Herb Johnson has a useful definition of “retrotechnology”: repair, restoration, and reuse of old technology, especially the digital computers of the 1970s and 1980s.
That definition immediately separates the site from a gallery of old beige boxes.
Johnson is interested in keeping the knowledge around the hardware alive: how systems worked, how they are repaired, what documentation survives, who built them, and what older methods can still teach people working with newer machines.
The site says its most substantial computing collection and core interest is S-100 personal-computing equipment from the 1970s and 1980s. There is also extensive material on Digital Research and Gary Kildall, whose work on CP/M sits underneath a large chunk of personal-computer history.
Preservation with a soldering iron
In 2009, Johnson began a series specifically about restoring, repairing, and preserving vintage computers. The pages document his work, other people’s work, and collaborative projects.
That practical emphasis matters.
It is one thing to record that a machine existed. It is another to preserve enough technical context for somebody to diagnose one when a forty-year-old board stops behaving.
The site also openly mixes preservation with commerce. Johnson sells hardware, parts, and services to keep the operation going. There is no need to pretend that historical work exists in a magical world without storage costs, parts costs, shipping, or time.
The homepage was revised in May 2026. That is another good sign of a genuinely living old-Web resource: the presentation may belong to an earlier Internet, but somebody is still maintaining the information.
For a webmaster, Retrotechnology is a useful reminder that depth beats polish when a site owns a narrow subject. A person searching for an S-100 board, CP/M history, an old Macintosh part, or restoration notes does not need a cinematic landing page. They need the person who kept the weird manual.
CacheRat’s Ancient Web research list contains 1,967 domains with this kind of material: specialist knowledge, hobby work, personal collections, and parts of Internet history that rarely fit neatly into modern platforms.
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Retrotechnology is not merely about old computers. It is about retaining enough knowledge that “old” does not automatically become “dead.”