Build Log: Macintosh Classic

If you used them when they were current, the emulator experience is never quite the same. The input latency is always detectably worse, especially without a CRT (and even now you're no longer 15-25 years old), and there's always at least a bit of sound latency. Also, you're using a modern keyboard and mouse.

On the flip side, all the original hardware is now ancient and at least somewhat broken (or going that way), and it's a pain to keep it running as an ongoing prospect. CRTs, floppy disk drives, floppy disks, hard disk drives, key switches, mice with balls, aging capacitors, batteries, little plastic bits inside the keyboard that you didn't even realise were there until they crumbled into dust - they all go bad in the long run, and the repair always eats up at least a bit of time. (Even assuming it's actually repairable! Battery damage can be literally unfixable. Parts supply generally can be an issue. Mouldy floppy disks are time-consuming to rescue, and can damage the drives as you attempt it. Those little plastic keyboard bits are theoretically 3d printable, but you'll need to figure out what shape they were originally and how to glue them into place. And so on.)

The long-term prognosis for modern computers is uncertain too - but the nice thing about them is that you can always just buy another one. Turns out they're always making more of them!

Infinite Mac (https://infinitemac.org) is honestly incredible and gets you 99% of the way there for running old software for the nostalgia.

But there's definitely something fun about running the old hardware with an old spinning hard drive, clacking away while it boots up for 2-3 minutes.

And then launching Microsoft Word 5.1 and wondering if it locked up, while each toolbar loads in one by one!

Honestly though, if you just wanted to do word processing, it's fine for that, and with modern tools like FloppyEmu, BlueSCSI, and some of the networking hacks with modern cheap hardware, you can get one of these things to transfer files to and from a network share very easily.

I'm using a netatalk server on my Raspberry Pi to serve up Samba shares over AppleTalk. Very simple to do nowadays! https://github.com/geerlingguy/apple-pi

I have a relatively ancient 8086 I still use from time to time with plain text files and a simple editor.

It provides a distraction-free environment for writing.

Save it to a 720kb floppy that my linux box can still read, and move it to a "modern" system for editing and such.

People bought them to do real work when they were new. I can't see why they can't continue to do that as long as you don't want to connect it to the internet.