I went to the regular monthly meeting of the local Linux users' group last night. There are a bunch of cool people in the club, but I definitely am realizing that I'm in a minority to like the really old hardware that I like.
The Commodore computers I've been playing with lately are still cool, though, in their own right. I read a passing mention earlier today of how the Commodore serial port was like a computer network. Really, it was. Disk drives and printers had their own CPU, RAM, ROM and I/O chips. (The famous and much-maligned Commodore 1541 disk drive was almost as powerful as a VIC-20; it had a 6502 processor, 2K of RAM, 8K of ROM, and a pair of 6522 VIA I/O chips; the VIC had 5K of RAM, 16K of ROM and a video chip but was otherwise similar.) That meant that loading a program off disk was like transferring a file via nfs - you were asking another computer (the 1541) to send you a file. There were even some neat programs that would run in the disk drives self-containedly - one played "Daisy Daisy" by manipulating the disk head and stepper motor. I'm not sure it was great for the stepper motor, but it sure was cool.
Maybe because this hardware is simple and yet complex, I like it. I have a chance of understanding how everything fits together. Unquestionably, it's a part of my history, a little memory of my childhood, too. As much as I enjoy modern computing, I don't love using an Athlon 64 as much as I do using a Commodore 64. Of course, the Athlon system is far more pleasant to use and does far more cool things. :) But ... the experience isn't the same.
So, get out there and get yourself a hopelessly obsolete computer! Or if you're worried about your basement filling to overflowing, get an emulator. This particular one, VICE, is excellent - it even runs close to full speed on my Pentium 200 notebook. It emulates just about every 8-bit Commodore computer ever made. Very fun.