While researching my recent-ish blog posts about Vim I was trawling the Internet Archive when I found a CD containing free software that was included with the 2001 Czech language edition of the CHIP magazine. I spent a good few hours exploring the articles (with the help of my browser's in-page translation feature) that had been carefully written by people who were obviously steeped in the technology and hacker culture of the time and just wanted to share their love for the beautiful new world people were building together.
Last month I went to a computing meetup and someone brought in a replica PDP-11
with UNIX V4 (1973) running on it. I had a great time learning how to use The
Standard Editor, backporting the 1984 IOCCC 1st place entry to UNIX V4, writing
an sl clone that prints out a rocket ship on a teletype, and patching the
shell to laugh at you when you try to type cd (the proper command is
chdir, of course; cd hadn't been invented yet, I guess).
A few days later, I visited Micro Center in passing and randomly came across the latest issue of the 2600 magazine. I enjoyed the back issues I bought on a whim at HOPE this year, so I figured what the heck, I'll buy the latest one. In it, I read about a way to cheaply build a virtual modem using a microcontroller that connects to the Internet via Wi-Fi. With such a device, an old computer's now-obsolete networking technology can be put to good use once more. In theory you could use your old computer to dial into a BBS anywhere in the world. Of course this was possible before, but it's harder to come by the necessary hardware these days, so why not build our own (for fun and profit)? Seemed like a fun and educational project and the Recurse Center has some old computers I can use, so I ordered parts and I'm waiting on them now. I put in a bulk order, enough parts to make 5, and it came out to about $5 per modem (including shipping and tax). Neat, hope it works!
So yeah, really into exploring computing history lately.