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This is magnificent reverse engineering. I wonder why retrocomputing is so fascinating? Is it an attempt (by older people) to rediscover their youth, or is it a

This is magnificent reverse engineering. I wonder why retrocomputing is so fascinating? Is it an attempt (by older people) to rediscover their youth, or is it a search for a golden age of computing where people still had some autonomy over their hardware? Or something else?

blame-troi 2y ago
I suspect it's the same appeal as woodworking or hor rodding or living history reenactment.
- MSFT_Edging 2y ago
  Humans also love their tools. While tools get more advanced, they sometimes lose some charm or benefits of older tools. For me, an interest in retro tech is seeing how people did things in the past and realizing we lost some "nice" experiences along the way. Also, in a world where everything becomes obsolete at record speeds, something so obsolete feels stuck in time.
  - wkat4242 2y ago
    > Humans also love their tools. While tools get more advanced, they sometimes lose some charm or benefits of older tools. This is true. In summer when I sit in the dark with the windows open (hot country and no AC and I don't want to attract bugs), my 4K computer monitor is totally incapable of dimming to a level that doesn't blind me. Even with white on black/dark mode and brightness set to 0. In fact, even during the day I work with brightness 0 on that thing, it seems all monitors are optimised for max brightness these days. Meanwhile, my old VT520 terminal has an analog brightness dial which I can turn so low that I can barely make out the letters in a pitch-black room <3
twoodfin 2y ago
Personally, I’m interested in getting to learn about and play with toys that had insurmountable (to me) barriers of cost, access, or obscurity when they were contemporary. The purest “retro” experience I’ve had wasn’t retro at all: Stepping into an MIT Athena lab a quarter century ago to see an SGI Indy ready for my login. In a way, it’s like finding out what winning the lottery would have meant for a curious tech nerd.
- icedchai 2y ago
  Yes. I bought an SGI O2 and a NextStation off of ebay for those reasons. I could've never afforded this stuff when it was new.
  - wkat4242 2y ago
    Ooh the O2 was a beautiful system. In fact all their systems looked amazing. Where all the others made all this super-boring businessy stuff. Well, except Sun, they had style but not too explicit, they were kinda in the middle. But HP and IBM made boring old boxes :P I did love HP-UX though.
    - icedchai 2y ago
      I always preferred Sun hardware, myself. In the early to mid 90's, SunOS was basically the gold standard for Unix systems and building open source software. Early Solaris releases were pretty rough, but by Solaris 2.5 it was pretty good...
- wkat4242 2y ago
  Yeah I'd love to play around with a real IBM Mainframe. However even in these days they are expensive, plus I don't have the space or power requirements for one of those :) There's are reason they were called "big iron".
EvanAnderson 2y ago
I love machines where the complexity is such that a single person can have an almost complete understanding of the entirety of the machine. You can get that from old machines.
glhaynes 2y ago
There's also an enjoyment in revisiting the old stuff while standing on its shoulders. For example, there are modern games made by hobbyists for old systems that completely outclass literally anything that was available contemporaneously. Today anyone with a computer has access to development hardware, software, documentation, and community resources that are all just lightyears beyond what was available then at any price. Changing a few lines of code and instantly hopping into a cycle-accurate emulator to test takes milliseconds versus writing out floppies or EEPROMs. Arcane tricks that only a privileged few knew (if that) are now common knowledge. That stuff leads to whole other strata of capabilities being accessible.

blame-troi 2y ago

I suspect it's the same appeal as woodworking or hor rodding or living history reenactment.

MSFT_Edging 2y ago
Humans also love their tools. While tools get more advanced, they sometimes lose some charm or benefits of older tools. For me, an interest in retro tech is seeing how people did things in the past and realizing we lost some "nice" experiences along the way. Also, in a world where everything becomes obsolete at record speeds, something so obsolete feels stuck in time.
- wkat4242 2y ago
  > Humans also love their tools. While tools get more advanced, they sometimes lose some charm or benefits of older tools. This is true. In summer when I sit in the dark with the windows open (hot country and no AC and I don't want to attract bugs), my 4K computer monitor is totally incapable of dimming to a level that doesn't blind me. Even with white on black/dark mode and brightness set to 0. In fact, even during the day I work with brightness 0 on that thing, it seems all monitors are optimised for max brightness these days. Meanwhile, my old VT520 terminal has an analog brightness dial which I can turn so low that I can barely make out the letters in a pitch-black room <3

twoodfin 2y ago

Personally, I’m interested in getting to learn about and play with toys that had insurmountable (to me) barriers of cost, access, or obscurity when they were contemporary. The purest “retro” experience I’ve had wasn’t retro at all: Stepping into an MIT Athena lab a quarter century ago to see an SGI Indy ready for my login. In a way, it’s like finding out what winning the lottery would have meant for a curious tech nerd.

icedchai 2y ago
Yes. I bought an SGI O2 and a NextStation off of ebay for those reasons. I could've never afforded this stuff when it was new.
- wkat4242 2y ago
  Ooh the O2 was a beautiful system. In fact all their systems looked amazing. Where all the others made all this super-boring businessy stuff. Well, except Sun, they had style but not too explicit, they were kinda in the middle. But HP and IBM made boring old boxes :P I did love HP-UX though.
  - icedchai 2y ago
    I always preferred Sun hardware, myself. In the early to mid 90's, SunOS was basically the gold standard for Unix systems and building open source software. Early Solaris releases were pretty rough, but by Solaris 2.5 it was pretty good...
wkat4242 2y ago
Yeah I'd love to play around with a real IBM Mainframe. However even in these days they are expensive, plus I don't have the space or power requirements for one of those :) There's are reason they were called "big iron".

EvanAnderson 2y ago

I love machines where the complexity is such that a single person can have an almost complete understanding of the entirety of the machine. You can get that from old machines.

glhaynes 2y ago

There's also an enjoyment in revisiting the old stuff while standing on its shoulders. For example, there are modern games made by hobbyists for old systems that completely outclass literally anything that was available contemporaneously. Today anyone with a computer has access to development hardware, software, documentation, and community resources that are all just lightyears beyond what was available then at any price. Changing a few lines of code and instantly hopping into a cycle-accurate emulator to test takes milliseconds versus writing out floppies or EEPROMs. Arcane tricks that only a privileged few knew (if that) are now common knowledge. That stuff leads to whole other strata of capabilities being accessible.