the good old days of mainframe computers

[Dave Britten]

I always find mainframes interesting, both in and of themselves, and also as adjacent to the era of early programmable calculators (the first "personal computers") democratizing computing and allowing a scientist, engineer, financier, etc. to produce, test, and refine results from an HP 25 or SR-52 or what have you in just a matter of hours, rather than sending a card stack to the computing center and hoping to get usable output the following day.

I don't have the space - and my wife doesn't have the patience - to ever acquire old mainframe hardware for our basement, but perhaps someday I'll pick up something in the minicomputer category. An old PDP or AS/400 would be neat to have and tinker with.