I think about this question a lot. It varies some from time to time and project to project, but I think I tend to fall into two brackets of preference:
Everything as it would have been Back in the Day
I think this is more or less what you’ve described as your aesthetic, which you’ve termed Immersive Retrocomputing. In this “mode,” I use physical disks and vintage calculators and printed materials only. I usually try to use a configuration that is more or less realistic for the time, as well – A C128 with the full complement of three external drives including a 1581 or two is just not something that Period Ethan would have had access to, so the internal 1571 and maybe a single external 1541 or 1571 is what I get.
I typically use a configuration like this mostly to run period software and do period things, although in some cases I have used it for deeper exploration and development. For example, I have spent quite a few hours on an Osborne 1 with DD drives but the original 52-column display writing 8080 assembler in CP/M asm with ed.com. In this case, the platform meets a kind of minimum usefulness to embark on more significant activities.
I enjoy and value this because I think it is a necessary step for really understanding computation as a tool or a way of operation, from a different era. The 8-bit home computers of the 1980s were absolutely a lived experience for me, but it turns out that the intervening decades of quickly-expanding computational capability have left me not really remembering how it really was to compute in those days. Floppy drives are slower than I remembered, operating systems are more clever than I knew at the time, display constraints are more important than I had the context to understand, etc.
A particular place that I have found going all the way to really open my eyes is in the area of slow printing terminals. This is a world that just predates my computing experience, so I was aware of it from early on, but had never lived it until recent decades. Many things that I just really Didn’t Understand ("how can you write an entire operating system in ed (1)?) started to become clearer, sitting in front of a PDP-11 with a DECWriter. (“Oh! ed had infinite scrollback with zero-overhead seek and indexing!”) Had I not taken the time to say “no, emulation isn’t what I want, and convenience isn’t what I’m looking for right now,” I don’t think this insight (and others) would have come to me.
Just enough concessions to smooth the way
The second approach I frequently take is to knock of just enough of the rough corners of the period to facilitate my chosen activities. This is a concession to both my own impatience and the reality that I just don’t have as much time for this hobby as I wish I did. In this frame of reference, I might (for example) replace the single 160 kB floppy disk drive with an emulated disk with several times that capacity, allow myself access to an extensive library of scanned or anachronistic documentation, and use a modern laptop to transfer files back and forth from the machine of interest as convenient.
My goal here is to preserve as much of the experience that I would have had in the era of interest, but allow much more rapid progress. As an example of this kind of activity, I have been doing some assembly language development on an Apple //e with a friend, recently; we’re both using original Apple //e computers in a fairly typical late-period configuration (80 column card, dual floppy disks, Super Serial card), but we have augmented them with large A2Pico-emulated ProDOS “hard disk” images. While the emulated disk is faster than the floppy disk, and that does matter, the big acceleration here is that I can have all of my disk utilities, Merlin Pro, my development files, and whatever other tools I “need” on-line at the same time.
Another possibility for this approach is simply an “original” machine, but in a hardware configuration that I could never have afforded or would not have practically used. For example, this might be an Amiga 500 with an external SCSI drive and a period-plausible FastRAM extension module, or an Apple IIgs with a Fast SCSI adapter, 4 MB of RAM on an Applied Engineering extender, and a Zip drive. Did such machines exist? Absolutely. Were they the normal user experience? Not at all, and I would not have had one, because when it was a desirable configuration I couldn’t have afforded it, and when it became attainable I had already moved on. In both cases, however, this has become a relatively convenient machine to use, eliminating floppy swapping and the associated slow access times, and opening the software capabilities to include (particularly in the case of the Amiga) a multitasking workflow with easy access to many tools.
Bridging the gap
Where possible, I like to use machines in their original configuration, and then start smoothing the process a little at a time until I get to a situation that is sustainable given my budget, time constraints, and intellectual itch. For example, the aforementioned Apple //e project started out purely on floppy disks, but getting started each day, and remembering to do all of the swaps and flops, ate a little bit of the fun out of it, so the A2Pico was introduced with a large, fast volume. From that point forward I didn’t feel a lot of friction, so I made no additional changes. In another case, I was using an Apple IIgs with two 3.5" disks and a Disk ][, then added SCSI and a Zip drive, and then later replaced the Zip with a BlueSCSI emulator and dropped back to a single 3.5 drive. The Zip was reasonably handy, but it left some pain points that the SCSI emulator pushed back just enough farther, and carting around those floppy drives just cluttered the workspace and made set-up more painful once transferring files was as easy as remounting an SD card.
I enjoy this philosophy in most things in life; if you want to pay a shop to change the oil in your car, that’s fine, but you should probably do it yourself once to learn what they’re doing and what it’s actually worth to you. If you want to hire a handyman to replace some drywall, that may be a reasonable choice, but try your hand at patching it the first time. I have followed this line of reasoning for many years, and while those around me don’t always understand (“You have a Ph.D., how does it make sense to replace that wheel bearing yourself?” – which is not only an elitist sentiment that I do not appreciate, but also misses the point), I think it leads to a level of personal satisfaction and steady growth of my abilities and knowledge that I value.
Emulation
I should also say that I do not shun or look down upon an emulator! I generally prefer hardware for the aesthetic, as you say, experience, but there are machines I either do not currently have access to or am unlikely to be able to find, tasks that are just a bridge from here to there that don’t capture my experiential interest in the same way, and times and places where hardware just isn’t practical. I’m unlikely to take a half-rack PDP-11 on vacation with me, but I sure can fire up SIMH and do some early Unix hacking. At the end of the day, though, I seldom take this path if I have a choice.
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I have come close, KICAD will let you tie VCC and GND together,
