Quarter-Scale Retrocomputing | Hacker News Reader

Quarter-Scale Retrocomputing

bbenchoff.github.io

140 pointssohkamyung31 comments

This one hits home!

Many moons ago (like... 12*6=72 moons, aprox.) I got my hands in one of these kits: https://chrismcveigh.com/lego_kit_guides_2018/my_first_compu...

[Note: I might have got v2 or v3, I guess]

I have all the stuff (screen, small pi-like board, cables and so on) to try and convert it into a small, functioning, Macintosh 128K. Now, where did I left the free time...? Can't seem to find it now.

It's probably some variety of lawyer-infested copyright landmine hellscape, but in principle I suspect there's a reasonably sized market for nostalgia-coddling raspberry pi (or similar) cases. Old nerds have money[1]. :)

[1] as one such Nerd of a Certain Age with Disposable Income, my plea would be for an sgi o2 or sun ipx or similar, haha

For instance the Pi-dp11 (and 8)[0]

[0]https://obsolescence.wixsite.com/obsolescence/pidp-11

I agree that there is a good market in serving NoaCAwDIs like us. There are definitely a few products available in this niche already, e.g.

https://boingboing.net/2016/09/07/retroconnector-makes-tiny-...

https://shop.minimuseum.com/products/first-super-computer?va...

I'd certainly pay money for a Packard Bell Legend or early-90's IBM case.

300Mhz SGI o2: ~650 Vax MIPS

Rpi 3: ~6000 Vax MIPS

You might think the Pi would lag on FP but...

o2: 131MFlops

Rpi 3: ~180 MFlops

So basically a Pi is better than an o2. And it's the size of a credit card.

And mostly used for toy projects.

Yeah, definitely :) It was kind of a bittersweet moment when I realized that all the gear I lusted after as a youth can now be outperformed on basically every axis by something that costs less than $40 (if you can find one!) and comparatively sips power. So if I could get a case that scratched the nostalgia itch a bit while having modern compute innards, that'd be grand. (Also, I suspect most of us are more nostalgic for the hardware than irix 6.2 or solaris 2.6 or whatever similar vintages of proprietary unix.)

> So basically a Pi is better than an o2. And it's the size of a credit card.

From HW capabilities, maybe (don't know how I/O compares), but from SW point of view PI is much worse. There is so much bloat in today's SW.

The ZIP Drive Tower is pretty impressive, too:

https://bbenchoff.github.io/pages/atapi.html

(especially the ATAPI/USB adapters)

I want a SGI Personal Iris so much. :-) This is my dream computer for so long.

https://www.digibarn.com/collections/systems/sgi-personal-ir...

At my university I asked about these flashy new machines which I'd never have a chance to use, I was told they were slow. That was way back then.

They were the slowest SGI boxes, but a MIPS R3000 at 12.5 to 36Mhz would have been faster than the 33Mhz 386DX in a high end PC in 1998.

Edit: Things were moving pretty fast at the time, so I suppose if you bought one in 1998, it would have looked anemic when the 486 came out. Basically, if you bought anything and held it for 3-5 years, it was much further behind than the same situation today.

>> the 33Mhz 386DX in a high end PC in 1998.

1998's high end PC would have been a Pentium II 450MHz with 128MB of RAM, 10GB HD, and a NVIDIA card.

The 386/33 was high end in 1990

Ah, yes, typo on my part...it was 1988, not 98.

I'd just like a sofa that looks like the Cray used in the movie Hackers...

The crays actually had cushions.

IMO the Sharp x68K sports one of the coolest designs of the 80s.

> A BeBox, if you’re not aware is a weird little computer from the mid-90s, and could have been the basis for OS X. About 2000 were ever made, making this one of the rarest vintage computers. Unobtanium, basically.

So... just like the Raspberry Pi that's inside the tiny case.

The Sharp X68000 was a legendary computer in Japan, and has a similar reputation as a gaming and graphical powerhouse to the Amiga in the West. Graphics-wise, it surpassed the Amiga -- it had honest-to-goodness arcade graphics hardware allowing for 100% faithful conversions of late 80s and early 90s arcade games. There was even a Castlevania game on the X68000 that wouldn't see a release on other platforms until a PlayStation release late in that system's life.

In the first episode of Battle Programmer Shirase, a representative of "Eibin Corporation" comes to the title character asking for help with a cyberterrorist who is holding their company hostage and demanding that they bring back their "EX68" computer line (to which Shirase replies that he wishes that they would bring it back too). Note that "eibin" means "sharpness" in Japanese. That's the X68000's reputation, to the point that it warrants nerdy references in anime decades after the system's heyday.

I haven't watched that anime yet. I also never even came close to the real thing.

What I do know is that one popular picture of the black X68k alongside a matching monitor and keyboard are to me the embodiment of the cool industrial/utilitarian late 80s computer design. The computer tower case looks like some premium stackable industrial equipment. The only thing I can think of that achieves similar iconic level is the PowerMac G5 "cheese grate" tower.

I was just saying, the cool case houses an even more awesome system. And it had soft eject 5 1/4" floppy drives!

I do not have a 3d printer... but if someone sold them, I would part with money pretty quickly. Those are great pi boxes :)

I've had good luck finding a local(ish) business to print things for me using Treatstock. Shapeways may also be an option.

I wish Haiku would target Raspberry Pi so we would be able to build a real modern BeBox rather than just a BeBox-looking Linux computer.

I've been banging on that drum for years, and the first time I posted on the Haiku forums people said it was proprietary and wasn't going anywhere, and that RISC-V would be a better priority.

Fast forward some five or six years and there are literally _hundreds_ of ARM SBCs out there that could be running Haiku instead of hacked Debian.

I would answer them Raspberry Pi is the only standardized-config, also fairly widespread and reasonably affordable computer. Standardized config is a must for a custom OS (so it is reasonably easy to fully support the hardware), price is among things which killed Be, vibrant community of geeky enthusiasts of all levels is a great bonus. RISC-V doesn't have any of these, it hardly even exists.

This was a few years back, and yes, it was already obvious it was getting mass produced and taking off. They just didn’t care up until the 3B+ came out.

Haiku has (experimental) support for Armv7 (or later). Would a Pi not meet this requirement?

https://www.haiku-os.org/guides/building/compiling-arm

Funny, this is a perfect use case for the tower/desktop case size.

If you were to make a NeXT Cube case like this, it would be cool, to be sure, but it would also be kind of big which (almost) defeats the purpose.

https://www.pine64.org/cube/ is the solution, also for a Connection Machine case.

A VAX 11/780 with Unibus expansion cabinet[1] is 72" wide, 60" tall and 30" deep. It would be cool to have a 1/4 scale model of that.

[1] https://manx-docs.org/collections/antonio/arc-db/EA-20190-20... pdf page 23

I was in a Target once and I spied a small box that read "DOS" in nice friendly bold Helvetica. For a fleeting moment I thought maybe it was a mini console shaped like a PC that ran DOS games.

Turned out to have been Dos, the sequel to the card game Uno. But man, what a dream. It's good to see this guy making that dream real.

Tandy mini PCs when?

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