The Retro-Computing Wave

It was the the first flash of the Information Age. And we were there.

We were the first kids to run up to the Tandy terminals on display at the mall and type in a little BASIC screen hack and run away laughing with security guards chasing us. We were the first kids on our block with a Commodore, or an Atari, or a Sinclair ZX. We were the first to spend our change in the coin-op arcade, playing Space Invaders and Asteroids. We learned Assembly and amazed ourselves when our little DOS programs worked. We put together demos and ANSI text art, we dialed up BBSs and stayed up to chat with a friend in America at 2AM. We traded floppy disks.

Nobody knew what to make of us, especially not our parents. Nobody in the history of the human race had ever done what we were doing. We made the culture, a piece at a time, and the culture of the computer hobbyist grew up around us. When other generations of teens had taken up an interest in cars or record players, we stayed up late playing with Pascal programs. When we would have been adjusting to the world, training ourselves in the jobs of our fathers, instead we were inventing new jobs. We forged new companies and went to work there, being experts in something that no-one had ever been experts in before.

The machines that we did this on... who knew that they would become treasured artifacts? Z80 machines, once common as rocks, and now we'd stop in our tracks if we saw one running today. Because we were the pioneers of the Digital Age, we have now discovered that we are destined to become the first generation to get nostalgic for our original machines.

The affection that middle-aged technology enthusiasts have for vintage hardware is a powerful force, one with vast untapped potential yet. just plug in an Amiga, run the red-and-white checkered ball graphics demo, and watch some techie come along, stop, go wobbly in the knees, and gasp, "Is that an Amiga? It's really running?"

Retro gaming is getting a similar second wind. This is the age of emulators, with XMame running old arcade classics, ZSNES running Nintendo games, and DOSBox and Wine supporting legacy DOS and Windows games, respectively. Ironically enough, the only way to play Chip's Challenge on a modern Windows machine, is to install DOSBox, install Windows 3.1 from floppies on that, and then install the game on all of that.

Or, of course, you could get the original. Yes, limited caches exist in the world of the original hardware, and hobbyists who are suddenly waking up to realize that they want those pieces of their childhood back are searching for Atari Portfolios, Commodore Amigas, Hewlett-Packard HP 200LX Pocket PCs, and IBM Poqet PC-Plus', among many others. When you've been a techie for 20, 30, and 40 years, and you get your hands on something you haven't played with since childhood, it unlocks dusty parts of your brain you'd forgotten about. Suddenly, all the commands and programming lines come flooding back. You code on it just like you'd never left it.

Good luck trying to explain this to your contemporaries. They'll look over your shoulder and ask, "What on Earth is that?" and you'll proudly exclaim "I'm coding QBasic!" or "This is 'Beneath a Steel Sky' on the Amiga CD32!" or "It's Lotus 1-2-3!" They'll look at the screen and say, "It looks old." and you'll shrug - well, of course it's old! That's the point. Then they'll ask you why you're running it.

Why? Because you're never as smart in your second language as you were in your first. Because you remember best how to drive your first car. Because the kiss of your first sweetheart is still the sweetest. Because you still have the map of your home town in your head. It may not be as glitzy and shiny as today's hardware, but on the other hand it was a lot more user-friendly. Vintage hardware and retro computers come from a time when everybody coded their own apps and hobby games and drew their own art, and nobody was professional and nobody was a "nerd". It was just the way people used to use computers, before the marketers came and put us all in straight-jackets.

Filed Under: The Retro Stylez, Toyz