Darko Mesaros used to park a car in the garage of his Maple Valley, Wash., home. These days, it’s wall-to-wall computers.
A towering server rack glows with red LEDs. CRT monitors are stacked beside vintage workstations, and a workbench overflows with tools, cables, and half-repaired components.
“I started getting stuff, and then … it just kind of snowballed to a point I actually had to slow down because I legitimately don’t have space for it anymore,” Mesaros told GeekWire during a recent tour of his retro hardware labyrinth.
The lore of tech innovation is full of suburban garages where visionary founders tinkered their way to world-changing companies. Mesaros, a distinguished developer advocate at Amazon Web Services, isn’t launching a startup out of his. Instead, he’s using it as a living museum to rescue, repair, and resurrect the discarded digital ghosts of computing history — and then daring them to run modern artificial intelligence.
The collection has spilled into an upstairs office and now spans more than 100 full computers, from an early-1970s minicomputer to Silicon Graphics workstations from the ’90s and HP workstations from the 2000s. Add roughly 25 vintage video game consoles, rescued software, peripherals, a leather-bound TRS-80 owner’s manual, and nearly a decade of 1980s Byte magazines, and the total tops 1,000 items.
Most of it arrives broken, and that’s the point.
“Buying a mint old system is not fun,” he said. “Buying something that’s broken and then having that excitement of fixing it is just fantastic.”
He finds gear at Goodwill, through local Facebook Marketplace groups, and through Seattle’s large retro computing community. Sometimes it takes a rescue mission: when a man in Washington, D.C., was about to throw away a pallet of 1980s computers, Mesaros had a friend there grab it, then paid to ship the whole load to Seattle.
At one point, he had seven Commodore 64s. He gives extras to other collectors, and he’s never sold a single piece.
“That’s been my little pride,” he said.
From a Commodore 64 in Serbia to the AWS cloud
Mesaros’ fascination with vintage hardware goes beyond nostalgia; it’s the foundation of a lifelong obsession with how things work under the hood.
Growing up in Serbia, he faced an economic reality where cutting-edge tech was out of reach. From 1991 to 2003, his only computer was a Commodore 64 — a machine released in 1982. While the rest of the computing world sped through the 1990s and early 2000s, Mesaros skipped straight to modern PCs.
“I feel like I missed that whole thing,” he said. “I missed the whole, you know, Sun workstation, Silicon Graphics, HP 9000, all of those things … and I just wanted to explore how that was.”
So he bought a couple of Sun workstations to see what he’d missed. Then he kept going.
“It’s a hobby, but it’s also a problem,” he said with a laugh.
If the garage caught fire, the one machine he’d grab? A bright blue Silicon Graphics Indy, the 1990s workstation from the very era he missed growing up. It was the first SGI he bought.
“It showed me how this amazing workstation worked!” he said. He still fires it up from time to time just to enjoy its IRIX operating system.
Still on his wish list: a DEC VT520 terminal with an amber screen. Working units only seem to turn up on the East Coast, and he won’t risk shipping a fragile CRT across the country.
Before joining Amazon nearly a decade ago, he held system administration and engineering roles at companies including AT&T and Tipico. Now at AWS, his day job involves leveraging his experience to help developers and customers adopt and use AWS services via blogs, webinars, code, and technical advocacy. The garage doubles as his set: he records AWS videos and live streams there.
Mesaros moved to the Seattle area around the start of the pandemic, arriving with a couple of workstations, a monitor, and a handful of laptops before his collection expanded. He soon realized gear was far cheaper here than in Europe.
“Most of these things are older than me. Especially older than my tech career,” the 38-year-old noted. “Actually, all of these things are older than my career. However, again, I find it fascinating how computer history has evolved.”
His arrival timing meant he narrowly missed the chance to visit Seattle’s beloved Living Computers: Museum + Labs before it permanently closed its doors. But in his own home, he’s essentially built a private version of the late Microsoft co-founder Paul Allen’s former institution.
Beyond the vintage hardware, Mesaros’ appreciation for computing history is permanently etched onto his body.
He sports a collection of retro tech tattoos on his arms, including symmetrical DOS and Linux terminal prompts (C:\WINDOWS> and root@localhost), a classic Windows 95 logo, MS-DOS branding, a shebang and a quit command that mark the start and end of a script, and detailed microprocessors like the Zilog Z80 and MOS 6502 paired with assembly code — a setup he jokingly calls his literal “ARM CPUs.” He’s still waiting, he said, on his check from Microsoft.
“I only tattoo ancient technology on myself,” Mesaros said, noting that people frequently stop him at airports to take pictures. “Old technology will stay with me … I feel like this is an investment in my career.”
He has plans for more ink during his next trip home to Serbia.
Wiring vintage hardware to modern AI
For Mesaros, collecting vintage computers is about more than admiring silent plastic shells on a shelf; it’s about making them talk across the digital chasm. In his garage and upstairs office, he routinely bends ancient hardware to modern purposes — proving that an 8-bit machine or a mechanical teletype can still interface with the cutting-edge cloud.
Mesaros has chatted with an AI coding agent from a Commodore 64 and deployed Kubernetes via a 1986 Tandy 102 portable computer. He wired a 1984 DEC DECwriter IV teletype to Amazon’s Kiro coding agent, explaining in a blog post how he talks to Kiro through the clacking machine — and he’s even deployed AWS infrastructure from it.
“Should this be done? Probably not,” he said. “But is it fun? Absolutely.”
In a demo for GeekWire, we watched the teletype clatter out the agent’s answer to his query, “What is GeekWire?” After a few seconds of hammering, it printed: “Seattle-based tech news site covering Pacific Northwest startups, Amazon, Microsoft and the broader tech industry.”
Not bad for a machine older than its operator.
Mesaros also spent a weekend trying to get stuck in 1999, using a Windows 98 machine as his only computer and documenting it on a VHS camcorder.
“The only window into the future was Kiro,” he said.
While these stunts might sound like elaborate practical jokes, Mesaros believes they serve a vital purpose in the age of AI. In a modern development landscape where tools let programmers “build a to-do app and walk away,” he argues that developers are losing the art of paying attention.
He likes to point out that a 2017 Google paper titled “Attention Is All You Need” helped kick off today’s LLM boom. “Now in 2026, to be a really successful developer,” he said, “attention is all you need.”
“I think being curious and paying attention are the two most important skills for a developer these days because it is so easy not to do those things,” Mesaros said. “And if you want to be relevant, if you want to be good at your job, especially with AI, I think those are the two important things that are critical.”
When he isn’t troubleshooting an obscure serial card data-ready pin or attempting to hook up a military field phone from his native Serbia to an LLM, he balances his digital obsession with analog pursuits. He wrenches on an old Jeep TJ — parked in the driveway because there’s no room in the garage.
He’s not the only tinkerer in the house. His wife is a fashion designer who 3D prints clothing and purses on a farm of printers in one of the upstairs rooms.
“She’s more creative than I am,” he said. “I get to tinker with old things that don’t want to work, and she uses technology to actually make new things.”
When it comes to the tech he lets into his own life, Mesaros is choosy. He wears a classic analog Timex and bought Meta’s smart glasses when they came out — then sold them within a month. “I don’t like the camera on my face,” he said. (He does use a camera-free pair that can display real-time translated subtitles when he travels abroad.)
That same instinct is why he doesn’t see screens going away, even as AI agents take on more work. “We still have the need for control,” he said. “Being able to observe and see, visualize what’s happening is still important.”
Old tech offers something else modern tech rarely does: a slower pace. Computer manuals once took months to produce because they’d stay accurate for years. “Today, if you create a manual that’s printed, it’s going to be valid for a week,” he said.
That’s what makes his garage an antidote to the endless scroll, a place anchored to the glowing screens and clacking keys of computing’s past. The hobby is his “computer away from a computer.”
“I spend my days in the email factory … and then in the afternoon, I just come here and tinker with something ancient that shouldn’t work anymore,” Mesaros said.
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