modern stuff

It's all in what you want to do. If your interest is mostly the software, as it is for many of us, then running emulators makes a lot of sense. If your interest is the machine architecture, you might want to reverse engineer the design and implement it in an FPGA. Depending on how deep you want to go, that might be a functional model or a gate level model. A functional model may not tell you a whole lot more than a software emulator does; a gate level model is often hard to pull off but if you can do it, it will tell you everything you want to know about the original design including all its undocumented strange properties. And if you enjoy working on old electronics, there's no substitute for the original iron. That's not an option if none exists any longer, or so few that people don't dare powering them on. For example, it would be neat to run an EL-X8, but that's not going to happen, there's only one left. At least it is preserved in a real museum. As for myself, I've done all of the above: work on SIMH and DtCyber, work on a gate level model of the CDC 6600, and (occasionally) run my old Pro-380. paul