Retrocomputing Beginner's Guide
This is Datashed Retrocomputing's guide for the aspiring retrocomputing collector. The goal is to give a few basic hints to keep frustration to a minimum, and help the aspiring collector find a positive direction in this highly-rewarding hobby.
General Hints
Pick a Platform, and Focus
Choose a platform or theme for your collection, and stick to it for awhile. You can always branch out later, but the aspiring collector will benefit from learning one type of system well, getting to know its quirks and all the ways to work around them. This will avoid frustrating and costly mistakes. It's easier, for instance, to learn Sun SPARC hardware on its own, than to be learning Sun, Commodore, DEC, and Apple gear all at once. I've seen beginners amass large and varied collections early on, only to give up in frustration and sell everything, or worse, scrap everything.
Here are a few platforms with some pros and cons for beginning collectors. I will give a "BFS" or "Beginner Friendliness Score" from 1 to 5, with higher numbers being more friendly:
Older x86 PCs/IBM Compatibles
This one is pretty much a no-brainer, and probably the easiest to start with. These machines are the ancestors of the Windows and Mac computers that are still on the market today. Popularity of the platform helps here, as so many have been made over the years that the supply of usable and fun machines is quite plentiful. Even if this category is not your primary focus, it is a good idea to have at least one or two 80486 or early Pentium-class machines with 3.5" and 5.25" floppy drives around, as they make great "gateway machines" to get software and data you download on your modern desktop or laptop onto your vintage machines--most vintage microcomputers (but not all) will have some means of reading IBM-compatible floppy disks.
There are several eras to cover here:
8088/PC and PC XT Era
This covers the first machine that introduced the x86 platform, the IBM PC, model 5150, and its immediate successor the IBM PC XT, model 5160. These machines generally include MDA video boards with no graphics capability, or CGA video boards with limited graphics capability (320x200/4 color, or 640x200 monochrome).
These machines inspired a number of clones, of various faithfulness to full IBM compatibility.
The IBM PC 5150 and PC XT 5160 are relatively challenging and expensive to find in good working order, will require some level of specialized components to upgrade to a usable state, and are quite slow. They also typically used 360KB double sided/double density 5.25-inch floppy drives. Without a network card (itself sometimes tough to find, for at least the 8-bit ISA expansion slots of the 5150) or a suitable "gateway machine" from the 386, 486, or early Pentium era equipped with a compatible floppy drive, these systems can be challenging to get programs and data onto. An XT-IDE adapter is a must, as the MFM/RLL hard drives of the day have mostly failed nowadays, and the ones that haven't are ticking time bombs. You should also expect to replace the tantalum capacitors on the system planar (IBM terminology for "motherboard"), as they have a tendency to violently explode. For the 5150, a power supply upgrade may be needed to support hard drives, as the original 62.5W power supply is a bit underpowered for such tasks.
These machines can support up to 640KB of RAM, although RAM above 256KB must generally reside on an expansion card. Given the limit of five slots on the 5150, this can be a problem.
I have limited experience with clones from this era, though the Tandy 1000 series is often considered an excellent alternative to IBM's entries into this category.
I would not recommend an IBM 8088 as a first retro system, but they can be a lot of fun for intermediate collectors, and a Tandy 1000 of any stripe would be a good beginner's machine with which to play games from the era. As an added benefit, some models of Tandy 1000 could be fitted with a 3.5" floppy drive, making data transfer from modern systems somewhat easier, although in the case of 720KB DSDD 3.5" floppies, modern USB floppy drives cannot generally write to them. You'll still need a "gateway machine" with a genuine, on-board floppy drive.
BFS: 2 for IBM, 3 for Tandy 1000
80286/AT Era
This covers the IBM PC AT (model 5170) and clones. They generally have CGA or EGA graphics and a hard disk drive; usually MFM/RLL or ESDI.
These machines expanded the memory addressing capability of the x86 platform from 20 bits to 24 bits, expanding addressable memory from 1MB to 16MB, and added multitasking and memory protection.
These systems are expensive enough and rare enough that I would personally recommend saving them for after you've picked up a 386, 486, or early Pentium machine. They also suffer from common hard drive failures, and can be difficult to get software onto, due to the 5.25" hard drives that were still ubiquitous. A gateway machine is advised.
There is also difficulty in these systems due to the fact that BIOS setup requires a boot floppy to access.
BFS: 2 for IBM
IBM PS/2 Range
The IBM PS/2 succeeded the PC, PC XT, and PC AT systems. With some exceptions, these systems include Micro Channel Architecture (MCA) expansion slots, VGA graphics, 1.44MB high-density or 2.88MB extended-density 3.5" floppy drives. The most useful of these machines (and the bulk of the range overall) are in the 386, 486, and early Pentium class.
In this range, we're getting into components (like the VGA graphics standard, PS/2 keyboard and mouse connectors) that make interoperability with modern systems easier. However, many of these machines used ESDI hard drives which are extremely rare, expensive, and unreliable. SCSI-based machines are friendlier, with the addition of a SCSI2SD adapter for reliable fixed storage, but the Micro Channel expansion slots mean that upgrades can be expensive and difficult to find, especially when it comes to sound cards. Also, the PS/2 floppy drives tend to fail, and are somewhat non-standard and difficult to source, though workarounds of varying degrees of elegance do exist. You will need a floppy diskette containing Adapter Definition Files for each card installed in your machine, and diagnostics/setup diskettes as well.
If you can get over the obstacles inherent in these machines, they can be incredibly rewarding to collect and use, especially in concert with the IBM OS/2 operating system they were designed to run.
Again, I'd put this off--but not for too long, as the supply of PS/2 systems has dwindled sharply, while prices have steadily increased.
BFS: 3
80386 Era
In this era, you're looking at machines that can run a wide variety of operating systems, and the platform itself was beginning to coalesce around a few standards, at least among clone vendors. MFM/RLL hard drives were still common, though SCSI and IDE both began to get a foothold in this era. A good 386 clone can be a decent starter and gateway machine, though they can be a bit hard to source for a decent price in modern times. Look for a machine with SCSI or IDE support, and a firmware-based BIOS setup utility. CompactFlash-IDE adapters and SCSI2SD solutions really begin to shine in this era of machine, although in the case of on-board IDE, support for CompactFlash-IDE media can be spotty, and BIOS may or may not detect your storage devices, especially at larger sizes. Look for 2GB or smaller media. SCSI will have higher chances of working with more and larger mass storage devices.
These machines do an acceptable job running MS-DOS and Windows 3.1. Windows 95 runs, but 8MB of RAM should be considered a minimum, and even then it will not be very performant.
BFS: 3.5
80486 Era
This era of machines
Find a Community
A collector is only as good as the communities in which they participate! Following are some suggestions. If you are an intolerant person--especially if you are chauvinistic, transphobic, homophobic, or have a problem with furry culture or anime--work on yourself before getting into this hobby. Such bigotry is not welcome in any of these communities.
CCTalk/CCTech/Usenet
Avoid posting to Usenet newsgroups and the CCTalk/CCTech mailing lists as a beginner. Do subscribe to CCTalk and CCTech early on, as they are bountiful treasure-troves of knowledge. However, some of these gurus tend to be as vintage and cranky as the computer systems we all love, and many of them have little patience for beginner-level questions. Being mocked and told to RTFM can be quite discouraging for newcomers to the hobby. Better to lurk here until you have built a certain level of knowledge and confidence, and can hang with the graybeards.
Every retrocomputing community has its share of cranky gurus and gatekeeping behavior, but these mailing lists and Usenet have a particularly high concentration. This is nothing against them--the beginner will eventually understand the reasons for it. One positive side effect of this gatekeeping is that the signal-to-noise ratio is quite excellent.
Read this right away, but save the posting for later.
Facebook can be a good resource. Check out these groups to start out:
The difficulty with Facebook groups is that they tend to have a rather high signal-to-noise ratio, with a lot of silly flame wars (my platform is better than yours!) and low-knowledge trolls. But, with patience, and the right group moderators (such as those found in the aforementioned groups), they can be a goldmine.
In my opinion, Twitter has the friendliest and most helpful group of retrocomputing enthusiasts on the Internet. Search for hashtags that are relevant to your particular retrocomputing interests, and be picky. Get your Twitter feed to only show you the good stuff.
Typical retrocomputing subreddits (such as r/retrobattlestations) seem to have a signal-to-noise ratio that's somewhat better than Facebook, but somewhat worse than CCTalk/CCTech. As long as you comply with established rules in the subreddits you follow, and don't bother with those having capricious and overzealous moderators, a great deal of useful content can be found here.
Discord
Among modern chat platforms, Discord probably has the most retrocomputing resources, as well as the friendliest people. It tends to lean a bit gamer-centric, so if this is not your interest, it might be better to stick to IRC for chat, or just stick to less realtime-oriented platforms (forums, social media, etc.)
Finding a server can be challenging, but if you're on Reddit, many of its retrocomputing-centric subreddits have official Discord servers that dovetail well into their respective communities.
IRC
Freenode has a fair number of good channels for retrocomputing, but IRC overall suffers from a high level of gatekeeping and newcomer-unfriendly behavior. Freenode is somewhat better on this; EFnet is absolutely terrible in this regard. I have not dealt with UnderNet, DALnet, etc., so I cannot speak to their friendliness and/or usefulness to aspiring collectors.