Vintage computing is a hobby that has been growing in popularity. It has evolved from something practiced by a handful of old techies who didn't want to let go of their favorite old platforms, to a vehicle for people to explore the nostalgia of their youth, and even for younger techies to explore what came before.
One of the more interesting segments of vintage computers to explore are the platforms that featured the Motorola 68000 processor, and its descendants. These entered the market in the 1980s, at a time when the first generation of home computers, which featured 8-bit CPUS and could do little more than process text, basic spreadsheets, small databases, and simple games, was giving way to a new generation that could tackle increasingly sophisticated problems.
The plethora of CPU architectures of the 1970s was whittled down to two main ones (in the US, at least): the Intel 8086 and its descendants, and the Motorola 68000 family. The architecture of the 8086 took off when a lower-cost variant of it, the 8088, was featured in the IBM PC, which proved to be wildly popular. The 68000, by contrast, was considered faster and easier to program, with its flat memory model (compared to the 8086's segmented memory model).
The most successful platforms that featured the 68k were the Apple Macintosh, the Commodore Amiga, and the Atari ST.
Introduced in 1984, the Macintosh was the first home computer to feature a Graphical User Interface. Although its predecessor the Lisa also featured a GUI, it cost $10,000 and was marketed to businesses. The Macintosh, on the other hand, cost $2,500 at launch. Although it was initially well-received for the pioneering concepts it introduced, sluggish performance and the need to constantly swap disks would hamper adoption until an upgraded model with more RAM and an optional external floppy drive was released later in the same year. These computers were widely used in education, and would go on to lead a revolution in desktop publishing, where its WYSIWYG applications and selection of quality included fonts made it a natural pick. Today they're often used as distraction-free writing machines, where more modern platforms make it too easy to give in to the temptation to check a social media feed, or some headlines, and it is also often used to revisit vintage educational software, as well as a few unique games that debuted on that platform.
Released a year later in 1985, the Atari 520ST had comparable specifications to the Macintosh, added an optional color monitor, and featured a similar GUI called GEM. It was considerably less expensive than the Macintosh, though, at $800. With its included midi port the series found a niche in music production, where it continued to be used well into the 2000s. The popular Cubase application, for example, was originally released for the Atari ST. It also had a wide array of well-loved games, but most can also be experienced on the Amiga with much better sound.
The last of the three platforms to hit the market was the Amiga, in 1985. It featured 256K of RAM, and custom chips that offloaded the processing of graphics and audio from the CPU, and it cost $1,300. It was the first to feature pre-emptive multitasking. Supply issues and poor marketing got it off to a slow start, but it became a well-loved home computer, featuring many advanced games and home productivity apps. It also was a nexus at the birth of the demoscene, a culture that celebrated the intersection of good programming, art, and music, and would launch the careers of many people involved with some of the most prominent games of the 2000s. Finally, it found a niche in 3d rendering and video production, where it was considered a considerably lower-cost alternative to Silicon Graphics workstations, and was used to create the special effects for shows like Seaquest DSV and Babylon 5. Although this platform tragically died off right as the rest of the world was coming to embrace the features that it offered, it still has a lively community, with new software and hardware being developed to this day.
These 68000-based platforms represented a pivotal moment in computing history, when personal computers first became capable of serious creative work. While Intel-based PCs would eventually dominate the market, these machines pioneered many innovations we take for granted today: graphical interfaces, pre-emptive multitasking, and dedicated multimedia hardware. Their influence can still be seen in modern computing, and their preservation by the vintage computing community keeps this history alive for new generations to discover.
When I was studying for my SAT, back when dinosaurs roamed the earth, I was given a copy of a book about derivatives (the language kind, not the Calculus kind) to help prepare. It was someone's dog-eared old copy, and the front cover was missing, so I don't remember the title or author. But there was a statement in it that fascinated me, that I've always wanted to explore: it said that the evolution of language was governed by observable patterns, and that differences between modern languages that descend from the same parent are largely down to a difference in the patterns that governed their evolution.
I always wanted to explore languages and see if I could learn those patterns, but I didn't really know how to learn languages, and I never gave it much focus. In the last few years, though, Duolingo has made language learning much more accessible, and by marrying an Algerian woman I married into a French-speaking family, so that gave me an incentive to start investing some energy into learning French.
French is actually one of the easiest languages to learn for English speakers. You already speak French every day, without being aware of it. If you speak of "manual labor" you're speaking French - the Anglo-Saxon translation would be "hand work", IE, working with one's hands. Now that's not exactly as a French speaker would say it today - that phrase comes from Old French, the language spoken by the Normans who invaded England in 1066.
For a couple of hundred years after that event, there was a bifurcation of the languages spoken in England. The aristocracy, and the upper classes that were close to them, spoke French. Common people, farmers, and laborers, on the other hand, continued to speak Anglo-Saxon. Some domains, like law, were often conducted in both languages. This left an indelible mark on our language, and gives it depth. There are many such cases in English where there's a "fancy" way to say something that's probably derived from French, and a "down-to-earth" way that comes from Anglo-Saxon. If you wanted to find a term for a woman who might be comforting, have warm hands, and smell like she just cooked a meal, you might call her "motherly." If you wanted to speak of the pure form of a mother's affection for her children, though, you might choose the term "maternal." Both words mean basically the same thing, but you would tend to use them in different contexts. You might ask your friend for an answer, but you would solicit a potential employer for a reply.
Now many or most of the French words that survive in English aren't exactly the same as the ones spoken by residents of Paris today, and the ones that are the same are pronounced differently, and often have slightly different meanings (for example "adroit" in English means "deft," while "a droit" in French means "to the right"). Still, they're usually similar enough that it makes it easy to see how the French words are related to the English ones, and that makes it much easier to memorize French vocabulary.
This proved to be a gateway into an extremely casual study of Romance languages for me. I'm nowhere near fluent, but after a couple of years I got to a point where I could follow the conversations of my Algerian inlaws when they spoke French, and occasionally contribute a sentence or two without getting corrected like a child. Then I started learning Latin, and after a few months of that, I wanted to tackle Spanish. I decided to take the Spanish from French Duolingo course, because I figured that would let me learn Spanish while keeping my French sharp. Then something strange happened - one day Youtube recommended a video about Latin (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p1Mq6YfozwA) that was presented in Italian, a language I hadn't studied at all. I watched it on a whim, and found - to my great surprise - that I could understand quite a bit of it.
That has led me back to my original goal of wanting to study the patterns in the changes of languages. I started studying Italian a bit after that, and one thing that stuck out to me was that the Italian word for "to eat" is "mangiare" - similar to the French "manger." The Spanish word is "comere" though, similar to the Latin "comedere" - in fact I've had the impression from my cursory survey of the languages that Spanish was more conservative than the other Romance languages, was closer to Latin.
This was originally intended to be the introduction to a comparison of a handful of verbs in a few Romance languages, that I was writing as a head-clearing exercise between CS homework assignments, but it's getting long and I need to get back to my homework, so I'll post this as it stands, and come back to that verb comparison another day.