[II2II]

> I got my hands on an old C64 a few years ago and fired it up. I tinkered with it for about 10 minutes and lost interest. It just felt lame, a complete waste of time. (...) Contrast that with my love of older cars. I love finding old cars on Craigslist, taking them home and tinkering with them, restoring them.

Perhaps the reason has to do with your approach. You're not going to have a chance to get hooked on the C=64 if your interest is in tinkering and restoring. That's barely enough time to load up a piece of software and refamiliarize yourself with it, never mind experience it in a new way. In contrast to your cars, it sounds like you spent enough time with them that you were experiencing them in a new way.

My apologies if that sounds a bit harsh. In some ways I am similar. Even though I am fascinated by old technology, I never could get into old computers the way most people seem to get into them (e.g. by playing games from their childhood).

[classichasclass]

Yeah, my interest in vintage systems - the C64 particularly, but even old Macs, old minis, etc. - isn't games either (though candidly it wasn't my interest really back in the day as well). It's the challenge of making it do things that are interesting by modern standards. It's Turing-complete, so anything should be possible ... ;)

[aaronbaugher]

A while back I started writing an assembly language sha256 algorithm for the C128. It's basically a lot of adds and bitwise operations on 32-bit values, which gets really tedious when you have to do them 8 bits at a time, carrying/shifting through a set of 4 bytes. I should finish it to find out how many hours it takes to process a decent-sized file.