/diy/ - Do It Yourself

>>840952
If you want to learn more about Computer Architecture, take your $109 and spend it on Hennessey and Patterson [1].

Vintage microcomputers don't have a lot of the stuff that you'd see in an actual CA course: for instance they've no MMU, no DMA, no bus-mastering, no cache hierarchy.

Even in their day, they weren't where the research was: that was going on on mainframes and minicomputers; home computers were just the bare essentials of a computer, built to a price a home user might afford.

If you really, really want to dick about with an old computer, get a PC from the AT or XT era. Get some ISA prototyping boards, and build it some kind of interesting or modern peripheral.

ISA is easy to work with, but at the same time is a real bus. You'll make some real hardware, and write a real driver. You can then sling it in a Pentium era PC, install Windows 95, and learn about modern operating systems by writing a Windows driver.

[1] - http://amzn.com/012383872X