Classic Computer Replicas
11 comments
·April 22, 2025jasongill
anyfoo
It's worth looking at this from multiple angles, though.
Intuitively, I'm also extremely said that "workstations" aren't a thing anymore. That there are no professional, well-engineered, powerful Sun or SGI workstations anymore. In a sense, they even felt similar to sports cars: You drooled for them, often from a distance.
On the flip side, I don't miss exactly that: Not being able to afford such a thing, or even if you theoretically could, having to shell out tens of thousands of dollars (not even accounting for inflation yet).
Extremely powerful PCs are now available to nearly everyone who wants one, especially if you take into account that even a 10+ year old dumpster PC does more than almost all these past workstations in several regards.
We'd probably be lamenting the opposite if that wasn't the case. But yes, the shine and magic is mostly gone...
TheOtherHobbes
Workstation-class machines are very much available, at workstation-class prices.
You can buy a 64-core 7985WX Threadripper Pro with Nvidia RTX6000 and 256GB RAM for $30k or so.
Upgrade to an A100 if you're in a hurry.
They're not unusual in commercial video and animation, machine learning, and general science/engineering.
TBH you could reasonably class the $4k M3Ultra Mac Studio as a low-end workstation-grade machine for some tasks.
boznz
Old mini-computers, one of my favourite topics! Obligatory plug for doing achieving something similar today on a budget https://rodyne.com/?p=1751 discussed here https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42672366
JKCalhoun
I have a few of these and enjoy them — the PDP-8 (emulated: PiDP-8), Altair 8800 (emulated: Altair-Duino), KIM-1 (more or less the real deal modulo the 6530 RIOT chips that are no longer available: PAL-1 and PAL-2).
These, as kits, are fun to assemble, fun then to play around with.
spitfire
Obsolescence Guaranteed Is a good name for a replica retro computer store.
If I ever retire and run a bar on the beach^w^w^w^w retro computer store, that’s what it’ll be called.
ozymandiax
Thank you dbelson for the mention! It's the oxygen we need.
...but just now, our web server crashed on the Hacker News traffic. Of course...
smitty1e
I may be alone in craving an AN/UYK-7.
ConanRus
by "replica" you mean emulator or something else?
retrac
They do appear to mean emulator.
The PDP-8 was hardware replicated many times. In the '80s it was a common final year project. There's a classic textbook that works through designing and implementing a clone of the PDP-8/I [1]. I've run into a number of threads over the years where hobbyists have done it with TTL to varying degrees of completeness.
The Apollo Guidance Computer was recreated by a hobbyist from the original designs using a modern logic family but gate-equivalent -- and I can't find it online anymore! Anyone know?
You can still build an original Apple II. [2] Being from the late 1970s there was no custom logic; it's straight TTL plus a 6502, and all the chips are still in production except for the ROMs and DRAM, which are easy enough to work around or find used.
[1] https://www.amazon.ca/Art-Digital-Design-Introduction-Top-Do...
[2] https://www.reactivemicro.com/product/apple-ii-plus-rev-7-rf...
TruffleLabs
Art of Digital Design: An Introduction to Top-Down Design - Prosser & Winkel, I took their graduate class in 1990 at IU Bloomington.
In this class I & my lab partner designed and built a PDP-8 out of PALs on a wire wrapped board. And we loaded code from old paper tape sources as part of the testing. It was a fun class :)
The "Extinct" arrow next to "Workstations - Sun, SGI" is sad - I miss the days of workstation-class machines