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Due to work I have to sometimes go fishing in development sites/garage sales/etc related to PC hardware from a couple decades ago (think DOS/win16 era). My expe

Due to work I have to sometimes go fishing in development sites/garage sales/etc related to PC hardware from a couple decades ago (think DOS/win16 era). My experience is that I almost never see anyone who actually experienced those things: almost all these "retro" revivals are caused by young people being hyped by devices they _never_ experienced. So there's zero nostalgia. I don't know what thrill they get from it but I suppose it's "fake" nostalgia in the sense that they want to go back to a past that they have only heard about it (and thus idealized) in writing or in TV series. IMHO the people who actually experienced those devices for a long-time know to avoid them like the plague they are.

xanderlewis 3y ago
I’ve felt for a long time that everyone is probably interested in the period of their birth, and particularly the years just before. There’s something uniquely weird feeling about that time — you were technically alive for some of it, and yet it’s totally alien to you. That’s why I think, for example, twenty year-olds today are interested in early 2000s fashion and computers.
Moldoteck 3y ago
for me for example it's the tactile feedback. Smartphones are boring in tactile sense. On the other hand, taking a photo with a manual film camera is completely different: you must load/unload the film, be careful to not rotate the film too much when getting it back into container, manually adjusting focus, advancing the film and hearing all of this or even manually developing the film for bigger nerds. With walkmans it's probably the same but with cassetes - loading/unloading, connecting headset, all the mechanical sounds, different buttons, wheel volume controls, weird designs and colors. We just don't get this kind of tactile&sound feedback with modern laptops&smartphones and their colors are usually boring too, esp in recent years

xanderlewis 3y ago

I’ve felt for a long time that everyone is probably interested in the period of their birth, and particularly the years just before. There’s something uniquely weird feeling about that time — you were technically alive for some of it, and yet it’s totally alien to you. That’s why I think, for example, twenty year-olds today are interested in early 2000s fashion and computers.

Moldoteck 3y ago

for me for example it's the tactile feedback. Smartphones are boring in tactile sense. On the other hand, taking a photo with a manual film camera is completely different: you must load/unload the film, be careful to not rotate the film too much when getting it back into container, manually adjusting focus, advancing the film and hearing all of this or even manually developing the film for bigger nerds. With walkmans it's probably the same but with cassetes - loading/unloading, connecting headset, all the mechanical sounds, different buttons, wheel volume controls, weird designs and colors. We just don't get this kind of tactile&sound feedback with modern laptops&smartphones and their colors are usually boring too, esp in recent years