Old computers appear to be much simpler than the computers we have nowadays. I am thinking of learning to use and program an older computing platform to better understand low level programming in a constrained environment. I would probably appreciate a computer more if I understood nearly every single part of it (similar to the enjoyment of understanding how to implement the Scheme programming language). What computing platforms would you recommend? I am currently leaning towards the Commodore 64 and/or MS-DOS because of their large enthusiast communities and the abundance of old software produced for these platforms.
Continuation:
The other approach is to learn and understand a modern single-board computer (SBC) such as a Raspberry Pi or the BeagleBone Black. However, the Raspberry Pis are not completely open source hardware, which means that some components are proprietary black boxes. The XINU educational OS runs on the BeagleBone Black [1], so that's probably a path to explore, but the community support and resources available for BeagleBone is likely to be less than that of Raspberry Pi, Commodore 64, and MS-DOS.
There never were commercial computers without proprietary components.
I vote for Commodore 64 or FreeDOS/TempleOS.
The funny thing is that even when writing bare metal programs, you are shielded from most complexity in the hardware. When you actually get to glimpse how the underlying hardware works, it is usually due to hardware errors and they are an endless source of terror.
Anyway I recommend MIPS, it used to be the big name in academy, you will surely find lots of great books about how to program it starting from reset and maybe even some about microarchitecture.
RISC-V
I write computer games for the TIC-8 fantasy computer. I get my fix of limited resource computing all within the convenience of today's mega bloated operating systems.
limited resource computing
mega bloated operating systems
Depressing world.
computer games
fantasy computer
Escapism.
Has humanity really come to this?
>>8
Escapism isn't necessarily wrong or immoral. Writing computer games is a real intellectual art. It is an art form to write computer games for a computer that's designed to have significant resource constraints. The fact that nobody cares to translate the fantasy computer specifications into physical wiring has no relevance to reality or morality.