Fun and Profit With Obsolete Computers

An anonymous reader writes "C|Net has a story about the value of aging computer hardware, and the subculture of people who collect them. The story details some of the more enthusiastic collectors currently participating in the hobby, as well as their old-school beautiful hardware. '[Sellam Ismail] recently brought a quarter century-old Xerox Star computer back to life to be used as evidence in a patent lawsuit. The pride of his collection is an Apple Lisa, one of the first computers (introduced in 1983) with a now standard graphical interface. Such items sell for more than $10,000. In an old barn in Northern California that also houses pigs, Bruce Damer, 45, keeps a collection that includes a Cray-1 supercomputer, a Xerox Alto (an early microcomputer introduced in 1973) and early Apple prototypes. '

Comments

Re:Best for learning programming

[romiz]

To learn system programming, it is a bad deal compared to a microcontroller with an emulator, or even a refurbished GBA with a flash card:

• Interrupt handling - Check
  With only 15 interrupts lines, cascaded into 2 8-lines banks, the IBM PC is quite limited, and you still have the trouble to handle the cascaded handlers.
• Instruction timing-based optimization - Check
  But if the 8086 processor understands a subset of the complete assembly language from the current PC, the timings constraints are completely different: the cost of an instruction for a 8086 accessing directly the main memory completely changes as soon as you have cache, which is essential for modern computers. And with the mess that x86 assembly is, I'd prefer dabbling with ARM assembly instead.
• Drawing lines by directly altering video memory - Check
  OK - but it is not alone on that segment.
• Disk and memory data structures - Check
  Disk structures ? The cylinder/head/track abstraction that come with the floppy disks is compulsory on old IBM PCs. The LBA method is much more straightforward. No one should need to learn a complex, obsolete abstraction that doesn't even correspond to the reality anymore.
• And in complement to that, it is impossible to debug from the outside. With embedded platforms, you can write the code with your PC, test it in an simulator, and then test it on the platform with an In-Circuit Emulator to check for bugs. You can't do that on an old IBM PC.

Re:Best for learning programming

[TheMoog]

In the computer games industry it still pays to know your way around cycle counts, pipelines and caches. Just because your device has a cache, and you're coding mainly in an OO language, doesn't mean to say you've left the world of cycle-level optimisation behind. And particularly on Sony machine it's almost a requirement to fully understand the various hardware interactions in order to get a decent turn of speed out of it.

As an industry we're now finding it very hard to employ people who know this kind of stuff. Most graduates are taught Java or C++ and have no decent experience at the assembler or hardware level. Now I'm not saying that we spend all day hand-crafting assembly code - games are just far too big nowadays - but every now and then you'll get an unusual crash which can only be debugged using knowledge of the hardware. In my experience CS graduates just freak out when you show them a disassembly of their code!