There's something so comfy about these old systems, even though most of them were released before I was born. Perhaps it's just nostalgia for the days of constant improvement.
I like the very early microcomputers where the storage is paper tape punch / reader. Your ASR-33 basically types in your program, or punches it on tape when you "list".
You can see some of these on "deramp"'s videos (he is selling Altair clones, but even so the videos are great demos).
You write files sequentially to the disk, and you can only write to the end. When you delete there are holes. You can run a defrag program to recover the space.
This stuff was all just before my time, but there were vestiges of it in later operating systems in the early 80s.
That is my belief, I had a couple of 16 bit proprietary UNIX 8086 systems from the late 80s. I tossed them out over 20 years ago.
When I see one of these articles really I wished I kept them, but I know I would rarely use them instead of BSD/Linux. But nostalgia seems to get stronger as you age. You know, good-ole-days and all :)
As far as the personal computing is concerned, the (relative) simplicity of it, and the openness, were key - and, today, the infinite source of nostalgia. It was a revelation that you can simply set a bit somewhere in memory and see a pixel lit on the screen.
Not a fan of the term "Nostalgia", often used to discredit why older systems were well engineered, minimal, functional and purposeful. But hey, you're deluded because you're being Nostalgic.
I love that adorable little SIIG Minisys. I've got a couple of Siemens-Nixdorf "Beetle" PCs which were used for point-of-sale terminals in the 90s, a bit wider than the Minisys but not as long. Can't remember at the moment if mine have 486 or Pentium (I) processors, but I did get Windows 3.11 going on one of them a few years back.
