Great article, thanks for posting. It makes me think about car detailers obsessing over paint matching for repairs on older vehicles. As a petrolhead I sometimes wonder to what extent there will be an equivalent collectors community of old PC hardware to the car community. Obviously there already is substantial interest in older PC's but if you compare the similarly widespread use of cars and computers I'd say that there are many more forums discussing old car maintenance, availability of very specialized detailing products for cars, marketplaces for collectible cars, concours for showing cars off etc. than there are for collecting/restoring PC's.
Maybe PC collecting, restoring etc. will be as big a deal but it's just early on the curve still. Or maybe the comparatively much higher steepness of the progress curve for PCs will prevent any sort of similar widespread enthusiasm for older stuff.
There are people collecting and repairing 80's computers already.
I guess the biggest difference is that you can still use a collector car to go for a drive today, but on the other hand there is not much practical use to get from a collector computer. Sure, you can play old games, but most of the task you'd do with a modern computer can't be done with an old one (unlike cars).
I'm definitely not arguing there aren't people collecting these iconic old computers - just the mismatch between how many people have used computers daily for 20/30 years now and how few people seem to collect them. In my small-sized city in a small country there are maybe 25 car clubs I could be part of, specialist garages for just about every brand of car - even really niche shops that just do custom re-upholstery only for certain brands etc. Whereas for computers there's just a handful of people using the local auction and classified sites.
I think the reason you cite for the mismatch is the strongest one. If you're into collecting 80's BMWs you can still easily drive with a club including newer cars every weekend on the same roads, use the same petrol, easily get plugs, belts other parts etc. But an 80's PC is much more "stuck in time" and you need to be quite knowledgeable to maintain and enjoy in the same way.
2-3 years ago I found my mom's old clamshell G3 iBook in her garage (from around 2000). Surprisingly it still booted up and worked great. I wanted to do some writing that trip and instead of using my own laptop which was full of distractions, I opted to use Word on the iBook. Which was also fun.
I saved my work as a text file on a USB stick, which was no problem bringing over to my modern Mac.
It's gonna be interesting to see how well old USB ports will be supported in the long term with everyone rushing for thin machines with USB-C (sure you could buy a hub).
Back in 2000 my first laptop had a serial port and i bought a Wacom serial based tablet for it. A couple of years later that was gone and i had to buy a USB Wacom (that still works with win10 on modern machines!!). So for some other HW project i had to find a USB-Serial converter, so the question will be, are we really supporting the same old standards if we're forced to chase dongles?
Meanwhile, on a system from the 80s, you wouldn't have a word processor, you wouldn't have support for any of the filesystems supported by modern OSes (well, maybe FAT?), and you wouldn't have USB anyway. Heck, you'd need either a serial port or a floppy drive on a modern computer in order to even have a chance of transferring data between them.
You wouldn't have a word processor? There's lots of word processors for CP/M, MS-DOS, Amiga, Atari, Tandy TRS-80, Tandy CoCo, not to mention proprietary machines like the Tandy 100/102/200 portables. A USB-Serial adapter works just fine. Or you can get a bluetooth or wifi modem that connects your old machine to the net.
Umm...just download it? https://winworldpc.com/product/wordstar/ Sure you need to transfer the files over, but that's quick work with a cheap serial to USB adapter or a USB floppy drive if the target machine has 3.5" drive
You could hook up a Mac to the internet in 1985-ish, transferring files using telnet.
Mac OS still ships with BinHex (https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/BinHex), I think, so for Macs, that might already be the simplest way to exchange data between an early Mac and a modern machine (even if you have a floppy drive, does it read Mac disks?)
Edit: maybe my memory is of, and it was direct dial-up to another machine, not across the internet. NCSA Telnet (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NCSA_Telnet) supported TCP/IP before the OS did (yes, that was possible. I don’t know whether you still could do that on a modern system), though, so who knows?
> supported TCP/IP before the OS did (yes, that was possible. I don’t know whether you still could do that on a modern system), though, so who knows?
In general you can. If the OS lets you open raw sockets, you can implement TCP and all yourself in userspace. Although in those days, I'm guessing it was actually implementing the entire AT modem stack too, and just driving the modem directly via a serial port.
> You could hook up a Mac to the internet in 1985-ish, transferring files using telnet.
I'm sure you could. In 1985-ish.
How much of the required hardware still exists? How much of the required software can you find? Is that software (or another version of it) also compatible with your modern computer? etc.
Also WordPerfect for DOS! We had an old XT that was "my" computer, and I did a lot of homework on it. Pretty sure it was WP5.1, which would have come out in '89, which matches the timeline pretty well (I think we got that computer around '92 or so).
At least in Germany, I think you can absolutely compare the usage of retro computers to the usage of retro cars. Noone uses their retro car for day-to-day business. They maybe use it to drive out on a warm summer day, but not to go to work. Just like how you'd use a retro computer in your spare time to enjoy some classic games and not to post on Hacker News or get actual work done.
Technically, sure, you can use your retro car every day. But most people don't, probably because it would be less practical and also lower the value of the car over time.
I think one of the reasons the retro car thing is so huge in the USA is that the cars STILL EXIST on the road - there are (poor) people using ancient cars as daily drivers, so when the desire comes to find a retro vehicle, they're out there and available and cheap.
Not so much with old computers - NOBODY, not even the poor in the USA, are trying to make do with a 8086 as a daily computer. Phones and better computers are simply too cheap and available.
Are car licenses (whatever you want to call it) more lax in the US? In the UK it is more expensive running old cars because there's an annual "Ministry of Transport test" (which is broadly just referred to as "MOT") with really strict regulations. If your car fails it then it's not road legal.
I remember from my trips to America that even some of the well maintained cars there wouldn't have been legal in the UK. For example some didn't have orange indicators, instead using the red break lights as an indicator.
Most states actually make it CHEAPER to use an older car - for example, California does NOT require smog checks on cars made before 1975.
A very few states have a more stringent "inspection" but it mainly checks that the car has working lights and brakes - nothing like an actual costly check.
The USA doesn't even mandate daytime running lights as far as I know.
Some states also have 'classic' registration which (in WI at least) is paid once and lasts as long as you own the vehicle. It's more expensive up front than a regular yearly registration, but once it's done it's done. It also carries additional restrictions befitting the intended operation of a 'classic' (e.g., owner must also have a regularly registered vehicle, not allowed to drive in January, hauling restrictions if it's a truck) which make it cheaper only as a second vehicle.
The rules are designed to apply to vehicles being preserved, and are a help to hobbyists who can afford to own two or more cars. They seem to be designed - for better or worse - to exclude people who happen to rely on an older car as their only vehicle.
For example, I’m from Illinois, and you only have to have an emissions test in the Chicago and East St. Louis regions. I grew up near Peoria, where you can seemingly drive whatever disgusting uranium-and-coal-fired jalopy you want.
It depends on the state, some do annual emissions and/or safety inspections and require failed vehicles to get fixed. But a lot will just let you drive nearly anything.
Depends in the state and county. Some require both an emissions and safety check, but the safety is far less strict than the MOT. Some only require emissions testing. In some cases no testing is required at all, e.g. niche vehicles like motorcycles and conversion kits for SxS ATVs.
You can find a lot of posts with people successfully using cream hair bleach and UV lights to restore 80's PCs. They call it "retrobrighting". One resource: https://powercc.org/retrobright/
People already collect and restore computers. Retro gaming and retro computing is a big scene already. However most IBM-clone towers aren't worth restoring because they're common, not particularly powerful and thus cheap to come by. Much like how a 1990s Ford Escort is going to fetch less interest than a Jaguar from the same era.
This is also a really good point - I was specifically thinking of PC's in my point above and you're right there is a lot more interest in old gaming systems. Maybe part of it is also the emotional connection and what does or doesn't have it, there are definitely a lot of old cars no one is collecting! Nassim Taleb's "graveyard of silent evidence" at play in my first comment.
>Maybe PC collecting, restoring etc. will be as big a deal but it's just early on the curve still
It is a fairly big deal for a lot of us, just in this room I'm sitting in I've got 3 vintage machines from the late 70s to early 80s, and 3 generations of Windows machines (95, 98, XP), alongside my work and personal computers. There are vintage computer fairs the world around, there are vintage computer clubs (ours here in the general Indy area meets monthly) the world around, there are numerous podcasts and some sizable YouTube content creators too.
There is even a healthy level of developing new software and hardware for vintage computers and consoles.
https://atariage.com/ is a quick look at (mostly, but not exclusively) Atari related for example. Then you have
There is also a very healthy vintage computer preservation community on the Internet Archive - preserving magazines, zines, newsletters, manuals, schematics, software, etc.
If you don't mind my asking - do you know any channels or places that do full longplays of games on original hardware with no emulation? I try my best to find walkthroughs on games on youtube but they very rarely specify that it is using the original hardware. And Xbox og/360 longplays are the easiest because they haven't been emulated properly so almost all videos are on the hardware afaik.
Looking for 1997-2006 PC gaming and PS1/PS2.
I guess I just like videos that aren't emulated and people like LGR only provide clips:P
It seems highly unlikely that the paint in that bottle retained its original color-affecting properties over all this time.
When using it to touch up machines that have approximately the same age, you may get lucky and the colors resemble eachother, as appears to be the case in the article.
Attempting to determine the color identity (e.g. pantone or hex) of apple beige however seems impossible using old paint.
I am not a chemist though, so it may be possible that this paint has chemical properties that cause it to retain its color-affecting properties over long periods of time. I just think it's unlikely.
Assuming the bottle has been kept closed and in a cupboard, it’s avoided the two main things that make pigments change over time - air and sunlight. It’s not possible to say that it hasn’t degraded at all, but it’s fair to say that it’ll be a lot closer to the original than the computer cases are.
It was a surprise to me too, though I'm not a big Apple guy as my niche is more Atari computers Virtually all vintage computers in my experience are colored plastic and not painted, I wonder if there are any others in a gray/beige/white that were painted.
It looks like the Commodore PET 4000 series is painted metal.
If I had to bet I'd say the ones with chiclet keyboards (2000 series, I guess) were metal as well, though that's based on my old memories, so that really means I don't know.
I dream to find the very same article on the original IBM PC hardware.
I wish to repaint my dirty 5160, but none of the beige sprays of the local DIY shops fit. I could order on Internet but I have no references and Google searches could not help me so far.
Have any of you repainted some early IBM PC hardware with proper colors? RAL codes are welcome if you have...
Excellent article. One slight adjustment would be to use a color calibration chart for the photos [1]. When the whole thing is about color, it’s a bit of a bummer to not see the color represented accurately. On my iPhone it looks like the carriage house green I painted my kitchen cabinets.
Not to detract from the article though which is such great sleuthing, and preservation of something that us retro tech obsessives are very fond of.
It's getting worse and worse, too. Ten years ago there was an enormous variety of PC cases with almost every imaginable design philosophy. These days it's basically either a black plastic box or a clear glass box. Mini-fridge or aquarium, that's it.
I have a Fractal case and do like the look of it, I just wish there were more companies selling premium larger cases because I dislike some of the plastic parts.
If the thing is going to have to sit in my office/bedroom I don't mind paying up to $1K for something nice looking, grown up and with premium metal finish.
Premium case market is entirely very small cases like the Louqe Ghost.
Classy? There’s a joke that if you don’t know what to get someone for Christmas you’ll buy them beige bath towels. Beige, is well, beige. It’s the least interesting of all colours.
If you get an old office computer that was used around 1980, you’ll probably find it yellowed or even browned with nicotine stains. Dust wasn’t the only thing in the air in an office back then.
In the 80’s I worked at a company that sold CAD workstations. We had one customer that smoked in his small office. Whenever we went there for maintenance, I would bring some cleaning wipes and transform his medium brown computer to something closer to light gray. Yuck!
I recently built a new computer and i couldn't believe how difficult it was to find a beige case. I ended up finding a beautiful NOS server case from 2000.
now if only I could find a monitor that wasn't black.
Second and third results for "wired usb mouse" on amazon. The 1st is an ad. I have to go down to the 9th result to see a mouse that actually lights up.
An RGB triple does not describe a color unambiguously: it depends on the device used to display it. Devices have different red, green and blue light sources.
I know it sounds like nitpicking, but we are talking about subtle differences in shades of beige, after all.
An LCD display will have a white backlight, with some distribution of wavelengths, and each pixel has filters that pass a certain band of wavelengths (one band each for red, one for green, one blue). Different LCDs will use different backlights, with different filters. An OLED will have a three kinds of emitters, each with its own distribution of wavelengths. CRTs used to have three kind of phosphors that glowed with their own characteristic colors.
Now, if you could give us the CIE XYZ coordinates of the color, or the CIELAB coordinates, that would be very helpful. They are device-independent.
that depends very much on the lighting in which a picture of Apple Beige is taken, the colour space of the photograph, the colour temperature of the monitor, the display gamma…
Does that really matter? When used in digital content the color
will vary from one PC screen to the next anyway, and from what I
know color matching real materials with such a precision is
basically its own art form.
My preferred color scheme most definitely doesn't look the same
for me as for the designer with his color calibrated screen. But
it's close enough that I wouldn't even consider comparing it.
That depends on what you want to do. If you want to represent Apple Beige _as it appears in a particular picture, on your display setup_, then no: if you want to do anything else using the Apple Beige colour, then yes. Saying "this object has the colour #123456" is not wrong, in that it's Not Even Wrong (https://rationalwiki.org/wiki/Not_even_wrong). It's like saying that my weight is "moves the scales needle by 35°".
While color names are useful, if I wanted to reproduce this paint color at the local paint store it is more reliable to bring the RGB code. I have some colors in my house for which I have the name, but they couldn't find the actual reference. So they generated an RGB code with a color scanner they have, and now I keep a record of that in case I need more paint.
Then you need to read the article. This is about trying to match the paint against a pantone reference paint. This user tried to get a hex value instead, which would be completely different depending on lighting conditions
I owned an early Apple ][+ and had no idea it was painted. I don't even recall what I did with it given its been 40+ years and I have owned so many Apple devices...
The original shade of that Apple was much prettier than the beige shade they used later in various Mac models.
Maybe PC collecting, restoring etc. will be as big a deal but it's just early on the curve still. Or maybe the comparatively much higher steepness of the progress curve for PCs will prevent any sort of similar widespread enthusiasm for older stuff.