I’m supporting Adrian’s Digital Basement on Patreon. He basically fixes old computers, but also things like CRTs, these days he is fixing an Apple Lisa computer that was donated to him in a pretty bad shape.
These days, the retro-computing scene is producing impressive components. My most loved machine was my Macintosh SE/30, these days you can find the following components built by the community:
- Reverse engineered motherboard to transplant existing components
- Replacement ROMs, which include bug fixes, bootable ROM disks
- SCSI drive emulator
- Replacement case
- LCD retrofit kit, including a custom graphic card
This means that as long as some core chips are survived, you can rebuild a functioning machine. Even if it gets improved, this is a machine from 1991. So while restoring it is impressive, it is not that useful for day to day computing. In fact the Raspberry Pi Pico used to build the BlueSCSI emulator is massively more powerful that the 16 Mhz 68030 processor of the SE/30: a Dual-core Arm Cortex-M0+ processor running at up to 133 Mhz. So is this just a pretty expensive nostalgia hobby? Yes and no.
The important thing is that people have the skills and the material to reverse-engineer proprietary hardware to not only fix it, but build improved components. The ability to design and manufacture circuit boards, and to a smaller extent 3D printing have enabled people to produce replacement components. Now restoring an SE/30 is not that useful – although Word 5 probably flies on that thing – but between the explosion of RAM and GPU prices and the general software enshittification, going back to something simpler is not be a bad idea.
Computer are just one category of hardware: restoring a CNC router or a lathe from the 90s and making it compatible with modern tools makes expensive industrial equipment accessible to small workshops. People talk of reindustrialisation, and the right to repair, but to actually make something, you need tools. There are probably other categories of tools I’m not thinking of which could be as useful when restored.