My boss still has two old Windows 98 machines in our office. Both presently do nothing more than take up space in the room that doubles as my office, but both were in various forms of use until a couple of years ago even after upgrading our main computer twice during that time. If my best-case scenario plays out and i can assume the practice when the boss stops working, I'd like to use one of the hard drives to archive old/digital content. I haven't decided what to do with the other drive, but neither go to waste if I have any input into their fate.
As for the oldest, most niche computer I ever used, it would have to be an old Tandy Color Computer 3. Very simple and rudimentary, even by standards at the time, but it got its use between me using it for high school assignments, sports tracking, and tinkering with its implementation of BASIC and my dad using it to revise the family genealogy. I still remember him typing away when -- in mid word -- a message popped up stating we lacked the memory to add any more characters to the document. With today's machines, it's difficult to envision running out of memory unless one purposely tries to do so.
My next door neighbor had a C(ommodore)-64 with a tape drive. I still recall two particular games; one was tanks vs. planes trying to shoot each other. The graphics were such that the tank's turret would often "separate" from the lower half during game play. The other game was identified on the tape as "Hawaii #3" and titled "Killer Comet." The idea was to shoot down a large, square-shaped, comet before it landed on Earth. Think Space invaders but without the invaders and saucers. I remember my neighbor's older brother reducing the comet down to two separate sections and saying "It looks like a brick chasing a dog!"
When my family had issues with our CoCo 3 saving to disk, we started to save stuff on cassette tape on a temporary basis. One of the programs we used at the time played the noise of the process through the speakers. That was equal parts intriguing and annoying to young ears. Like
@Ginger Piglet , load/save errors were annoying because there never seemed to be any easy workaround for them apart from scrambling to find a different cassette to use in hopes that using a different one solved the problem.
I've seen a professional's sample program written in MASM and its source listing. The code on its surface read like a bastardized hybrid of old-school System 360 assembler, Visual BASIC/C++, and the Windows API. As much as I liked and appreciated seeing a decent app run with a small EXE footprint, I cant see why I'd want to do anything more than "Hello World" style programs in any flavor of assembly language unless I needed to write something that dug deep into the machine level.
github.com
www.forum64.de
