4 ms·

Something that has been kind of funny for me, perhaps others are feeling this way: I see increasingly this "retro computing community" fawning over machines tha

Something that has been kind of funny for me, perhaps others are feeling this way: I see increasingly this "retro computing community" fawning over machines that I think of as ... just machines that I used once. Some of the machines were even kind of scorned at the time as I recall — now they're sought after, lovingly restored.... I don't know if my reaction is as one who is being made aware of just how old they are (61, BTW) or if it is a bit of a sweetness that I feel that younger generations are coveting these older machines instead of reflexively landfilling them.

nemo44x 1y ago
A lot of this stuff was beyond reach for people back in the day. A Neo-Geo game system is something a lot of people still want because it’s something they can finally acquire.
dylan604 1y ago
Does that same feeling of wow still exist for kids today? They have grown up with computers there entire life. Some of us were introduced to computers in our teens, so there was prior experience of not having a computer for that wow to hit. Even now, the wow factor has diminished for me with new computers/devices. They are not really doing anything new as much as they just do the things faster/quiter/cheaper/smaller. There are definite milestones for me that just made my socks roll up and down when they were first available on computers. Is there anything not done on a computer now?
- cosmic_cheese 1y ago
  > Some of us were introduced to computers in our teens, so there was prior experience of not having a computer for that wow to hit. The effect is similar for those of us whose exposure was earlier, but similarly devoid of computers prior. In my case it was a 1996 Mac tower w/internal 28k modem, at which point I was seven. It was not only the first computer of any sort in the house (no game consoles either) but also our first CD player. Up until then, the extent of tech for me was a late 80s Sharp VCR and an even older faux wood console Zenith TV hooked up to a roof antenna (no cable). Anything beyond that existed only in TV commercials and movies. It was such a huge shift that it’s difficult to articulate. It sparked a lifelong obsession.
- alnwlsn 1y ago
  In my case the computers I 'learned computers' on were old pre-xp 90's machines. Nobody cares if some kid wants to take apart a few old computers on their way to the trash. That feeling of 'getting something to work' on those old machines sort of never went away for me, which is why I like retrocomputing even though the internet, cell phones, youtube, social media was pretty much around most of my life.
bombcar 1y ago
The key is that you used them. The retro community is for people who lusted after those machines, but we’re stuck with something much more affordable and much less powerful. And now they’re well into middle age and they have money.
- deadbabe 1y ago
  I don’t think it’s that simple. Yes for some people who used these machines once, they might just think of them as old machines, the same way an ancient Roman still alive today might not think much of mundane Roman tech. But getting into retro-computing as a hobby is more like being a historian or archaeologist. There is endless lore to discover, and restoring old hardware is an art. Some of these people were never old enough or even existed to lust after these machines. Someday, all the people who used these machines will be dead, completely dead, and the machines will be all that remains. Blessed are those who keep them running in their memory.
- JKCalhoun 1y ago
  Myself, I have passion for the KIM-1. Perhaps, as you suggest, because I saw it in a TAB book in the early 70's when I was a teenager, unable at that time to swing the $400 or so to get it. But I think my current passion has more to do with the simplicity of it, and being forced (well, more or less) to learn 6502 assembly. (Oh, and Christ an original KIM-1 is a good deal more than $400 now, ha ha. But there are nice reproductions you can build yourself.) What a breath of fresh air the thing is — having so little between its hex keypad and its six character display.
- ehnto 1y ago
  The same thing happens with cars. There's a somewhat predictable spike in used car prices for what become cult classics. Cars that are otherwise pretty mundane, and have since been well surpassed. It's the people now with full time employment, who couldn't afford them when they were 16. Now they can, and the cars in good condition are more scarce.
- flomo 1y ago
  You're right about the money part, but it always seemed more like a 30-year-old pursuit than middle-aged. But once I went through Vogons and had the impression that many of them lacked any taste. A lot of PCs (and Macs) were total shite back then. If you want to dink around, you can now get the best old stuff.
steamrolled 1y ago
There's a ton of hobbies like that. There are people who collect out-of-print comic books, sports memorabilia, old militaria, etc. What's the point of any of it? It's the joy of having a hobby and being a part of a community, not the utility of the gear itself.
donatj 1y ago
I feel this way about the keyboard community and their love of old IBM keyboards. In the mid-to-late 90s I had probably fifteen of them laying around and couldn't give them away. No one wanted these heavy bulky noisy keyboards. Now people pay hundreds of dollars for the originals and there's even a company[1] devoted to making new ones. Don't get me wrong, I enjoy a Model M and still have a couple, but I would never pay these insane amounts for one. 1. https://www.pckeyboard.com/page/SFNT https://www.pckeyboard.com/page/SFNT
fidotron 1y ago
I am not quite that age but notice a similar phenomenon, and have indulged slightly in it myself. My gut feeling is the motivation relates to how computing evolved, particularly in the 80s and 90s. Essentially people used to feel that their inability to perform a given task was gated by their lack of access to a certain sort of machine, such as a UNIX workstation or LISP machine. Now we all have surplus computing power and cheap peripherals the sense is that we must be missing some essence that was lost since these machines, because that is the nicer explanation than that given access to tools far better than those in previous generations most of us have no idea what to do with them, or worse that we allow ourselves to be distracted entirely. The musical equipment world is just like this too.
dale_glass 1y ago
Yeah, it's kind of weird. I had a 386 with 4MB RAM and am not the least nostalgic about it. In fact damn near everything about that machine was limiting and something I couldn't wait to replace with something newer. I even didn't care for the beige color schemes of the day -- I remember going for the brushed aluminium case way back because I was excited it wasn't freaking beige. Watching some of the channels though I'd say a lot of the retro experience isn't quite what most people had. A lot of modern retrocomputing is putting together what would have qualified as a "dream machine" back in the day. Some are specced up to the absolute best one could get, some are unrealistic (1990 Monkey Island on a 2000s Pentium 3), some are jazzed up with scifi tech like floppy emulators.
- dfe 1y ago
  I, too, am not the least bit nostalgic about the 486, Pentium, Pentium Pro, Pentium II, and later machines that I owned. I think for me it's that they are too much the direct ancestors of current machines. There's basically zero software from that era nor any modern software written for these machines that really cares all that much about bus timings or cycle counting. It runs just as well or even better on modern machines in an emulator. I'm not a big gamer, but even if I play later-1990s era EGA/VGA games on a modern PC, it feels basically normal to me. I am nostalgic about machines older than that, particularly the mid-to-late 1980s machines that I grew up with. I now have decades of experience writing software. Even though I don't do much with hardware in my day job, I do know my way around hardware interfaces. I can read schematics and chip data sheets and know how to make it work. And what's nice about these machines is that many of them came with schematics and hardware register descriptions. Even if the paper is lost to time, someone has scanned them in and put them on the internet. So I like to tinker with them. I like making them do things I wished I could do 35-40 years ago. I especially like when I can do it with pure software. Once such example is a DOS driver I wrote to make Tandy ROM drives accessible to (newer) non-Tandy DOS versions. https://github.com/dfelliott/tandy1000-romdrive https://github.com/dfelliott/tandy1000-romdrive I had a 1000 TL I think I got probably late 1988 or early 1989. Back then I had a 40 MB hard card and it had to be partitioned because of DOS's 32 MB limit. When I upgraded to DOS 5 in 1991, literally going to the store the day it came out, I was dismayed to find I could no longer run Deskmate which was one of the main reasons to own a Tandy. A few years ago I bought another one (my old one sadly bit the dust in a natural disaster) and went to work on fixing the problem. The journey was fun, and so was the end result. I finally got what I wanted, a machine running Deskmate and other software on DOS 5. Coupled with my "sci-fi" Gotek I now have a machine that does a really good job of behaving like a machine of that era, because it is a machine of that era, running my old games with Tandy graphics and sound exactly how they ran back then. And I have real nostalgia for these games. There's something neat about what could be done with hardware of that era. Emulation is just not quite the same. There's something about the CGA rasters on the tube that just feels right. Plus, even though the machine bit the dust, I still have my old floppies, which I've started reading in with a Greaseweazle. The Gotek doesn't really detract from the experience, it just takes away the drudgery of dealing with actual floppies and avoids wearing down what little is left of them.
philistine 1y ago
The people in the retro community do not require these machines to perform all their tasks. They're not filing their taxes with a Macintosh LC III. They have modern computers! This allows old computers to be appreciated very differently. And retro enthusiasts will often love a machine because it is such a bad machine. It gives it a different appeal, its history and poor reception part of its charm. Ultimately, they're collectors. They collect the good and the bad.
- wincy 1y ago
  If you’re driving around in your 1971 Ford Thunderbird and the vacuum line fails, making it so your headlights doors are stuck closed, that would have been super annoying in 1977 as you were driving home in the evening. In 2025 it’s just “the charm of owning a classic car”. Instead of an annoyance, you might think of it as having a unique and endearing quirk.
  - philistine 1y ago
    You illustrated so eloquently what I was trying to say!
Ezhik 1y ago
for some of us computers used to be something special
tinco 1y ago
Perhaps it's related to what age you were when that particular computer caught your attention. I don't have any attachment to any hardware that came out after I was 18 or so. But my parents bought the Compaq Presario 5030 when I was like 10, and even looking at a picture now fills me with excitement. A computer could not be less important to computing in general: A bog standard mid market Pentium II from one of IBM PC clone companies. But to me it represents my first connection to the internet, and a huge part of what grew into my identity. Perhaps you'd feel the same way about a machine or tool or toy that you used when you were 10?
deleted 1y ago
[deleted]
testing22321 1y ago
Some people are passionate about cooking. Some dancing. Others mountain biking, snowboarding, hiking, painting, music, gardening, …. Literally endless list of hobbies and passions. These people are passionate about old computer hardware. I’m not, but it makes me happy to know they are happy doing what they want.

nemo44x 1y ago

A lot of this stuff was beyond reach for people back in the day. A Neo-Geo game system is something a lot of people still want because it’s something they can finally acquire.

dylan604 1y ago

Does that same feeling of wow still exist for kids today? They have grown up with computers there entire life. Some of us were introduced to computers in our teens, so there was prior experience of not having a computer for that wow to hit. Even now, the wow factor has diminished for me with new computers/devices. They are not really doing anything new as much as they just do the things faster/quiter/cheaper/smaller. There are definite milestones for me that just made my socks roll up and down when they were first available on computers. Is there anything not done on a computer now?

cosmic_cheese 1y ago
> Some of us were introduced to computers in our teens, so there was prior experience of not having a computer for that wow to hit. The effect is similar for those of us whose exposure was earlier, but similarly devoid of computers prior. In my case it was a 1996 Mac tower w/internal 28k modem, at which point I was seven. It was not only the first computer of any sort in the house (no game consoles either) but also our first CD player. Up until then, the extent of tech for me was a late 80s Sharp VCR and an even older faux wood console Zenith TV hooked up to a roof antenna (no cable). Anything beyond that existed only in TV commercials and movies. It was such a huge shift that it’s difficult to articulate. It sparked a lifelong obsession.
alnwlsn 1y ago
In my case the computers I 'learned computers' on were old pre-xp 90's machines. Nobody cares if some kid wants to take apart a few old computers on their way to the trash. That feeling of 'getting something to work' on those old machines sort of never went away for me, which is why I like retrocomputing even though the internet, cell phones, youtube, social media was pretty much around most of my life.

bombcar 1y ago

The key is that you used them. The retro community is for people who lusted after those machines, but we’re stuck with something much more affordable and much less powerful. And now they’re well into middle age and they have money.

deadbabe 1y ago
I don’t think it’s that simple. Yes for some people who used these machines once, they might just think of them as old machines, the same way an ancient Roman still alive today might not think much of mundane Roman tech. But getting into retro-computing as a hobby is more like being a historian or archaeologist. There is endless lore to discover, and restoring old hardware is an art. Some of these people were never old enough or even existed to lust after these machines. Someday, all the people who used these machines will be dead, completely dead, and the machines will be all that remains. Blessed are those who keep them running in their memory.
JKCalhoun 1y ago
Myself, I have passion for the KIM-1. Perhaps, as you suggest, because I saw it in a TAB book in the early 70's when I was a teenager, unable at that time to swing the $400 or so to get it. But I think my current passion has more to do with the simplicity of it, and being forced (well, more or less) to learn 6502 assembly. (Oh, and Christ an original KIM-1 is a good deal more than $400 now, ha ha. But there are nice reproductions you can build yourself.) What a breath of fresh air the thing is — having so little between its hex keypad and its six character display.
ehnto 1y ago
The same thing happens with cars. There's a somewhat predictable spike in used car prices for what become cult classics. Cars that are otherwise pretty mundane, and have since been well surpassed. It's the people now with full time employment, who couldn't afford them when they were 16. Now they can, and the cars in good condition are more scarce.
flomo 1y ago
You're right about the money part, but it always seemed more like a 30-year-old pursuit than middle-aged. But once I went through Vogons and had the impression that many of them lacked any taste. A lot of PCs (and Macs) were total shite back then. If you want to dink around, you can now get the best old stuff.

steamrolled 1y ago

There's a ton of hobbies like that. There are people who collect out-of-print comic books, sports memorabilia, old militaria, etc. What's the point of any of it? It's the joy of having a hobby and being a part of a community, not the utility of the gear itself.

donatj 1y ago

I feel this way about the keyboard community and their love of old IBM keyboards. In the mid-to-late 90s I had probably fifteen of them laying around and couldn't give them away. No one wanted these heavy bulky noisy keyboards. Now people pay hundreds of dollars for the originals and there's even a company[1] devoted to making new ones. Don't get me wrong, I enjoy a Model M and still have a couple, but I would never pay these insane amounts for one. 1. https://www.pckeyboard.com/page/SFNT https://www.pckeyboard.com/page/SFNT

fidotron 1y ago

I am not quite that age but notice a similar phenomenon, and have indulged slightly in it myself. My gut feeling is the motivation relates to how computing evolved, particularly in the 80s and 90s. Essentially people used to feel that their inability to perform a given task was gated by their lack of access to a certain sort of machine, such as a UNIX workstation or LISP machine. Now we all have surplus computing power and cheap peripherals the sense is that we must be missing some essence that was lost since these machines, because that is the nicer explanation than that given access to tools far better than those in previous generations most of us have no idea what to do with them, or worse that we allow ourselves to be distracted entirely. The musical equipment world is just like this too.

dale_glass 1y ago

Yeah, it's kind of weird. I had a 386 with 4MB RAM and am not the least nostalgic about it. In fact damn near everything about that machine was limiting and something I couldn't wait to replace with something newer. I even didn't care for the beige color schemes of the day -- I remember going for the brushed aluminium case way back because I was excited it wasn't freaking beige. Watching some of the channels though I'd say a lot of the retro experience isn't quite what most people had. A lot of modern retrocomputing is putting together what would have qualified as a "dream machine" back in the day. Some are specced up to the absolute best one could get, some are unrealistic (1990 Monkey Island on a 2000s Pentium 3), some are jazzed up with scifi tech like floppy emulators.

dfe 1y ago
I, too, am not the least bit nostalgic about the 486, Pentium, Pentium Pro, Pentium II, and later machines that I owned. I think for me it's that they are too much the direct ancestors of current machines. There's basically zero software from that era nor any modern software written for these machines that really cares all that much about bus timings or cycle counting. It runs just as well or even better on modern machines in an emulator. I'm not a big gamer, but even if I play later-1990s era EGA/VGA games on a modern PC, it feels basically normal to me. I am nostalgic about machines older than that, particularly the mid-to-late 1980s machines that I grew up with. I now have decades of experience writing software. Even though I don't do much with hardware in my day job, I do know my way around hardware interfaces. I can read schematics and chip data sheets and know how to make it work. And what's nice about these machines is that many of them came with schematics and hardware register descriptions. Even if the paper is lost to time, someone has scanned them in and put them on the internet. So I like to tinker with them. I like making them do things I wished I could do 35-40 years ago. I especially like when I can do it with pure software. Once such example is a DOS driver I wrote to make Tandy ROM drives accessible to (newer) non-Tandy DOS versions. https://github.com/dfelliott/tandy1000-romdrive https://github.com/dfelliott/tandy1000-romdrive I had a 1000 TL I think I got probably late 1988 or early 1989. Back then I had a 40 MB hard card and it had to be partitioned because of DOS's 32 MB limit. When I upgraded to DOS 5 in 1991, literally going to the store the day it came out, I was dismayed to find I could no longer run Deskmate which was one of the main reasons to own a Tandy. A few years ago I bought another one (my old one sadly bit the dust in a natural disaster) and went to work on fixing the problem. The journey was fun, and so was the end result. I finally got what I wanted, a machine running Deskmate and other software on DOS 5. Coupled with my "sci-fi" Gotek I now have a machine that does a really good job of behaving like a machine of that era, because it is a machine of that era, running my old games with Tandy graphics and sound exactly how they ran back then. And I have real nostalgia for these games. There's something neat about what could be done with hardware of that era. Emulation is just not quite the same. There's something about the CGA rasters on the tube that just feels right. Plus, even though the machine bit the dust, I still have my old floppies, which I've started reading in with a Greaseweazle. The Gotek doesn't really detract from the experience, it just takes away the drudgery of dealing with actual floppies and avoids wearing down what little is left of them.

philistine 1y ago

The people in the retro community do not require these machines to perform all their tasks. They're not filing their taxes with a Macintosh LC III. They have modern computers! This allows old computers to be appreciated very differently. And retro enthusiasts will often love a machine because it is such a bad machine. It gives it a different appeal, its history and poor reception part of its charm. Ultimately, they're collectors. They collect the good and the bad.

wincy 1y ago
If you’re driving around in your 1971 Ford Thunderbird and the vacuum line fails, making it so your headlights doors are stuck closed, that would have been super annoying in 1977 as you were driving home in the evening. In 2025 it’s just “the charm of owning a classic car”. Instead of an annoyance, you might think of it as having a unique and endearing quirk.
- philistine 1y ago
  You illustrated so eloquently what I was trying to say!

Ezhik 1y ago

for some of us computers used to be something special

tinco 1y ago

Perhaps it's related to what age you were when that particular computer caught your attention. I don't have any attachment to any hardware that came out after I was 18 or so. But my parents bought the Compaq Presario 5030 when I was like 10, and even looking at a picture now fills me with excitement. A computer could not be less important to computing in general: A bog standard mid market Pentium II from one of IBM PC clone companies. But to me it represents my first connection to the internet, and a huge part of what grew into my identity. Perhaps you'd feel the same way about a machine or tool or toy that you used when you were 10?

deleted 1y ago

[deleted]

testing22321 1y ago

Some people are passionate about cooking. Some dancing. Others mountain biking, snowboarding, hiking, painting, music, gardening, …. Literally endless list of hobbies and passions. These people are passionate about old computer hardware. I’m not, but it makes me happy to know they are happy doing what they want.