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I've been inexplicably drawn to the Commodore 64 -- the one computer I have no nostalgic connection to. I cut my teeth on an Atari 800 (I saved up my entire summer job earnings to buy it) and an Apple ][. I didn't know anyone with a C64, and got my hands on one a few years ago.
It's kind of a terrible thing, but it has a 6502 (6510), colors, sprites, sound, and the demo people keep pushing the limits making it do amazingly impressive yet tasteless and annoying things.
I am kind of fed up with modern tech.
The problem is the rate at which everything becomes obsolete. It is obsene. Apple ][ was around for two decades, until that phychopath Jobs killed it for an inferior 68000 machine. C64, well over a decade.
You had time to hone your skills, and if you were exceptionally good, it mattered a lot. Now, tech is advancing fast enough that by the time you become exceptional at something, a total idiot can match you on a new device that runs four times as fast, using some moronic tools that are stupidly inefficient and eat up hundreds of megabytes. Being really good at something does not pay.
That is just part of idiotic capitalism, driven by magic money from above. In a free market we would not have an infinite race to double the clock or add cores -- at some point hardware would be good enough, and further development would stop being cost-effective. And without magic money that grows on trees and gets shoved down corporate funnels, there would be no demand for absurdly fast computers.
Instead we would focus our efforts on becoming exceptional at software, and be rewarded for that. As it is, software is in a sorry state -- as it should be given that hardware makes really shitty software good enough.
I am writing this on a 10-year-old i7 laptop which I use for development, and it's plenty fast. But I never know if it will wake up after being suspended - the last 10 years of Ubuntu failed to improve the situation.
I really like becoming excellent at things that don't move too fast. I don't care about making the big bucks anymore. I just want to enjoy myself doing interesting and intellectually satisfying things, which sometimes involves doing something with some 20-year-old XC3S FPGAs (which by the way take seconds to configure unlike their modern siblings). Or coding self-modifying code in 6502 assembly and counting cycles.
And it helps to have something I know virtually nothing about -- the Commodore 64 at this point. It feels really good to have nothing but a simple assembler right on real bare metal, where from reset to monitor takes a fraction of a second.
It probably won't last too long and I will get sucked back into any number of unfinished projects I have sitting around in the modern world. But even if it's a few days until I get sick of it, I intend to make the best of it.