PCB manufacturing company that was itself formed in 1964, i.e. during the key H200 marketing years, as a small family business. It was originally a shoestring operation in a workshop without a phone and the family car, its only transport, cost five pounds from a local scrap yard. Whenever the carburettor stuck, which it frequently did, and the engine stopped the company MD had to jump out and hit the carb with a hammer to continue his journey. The current proprietor of what is now a state of the art business establishment is the founder's son and was raised in those surroundings, so my project is as much a nostalgic part of his life as it is for me. When I designed some exact replica boards to supplement my supply of originals he rooted out some very old phenolic board from his stock to make them more authentic. An example of the result can be seen
HERE. So even when one does have to use whole phenolic resin soaked cloth to achieve one's purpose the nostalgic trip makes it worthwhile.
Some of us attempt to relive the past because we never really left it, not in our hearts. My website now merits its .org suffix because my project is a nostalgic trip for others, such as former Honeywell engineers who have contacted me and that PCB manufacturer who is helping, as well as myself.
