I've been feeling lately that as computers have become more advanced and software has become more inscrutable, our relationship with our computers has changed, for the worse. This essay hit home for me: https://explaining.software/archive/transparent-like-frosted...
These old-school computers viewed their users as creators, as developers. Modern computers (read: smartphones) _are_ the users, and the "used" are just ad-watching revenue cows. I passionately hate this arrangement.
When I have children, I want them to know what computing should feel like---empowering, creative and stimulating, not controlled, consumptive, compulsive and mindless. I want to give them a computer that builds up their spirit, rather than grinding it down.
I think this computer should have several qualities:
0. The computer should be about _creation_ and not consumption.
1. The computer should be _local_, not global. Intranet should be prioritized over Internet.
1.5 A corollary, the computer should be _personal_. It should encourage and reward in-person interaction, physical sharing of information and programs, and short-range connection between computers.
2. The computer should be _limited_. Because the medium is the message, we have to restrict the capabilities of our media to better promote the messages we value.
2.5. A corollary, the computer should be _text-oriented_. Graphics shouldn't be impossible, but text should be primary. The computer should cultivate a typographic mind, not a graphic mind (in Marshall McLuhan's terminology).
3. The computer should be _focused_. It should never distract you from what you want to work on.
4. The computer should be _reactive_, not proactive. It should never give you a notification. You should be in charge of retrieving all information yourself, like a library, not a call center.
5. The computer should be _physical_. It should be oriented around physical media.
6. The computer should be _modifiable_. It should encourage and reward inspection into its internals, and be easy to change.
7. The computer should be _simple_, understandable by a single person in its entirety with time and study.
The Mega65 is amazing and checks these boxes, but unfortunately it's a tad expensive for me. What other machines are out there like this?
Mega65 is a nostalgia project aimed at targeting a specific kind of older computer system.
If practical and simple were the goals, it wouldn't be using an 8-bit chip nor would it be focused on things like BASIC as these kinds of things make things harder rather than easier.
Mega65 is about working within constraints, but (to me), the bend of the complexity curve where things are simple enough to understand, but powerful enough to do necessary tasks requires much larger software and hardware resources than what a system like Mega65 offers.
At a bare minimum, I believe you'd want a much more powerful single-core machine with the ability to do floating point and vector calculations while having access to at least a couple hundred megabytes of RAM and a few gigabytes of storage. Something more along the lines of a Pi Zero, but based on open hardware and open chip designs seems to be around the point where it is powerful enough to do all the common, non-connected tasks a user might need to do while still being simple enough that you could understand most of the moving parts if you wanted to take the time.
>If practical and simple were the goals, it wouldn't be using an 8-bit chip nor would it be focused on things like BASIC as these kinds of things make things harder rather than easier.
A 32-bit word size is the absolute minimum that I would consider “practical”. With that you can comfortably implement reasonable floating point and integer arithmetic that can solve most of the common practical problems you encounter in science, business or engineering. Still people criticised the System/360 because it was 32-bit, saying it wasn’t enough compared to the 36-bit word size computers that preceded it. Mechanical calculators generally had ten decimal digits of precision so the thinking was that digital computers needed to at least match or exceed that.
Actually, something comparable to the original Symbolics Lisp Machines could be at the sweet spot where you still understand the whole system from the hardware up, but have powerful enough tools to be actually productive.
I agree completely. I've looked at designing a system around the Pi Zero, but it's so much work for someone with the time and skills that I (don't) have. And the Pi Zero doesn't seem to have the kind of I/O capability that I'm looking for.
The Tulip Creative Computer[1][2] hits most of your points (I'm just a customer). It is definitely not a retro computer. It uses modern technology (ESP32S3 microcontroller with megabytes of flash memory and RAM, USB ports, wifi, color touch screen etc.) and runs a modern programming language (MicroPython) that also serves as the operating system.
This particular product might not be exactly what you want, but it shows that you can use these technologies to build a computer that is much simpler and more malleable than a modern PC in both hardware and software, but is still very capable, and intriguing to use.
I grew up before the Internet and we still craved connectivity with our computers. I remember dialing into BBSes and playing turn-based text games and it was amazing. It was also the best way to get software; my computer would be pretty boring if the only software I had was what I created myself or purchased in a box.
I also could have done so much more with all my computers, from my Commodore 64 to my 286, if had I had the vast information resources that are available now.
I think the difference is that in the days of the nascent internet, connecting with people meant much more than it does now. You dial into a BBS or log into a MUD and you have a small-ish community of real people that you can develop relationships with. Modern internet connectivity almost means the opposite: all the major services are oriented toward moneymaking, nothing is genuine, there is no sincerity, most behavior is motivated by accumulation of worthless social capital.
So, the society that you craved connection with no longer exists now that you are able to connect. This is another thing that, seemingly, has to be rebuilt from the ground up locally.
I got started with a 1200 baud modem, back in the late 80's. I miss the local community found on BBSes and the early, text-oriented Internet providers. There seems to be no replacement for that at all. Any "local" oriented sub-reddit, Discord, etc. is full of bots and spammers.
Consider the RC2014 https://rc2014.co.uk I think it hits a bunch of these points. Also don't overlook the SpecNext https://www.specnext.com -- both have very active communities.
I've wanted an e-paper laptop ever since I saw a Kindle ad in 2008. I'm also interested in ultra low power computing (solar charging, daylight readable, months of battery life, offline-first, mostly text...). So your list has a lot of overlap with mine!
Such a thing doesn't seem to have been invented yet. The remarkable might come close (or that weird typewriter like thing?) but I haven't been able to justify any of those purchases yet...
I'm not 100% sure about e-paper (the lag may actually be a feature reducing addictiveness), I'm also amenable to those transflective Sharp LCDs! (Though I think they're a bit too small for a daily driver.)
> I've been feeling lately that as computers have become more advanced and software has become more inscrutable, our relationship with our computers has changed, for the worse.
Very much so. Technology stopped being about empowerment some time ago - it's been subverted into a tool for erecting virtual tollbooths.
Thanks for that - I just read it. This made me grin:
> "By the mid-1990s," Turkle says, "when people said that something was transparent, they meant that they could immediately make it work, not that they knew how it worked."
... and by the late 1990s people meant they could see its PCB through the case!
Interesting that the hackers in the book of the same name (by Steven Levy) were looking to change the public's perception of computers from something very different from what we see today to something very similar to what you describe. You both describe an end state that is very tactile, emotional and human.
I struggle to get my kids to experience computers with the same sense of wonder and amazement that I had. This could be inevitable (I've always taken flipping a light switch or refrigerated food for granted) but it still makes me sad.
This is an interesting point of view, thinking about it I agree that instilling the "hacker ethic" into kids is very valuable. But how does one do that?
For myself, I fell into video game hacking (and related hijinks) because I loved a particular game, and happened to hang out with some smart people on some forums online, and that set the course of my life to a large degree. But it seems like accidentally having these experiences is harder and harder these days.
How do we set our kids up, or set the world up for our kids, to have these experiences organically?
So much of the effort and expense has gone into creating a large plastic shell and custom keyboard, though, resulting in a costly product targeting a very small niche of the already fairly niche hobby that is retro computing/gaming (or even retro Commodore enthusiasts)
And that large plastic shell of the C65 was always an ugly design, and I can't imagine it's comfortable to type on with that floppy drive protrusion so close to the arrow keys?
I dug out an old HP-50g calculator I got a while back. I'm finding it trips my triggers in the right way, with nearly all of the points you made. It's a tiny, programmable computer that's fully knowable. I was surprised how much fine I'm having with it.
Real Commodore hardware is going to break down eventually, I'd love to have something that uses modern parts so we aren't dependent on rare parts that are going to disappear or become super expensive.
They are extremely repairable due to low level of integration and commodity components. And many ICs (outside DRAM or PROM) can potentially last for centuries.
vintage hardware is too expensive. I'm not sure why, or who's buying it, but if you want to actually run & program on it you're better off with emulators
Even back when all the kids had C64s, most only knew enough about it to load up games from the tape drive. Personally I was intrigued by the built-in basic, and that got me started programming (and I absolutely loathed the mindless consoles like the Nintendo Entertainment System), but I was very much in the minority.
Is that just a board or a full computer with a case, keyboard, etc?
I find the all-in-one kind of retrocomputers more appealing than the DIY projects (knowing nothing of electronics or of sourcing parts, cases, etc, DIY is not for me).
The ez80 is nice, but it's not 'orders of magnitude' more powerful than a regular z80, especially clocked at 20Mhz (the CMOS Z80C was available up to 20MHz).
(The ez80 is capable of 50MHz, I'm not entirely sure why they limited it to 20Mhz in the Agon Light).
A just had a quick look at the ez80 it and it seems like it's pipelined, so the instructions per clock will be a lot better than the z80. A 20MHz ez80 is probably one order of magnitude improvement than the oftentimes 4MHz z80.
Wikipedia says three times faster at the same clock speed. So 20*3/4=15 give or take.
As an aside, last time I did napkin math estimation on the 8-bit AVR it was faster than a 68000 at the same clock speed. The 68k took 4 clocks to do register to register, AVR is mostly one clock so could do most 32 bit operations as fast or faster using multiple instructions.
I love AVR8 assembly so much and how AVR8 is so much better than any of the 8-bit micros in so many ways except for the small RAM size (though it does make it up in ROM)
In hindsight, it's not the best for emulation, I think most of the emulator time goes into extracting the bits from instructions. I really should make a translator that turns it instruction by instruction into something easier to decode.
On a CPU with 8- or even 16-bit instructions, if at all possible (I don't know much about AVR8) it's probably better to use jump tables than to try to decode bit-wise when emulating I think.
I’ve thought about making an AVR-8 emulator in AVR-8 assembly language that would let me run tiny programs out of RAM where the emulator (host) would use some of the registers and the others would be be available to the guest. This way you could upload a function over the serial port and run it. I figured it would be a good way to really master AVR-8 assembly.
The ESP32 has a huge amount of potential for emulating other things, see
Look, if you're going to get picky, it literally is at least an order of magnitude faster. And in addition, Hz for Hz, the eZ80 is much faster than the Z80A, which is what people would actually be comparing it to.
I've never understood why retro computer enthusiasts go through such effort to replace their floppy drives with CF cards, when Sony had a solution almost 25 years ago.
My DSC-30 came with a metal floppy disk that has no moving parts. But you could insert a Memory Stick into it, and then stick it in any 3.5" floppy drive and read the stick as FAT.
Every time I see someone on the VCF forums struggling with the latest floppy drive replacement board I wonder what ever happened to that technology.
Simple: a real 3.5" floppy disk drive has moving parts and various things that age and eventually break. For example I have an old device with a broken floppy disk drive which can't even read a real floppy anymore. With the metal floppy "emulator disk" you mentioned, the FDD itself still has to be fully functional in order to read this "emulator disk".
A floppy emulator board which reads SD/CF cards or USB sticks doesn't have that problem at all since it's purely solid state electronics and directly connected to the electronic interface of the FDD instead of the real FDD, and usually you can put thousands of floppy disk images onto such a memory card/stick and select which disk image is to be put into the emulated floppy disk drive ⇒ there is simply no need for the "emulator disk" technology you mentioned anymore.
Speaking of whom, I'm surprised nobody has mentioned his Commander X16 project yet. Much in the same spirit, a "fantasy C64 successor", just not based on the C65. Looks like about the same market penetration too (on the order of 1K units to date).
I've been following this project pretty closely and even though it is based on the prototype Commodore 65, I kind of wish they had just gone with the superior aesthetics of the classic c64 for the outer shell even if that would have been less accurate. And the extra long spacebar, just ugh.
That box design is giving me huge nostalgia waves.
A program most nerds (including me) used to run on every computer we came across in department stores back in the 80’s. The salesmen must have been sick to death of kids doing this all day every day – some of the messages weren’t always so polite either!
As a diehard Amiga fan, I would always stop at the Macs on display at office supply stores and switch the color setting from "thousands of colors" to grayscale. Just doing my part.
In programming class at school, we'd be taught for a bit, then go to the computers to practice what we'd learned in BASIC. When class was over, we'd write programs to loop for maybe 15 minutes, then emit an obnoxious sound to interrupt the next class. Ideally, the chosen frequency would be high enough that the teacher couldn't hear it, but the class could. Truly madlads.
I don't think there is much risk of confusion between a microcontroller and an all-in-one retro computer. They also have different numbers (64/64A vs. 65) and the Mega65 isn't prefixed with an 'AT'.
I've been feeling lately that as computers have become more advanced and software has become more inscrutable, our relationship with our computers has changed, for the worse. This essay hit home for me: https://explaining.software/archive/transparent-like-frosted...
These old-school computers viewed their users as creators, as developers. Modern computers (read: smartphones) _are_ the users, and the "used" are just ad-watching revenue cows. I passionately hate this arrangement.
When I have children, I want them to know what computing should feel like---empowering, creative and stimulating, not controlled, consumptive, compulsive and mindless. I want to give them a computer that builds up their spirit, rather than grinding it down.
I think this computer should have several qualities:
0. The computer should be about _creation_ and not consumption.
1. The computer should be _local_, not global. Intranet should be prioritized over Internet.
1.5 A corollary, the computer should be _personal_. It should encourage and reward in-person interaction, physical sharing of information and programs, and short-range connection between computers.
2. The computer should be _limited_. Because the medium is the message, we have to restrict the capabilities of our media to better promote the messages we value.
2.5. A corollary, the computer should be _text-oriented_. Graphics shouldn't be impossible, but text should be primary. The computer should cultivate a typographic mind, not a graphic mind (in Marshall McLuhan's terminology).
3. The computer should be _focused_. It should never distract you from what you want to work on.
4. The computer should be _reactive_, not proactive. It should never give you a notification. You should be in charge of retrieving all information yourself, like a library, not a call center.
5. The computer should be _physical_. It should be oriented around physical media.
6. The computer should be _modifiable_. It should encourage and reward inspection into its internals, and be easy to change.
7. The computer should be _simple_, understandable by a single person in its entirety with time and study.
The Mega65 is amazing and checks these boxes, but unfortunately it's a tad expensive for me. What other machines are out there like this?
If practical and simple were the goals, it wouldn't be using an 8-bit chip nor would it be focused on things like BASIC as these kinds of things make things harder rather than easier.
Mega65 is about working within constraints, but (to me), the bend of the complexity curve where things are simple enough to understand, but powerful enough to do necessary tasks requires much larger software and hardware resources than what a system like Mega65 offers.
At a bare minimum, I believe you'd want a much more powerful single-core machine with the ability to do floating point and vector calculations while having access to at least a couple hundred megabytes of RAM and a few gigabytes of storage. Something more along the lines of a Pi Zero, but based on open hardware and open chip designs seems to be around the point where it is powerful enough to do all the common, non-connected tasks a user might need to do while still being simple enough that you could understand most of the moving parts if you wanted to take the time.
A 32-bit word size is the absolute minimum that I would consider “practical”. With that you can comfortably implement reasonable floating point and integer arithmetic that can solve most of the common practical problems you encounter in science, business or engineering. Still people criticised the System/360 because it was 32-bit, saying it wasn’t enough compared to the 36-bit word size computers that preceded it. Mechanical calculators generally had ten decimal digits of precision so the thinking was that digital computers needed to at least match or exceed that.
https://www.raspberrypi.com/products/rp2350/
The documentation is pretty good. Reading it reminds me of going through the documentation provided with my Tandy Color Computer as a kid.
This particular product might not be exactly what you want, but it shows that you can use these technologies to build a computer that is much simpler and more malleable than a modern PC in both hardware and software, but is still very capable, and intriguing to use.
1. https://github.com/shorepine/tulipcc 2. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41122986
I also could have done so much more with all my computers, from my Commodore 64 to my 286, if had I had the vast information resources that are available now.
So, the society that you craved connection with no longer exists now that you are able to connect. This is another thing that, seemingly, has to be rebuilt from the ground up locally.
Such a thing doesn't seem to have been invented yet. The remarkable might come close (or that weird typewriter like thing?) but I haven't been able to justify any of those purchases yet...
I'm not 100% sure about e-paper (the lag may actually be a feature reducing addictiveness), I'm also amenable to those transflective Sharp LCDs! (Though I think they're a bit too small for a daily driver.)
Very much so. Technology stopped being about empowerment some time ago - it's been subverted into a tool for erecting virtual tollbooths.
> This essay hit home for me: https://explaining.software/archive/transparent-like-frosted...
Thanks for that - I just read it. This made me grin:
> "By the mid-1990s," Turkle says, "when people said that something was transparent, they meant that they could immediately make it work, not that they knew how it worked."
... and by the late 1990s people meant they could see its PCB through the case!
I struggle to get my kids to experience computers with the same sense of wonder and amazement that I had. This could be inevitable (I've always taken flipping a light switch or refrigerated food for granted) but it still makes me sad.
For myself, I fell into video game hacking (and related hijinks) because I loved a particular game, and happened to hang out with some smart people on some forums online, and that set the course of my life to a large degree. But it seems like accidentally having these experiences is harder and harder these days.
How do we set our kids up, or set the world up for our kids, to have these experiences organically?
And that large plastic shell of the C65 was always an ugly design, and I can't imagine it's comfortable to type on with that floppy drive protrusion so close to the arrow keys?
Or if that it is too limited, go for the Amiga. It is more modifiable.
As a sidenote, I got my Mega65 just the other day. Been waiting almost a year for it :)
https://ultimate64.com/Ultimate64
Got one of these too (the now discontinued non-Elite version) and it is pretty cool running stuff at 48MHz:
https://youtube.com/shorts/fF2IXTwWDPQ?si=ww3IXp7CVWDT3SZy
In above video, I hacked the awesome demo Andropolis to utilize U64’s turbo mode during vblank.
This clip shows it running in full turbo mode:
https://youtube.com/shorts/hvmNnwz7ENQ?si=6idbUgRYikXHh25O
It feels like people aren't interested in being creators. Just consumers. And that shows in how media and companies refer to people as consumers.
I wish there was a way to reverse this trend. It feels in many ways like a Plato's cave kind of situation.
I find the all-in-one kind of retrocomputers more appealing than the DIY projects (knowing nothing of electronics or of sourcing parts, cases, etc, DIY is not for me).
(The ez80 is capable of 50MHz, I'm not entirely sure why they limited it to 20Mhz in the Agon Light).
Wikipedia says three times faster at the same clock speed. So 20*3/4=15 give or take.
As an aside, last time I did napkin math estimation on the 8-bit AVR it was faster than a 68000 at the same clock speed. The 68k took 4 clocks to do register to register, AVR is mostly one clock so could do most 32 bit operations as fast or faster using multiple instructions.
https://k8.fingswotidun.com/static/ide/?gist=78d170a65bc6c9d...
In hindsight, it's not the best for emulation, I think most of the emulator time goes into extracting the bits from instructions. I really should make a translator that turns it instruction by instruction into something easier to decode.
The ESP32 has a huge amount of potential for emulating other things, see
https://github.com/breakintoprogram/agon-vdp
For a display controller implemented for ESP32.
My DSC-30 came with a metal floppy disk that has no moving parts. But you could insert a Memory Stick into it, and then stick it in any 3.5" floppy drive and read the stick as FAT.
Every time I see someone on the VCF forums struggling with the latest floppy drive replacement board I wonder what ever happened to that technology.
A floppy emulator board which reads SD/CF cards or USB sticks doesn't have that problem at all since it's purely solid state electronics and directly connected to the electronic interface of the FDD instead of the real FDD, and usually you can put thousands of floppy disk images onto such a memory card/stick and select which disk image is to be put into the emulated floppy disk drive ⇒ there is simply no need for the "emulator disk" technology you mentioned anymore.
That's an interesting combination of words!
https://shop.trenz-electronic.de/media/pdf/ca/ca/31/Mega65-P...
[1]: https://digilent.com/reference/pmod/start [2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pmod_Interface
A program most nerds (including me) used to run on every computer we came across in department stores back in the 80’s. The salesmen must have been sick to death of kids doing this all day every day – some of the messages weren’t always so polite either!
As a diehard Amiga fan, I would always stop at the Macs on display at office supply stores and switch the color setting from "thousands of colors" to grayscale. Just doing my part.
In programming class at school, we'd be taught for a bit, then go to the computers to practice what we'd learned in BASIC. When class was over, we'd write programs to loop for maybe 15 minutes, then emit an obnoxious sound to interrupt the next class. Ideally, the chosen frequency would be high enough that the teacher couldn't hear it, but the class could. Truly madlads.
Now where’d I leave those Galaksija resistors…
https://www.microchip.com/en-us/product/atmega64