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Where does a baby retro computer geek start?

I've started messing around with my beasty of a pc but have come to recognize that I am still in the rnd phaise of all this. It starts with fascination followed by data gathering. so far I've found that blind people really did use Dos and Unix at the time and that the braille and speak was a great little synth for speech with a dos machine as the terminal. Considering that not much of this would be of practical use today I'm wondering how to bring it back to bring it forward if that makes sense, use the retro experience of computing minimalism to do things today. As far as the braille display goes there's the Transforming Braille project which is working to create a low cost unit since for years they were a dream beyond many of us. This is grand news indeed as many have wondered at the usefulness of braille in the age of the IPAD. Of course any way of gaining direct access is a huge win. I think the only way to really know what is useful and possible is to sit with a few old geeks who have made the attempt and see what comes up, ya know plug in the old hardware and see what happens. I'd like my interest to be of real use.Oh and I've discovered the Linux based notetaker, stil more reading to do. Thanks for the links to the mailing list.

Apparently someone made a Braille printer out of Lego:

http://www.popsci.com/article/diy/t...jects-that-make-lego-toys-into-hightech-tools
 
Doesn't Slackware have some sort of support for hardware text to speech? I seem to remember it always asking something about that when installing a few years back when I stilled used it.

Also, have you ever used a chorded keyboard? I find them pretty interesting and might try learning how to used one someday. I originally picked a braille n speak up off of ebay so I could use the speech chip out of it since it is fairly rare and sounds cool!
 
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