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How Do You Get Your Geek Nostalgia Fix?
Vrtigo1 writes "I keep a Pentium Pro CPU on my desk underneath my monitor because it reminds me of simpler times. Every once in a while I want to revisit the old days of the original Doom, the phonebook-sized Computer Shoppers, when you looked forward to the demo CD that came with Computer Gaming World because the Internet was too slow to distribute software, and when Falcon Northwest's Mach V was the envy of many a geek. IRC is just about the only technology I can think of that's still in use today and still looks the same as it did in the early nineties. So where do you go when you need to regress back to simpler times and get your nostalgia fix? I foolishly trashed my old tech mags, and there isn't a whole lot online that has survived from that long ago."
Apple II + Novation Applecat. Only problem: No AE to call...
People are still refusing to migrate from Windows XP.
I open a terminal window on my Mac. Do it every day for one reason or another.
It's particularly fun to go fullscreen with it and run nethack, and people actually think you're doing something very brainy and technical.
forget it.
Join the Slashcott! Feb 10 thru Feb 17!
You feel nostalgic about THAT? Damn you, now I feel ancient. I still remember waiting for those INPUT magazines, with BASIC listings of games and other software for Spectrum/TSR80/MSX/Apple/etc. Get off my lawn!
(Cue for "You had BASIC?!", "Punchcards" and other even older geezers that will make me feel a bit younger)
its a //c for easy storage in my small apartment
The newsgroups are still going strong these days.
When I need a geek nostalgia fix, I fire up one of my old MAC SE-30's running AUX.
That's Apple's Unix for Macs, circa 1990. Server-class under the skin with MacOS on the desktop.
Red
HP-48GX calculator in my desk. I have had it for about 14 years now, and I still use it every day.
I installed Gentoo on an Ultra 5 last week just to see if it still works.
Doesn't get any more nostalgic than telneting to nethack.alt.org and trying to achieve demigodhood.
*sigh* back to work...
"Get a life"!
The first PC I built was an AMD 2500+ Barton with nForce 2 with XP.
I eventually sold the parts to upgrade but now I'm currently using a PC i put together with similar parts but hte same chipset and CPU. This time though I dual boot from Win98 and WinXP.
I play old school PC games:
Gothic
Thief (1, 2, Gold and plethora of fan missions)
Ultima Underworld
Anachronox
etc.
I still have as much fun replaying those old games as I do playing the new ones, sometimes moreso.
I used to have a ton of demo CDs from CGW and PlayStation Demo CDs....
Previewing comments are for sissies!
I go to textfiles.com and read some of the old docs I remember from my BBS days.
UAE FTW!
Byte Compedium, Hackers handbook, old Atari catalogues, that sort of thing. Old issues of Creative Computing, that sort of thing.
I want a list of atrocities done in your name - Recoil
I'm so into Geek Nostalgia that I even created www.GeekVintage.com to wax about it. Nothing like getting your game on 8bit style!
It still looks as just as ugly as it did back in the day.
> EX E800
> GO ASM
Everybody gets what the majority deserves.
I get a tarball for some old project and get it to compile without warnings with g++. The task can take hours as I have to deal with old C programmers' hatred for const correctness, uberclever macros, use of variables called "class" and "new", reinvented containers, and general disregard for maintainer sanity. Approached with the right mindset this can become as entertaining as a video game, with frequent exclamations of "what kind of a moron would do this?!?"
I highly recommend Omega roguelike game for this purpose. In addition to all of the above mentioned qualities, it's got tons of entertaining content, being probably the best roguelike out there. It is relatively challenging to convert to an event-driven model suitable for a modern UI approach. And heck, it is just plain darn fun and easy to debug.
55378008
HP-35 in its original plastic box in a cabinet at work.
I still have and use an iMac G4 (as a file server and to run iTunes, mostly). You know, the one that looks like the pixar lamps. Best iMac design EVER, in my opinion. I will continue using it until the day something fries in it that I can't replace.
I use Windows at times. That way I remember how nice Debian Linux is.
It is slower, uglier, and reminds me of the olde days.
Not an emulator for a whole machine (although you could if you wanted to), but just the CPU. That'd be fun. (If you're a programmer of course).
Lesser beings may know that game by the name of X-com: Ufo defence but they are not worth talking about.
For me, that series comes as close to the old days that I am glad are not gone. Who on earth prefers having to rely on a game mag CD over instantly downloading something? Who is not glad off MORE cpu power? Who does not enjoy games with a thousand times the graphical splendor of Doom? (If you are going to claim you loved Doom for its depth of gameplay, then I will have kill you) .
But UFO: Enemy Unknown is a game genre that is no more. It had debt, it had style, it had high production values, it had longevity. I even liked Apocalypse despite it horrible X-com prefix. And as for magazine cd's, I got the demo from a floppy. THAT is old school you newbie (and before any real oldies awaken from their undead sleep, my oldest games were recorded of the radio onto tape, my FIRST game was handtyped from a book... okay, now the REALLY ancient can speak up).
The only other old thing I use is MC (Midnight Commander). Some things get replaced by better, somethings can never be improved upon.
MMO Quests are like orgasms:
You may solo them, I prefer them in a group.
For old times sake I've kept a lot of my original Mac gear and I've got some older PC towers sitting around that if I get really bored I'll throw a linux or Open Solaris distro on. I've got an old Color Mac I'm still using as a MIDI sequencer 'cause I haven't gotten around to porting the tunes onto newer equipment.
Open up the (default) GUI for a linux distro. Ta-da! At least it doesnt crash or hang as often.
I keep ZSNES and a couple of ROMs on all of my machines. There's even mods (in the form of IPS patches) for several SNES games. In particular, I HIGHLY recommend Super Metroid Redesign.
http://youtu.be/5XLgAR_vmZo
I do it.
There's nothing sweeter than a Socket 3 system going through a boot process, running Windows 95 C with an AWE32 and a 4X CD-ROM drive just to run Quake at a staggering 10fps because the FPU sucks.
A few months ago I installed Windows 3.1 in DosBox. If you can get a hold of the installer, it sure is worth it ... for approx. 5 mins. Does bring back a bunch of memories though.
The furthest I've gone back in time is with this: http://www.hercules-390.org/
Making old machines actually come to life... http://www.abc80.org/~hpa/fpga/
I have a PI that has a bunch of my favorite games from way back when. AOE I, the original WarCraft, You Don't Know Jack, Lost Vikings, and Space Quest 5 among others. I could probably put even more stuff on it; Radix Beyond the Void, Epic Pinball, and a few other DOS games. I was going through my old hardware recently and realized I just couldn't possibly throw it out.
And use the classic discussion system. Reminds me of simpler times.
The world is made by those who show up for the job.
Watch an old MTV music video with scantily clad women on YouTube (or Phoebe Cates scene from Fast Times at Ridgemont High), go to bathroom, spank monkey while playing tape of mom yelling; "What are you doing in there? You're going to go blind."
SIMH (google it) will simulate a PDP-11 running V7 UNIX. Heaven, 1976 style!
I still think digital watches are a pretty neat idea.
Zork, or one of the original Infocom games, running on my smartphone.
You think hugging a Pentium Pro is nostalgic? Kids these days.
No, this is not a 'get off my lawn' moment, but get real, if you want to talk nostalgic at least go 8 bit..
---- Booth was a patriot ----
"It's a rubber chicken with a pulley in the middle. What possible use could that have?"
How Do You Get Your Geek Nostalgia Fix?
"Read the 42 comments"
You mean that posting to Slashdot from my R4400 SGI Indigo doesn't count?
Netscape Navigator has a wonderful time with the CSS.
"Flyin' in just a sweet place,
Never been known to fail..."
On the top shelf of my office I keep a box of 2000 IBM (Hollerith) punched cards with the sources for a few of the programs I wrote 42 years ago.
I still have the first "PC Compatible" machine that I ever owned. My yellowed but trusty K6-II that I built myself after about a year's worth of internet research on how to build a computer, on the library's computers. I always regretted giving away my NES and my Commodore Plus/4, so I vowed to keep this one as long as it worked, and repair it as long as I could. It still chugs along @ 300mhz, with 128MB of RAM (which was expensive back in the day) and the 6.4GB hard drive. I put it together over the summer of 1999 from parts I bought at egghead auctions.
I wanted to run this fascinating thing I read about, called UNIX.
I initially ran Solaris 7 on it, because I hadn't heard of the BSDs at the time and someone convinced me that Linux was garbage. It has run pretty much everything that I could download since. I've had piles of other computers since then, but I still have this one. Truth be told, it's getting tough to run modern OSes on it these days. Even ArchLinux, who is otherwise the champion of "linux on old hardware" doesn't support it. It can run vanilla Debian 6.0 or the base install of the latest Free/Net/OpenBSD, but X or Xorg ist verboten. I tried to see if it would function as a MineCraft server but it doesn't have enough memory.
Mainly, I use it as a console-only FreeBSD development box (I'm relearning C after about 10+ years) and for some time it was a web and file server as well as my internet firewall. It also dual-boots Windows95 so I can play CnC Red Alert and DaggerFall.
Sometimes I consider digging out my old linux disks (Caldera 2.2, Slackware 7, Debian Potato etc, when I was trying them all out) and giving them a whirl. Why not?
do() || do_not();
Let me date myself too...
Fun for early teens at my dad's place:
Pascal on the DTACK Grande anyone?
Also, I still like to play Ulitma I and II once in a while on the old //e. I don't know what happened to our ][+, I think my dad git rid of it.
I still remember putting EA EA in one place (that's a 6502 NOP, twice) in two nibbles on the Ultima II Master to make it ignore copy protection (don't remember which two nibbles though). I did it with the Copy ][+ nibble editor. Damn, that was a good program.
Watch the BBS Documentary. Full of geekly nostalgia, and well-executed.
Is for losers. Real geeks own the hardware. AND still remember when it was new.
---- Booth was a patriot ----
I watch "Clash of the Titans" or "Troy", of course. Oh, wait a minute: I thought you said Greek nostalgia. Never mind
Proverbs 21:19
and make shape tables (or just play Sneakers)
~psybre
Authority questions you. Return the favor. -- d474
For the most part I don't miss slow transfer speeds and computers that stuttered playing MP3. Nostalgia for me is restricted to certain apps and games I can't or don't have the time to run.
- If I want a laugh I look at my own web page, built in the mid 90s that's only had minor changes
- wayback machine
- Certain games I install if they work on newer OS or emulate if they don't....though some games just can't run without a proper win98 machine which is not something I have any more
- I still use a Palm Pilot on occasion. I really need to migrate my contacts off it permanently (I do have text file exports). Wonder if Palm Desktop will work with Win 7 64 bit on my new machine
These posts express my own personal views, not those of my employer
Nostalgia? When I see the reflection staring back at me through the blank CRT the correct term would be "regret".
https://secure.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/wiki/Graphical_Environment_Manager
You kids and your new shit. Nothing simple about a 32-bit CISC chip. When I was a kid we had 8-bit CPUs and liked it! I didn't wait for a "Computer Shopper" with a demo CD, I had to write my games/apps! If I was lucky I could type in some buggy code from a magazine and try to get it to run.
Every now and then I still play Elite. And dock without docking computers.
M0571y H@rml355.
The first PC I built was an AMD 2500+ Barton with nForce 2 with XP.
On behalf of all Slashdot users, I'd like to officially tell you to GET OFF MY LAWN, YOU PUNK! :)
Seriously - I probably have *shoes* older than you...
I own a PDP-10.
I run it every week or so that way my neighbors think I actually vacuum my carpets.
Here in central New Jersey, I get my nostalgic geek fix every Sunday afternoon at the InfoAge Science Center. They have a vintage computer museum with every from a UNIVAC to 8-bit machines. As for the original poster's Pentium ... bah, humbug.
I go into a dark room and stand in front of a mirror and say: "Fidonet, Fidonet, Fidonet"
YouTube has a lot of recordings of 8-bit videogames played to completion and 8-bit audio/video demos.
And contrary to the summary, there are a lot of old tech magazines online, especially the ones aimed toward 8-bit computers and even the programmable calculators before them, such as the TI-59. <flamebait>Magazines from the "Pentium Pro" era wouldn't be considered "classic computing" so that may be why those aren't online.</flamebait>
If those games are oldschool, what do you call Delta, Who Dares Wins, Defender of the Crown, Armalyte, Monkey Island, Beach Head, IK+ etc?
Or are you writing from the distant future?
Pentium Pro CPU on my desk underneath my monitor because it reminds me of simpler times
Nostalgic for 10 year olds, maybe.
I like the hercules System/360 emulator running MVS although I admit to a fondness for MVT. Both are before my time. That and the PDP-8, and my SBC6120, and my MicroKIM...
"Science flies us to the moon. Religion flies us into buildings." - Victor Stenger
I have an FC Twin (clone hardware capable of playing NES/SNES games) next to the PS3 at home. Every now and then I turn it on and bask in 8/16-bit glory.
... seems to for me. Any time I pick up a pair of pliers or a screwdriver, open a pocket knife, take out my ATM card, see a rotary phone, open a PC, hear certain songs, use an internet protocol, talk to my parents (who were both big Bell employees most of their adult lives,) see a floppy, see green and black together.. or that ugly orange-ish color and black...
expletives welcomed
(Emulated of course).
See http://www.icl1900.co.uk/ for info
Watch this Heartland Institute video
...alive and well!
We have all kinds of crap stored. There is even a Kaypro lugable in there. Hayes modems, Stallion serial ports cards, Seagate 20 Mb disk drive, 8-inch floppy disks. At least the System 36 units went away. At some point, the CP/M unit left, but one of the drive cabinets is still around.
Why, without your clothes, you're naked, Miss Dudley!
Firefox skin that makes it look like Netscape: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/foxscape/
That, and, sometimes I also set the Windows theme to "classic." :)
It all depends on what you really want to get into.
DOSBox - For all your old DOS based games, this emulator works wonders. The only part you need to worry about is getting them off those old 3.5" and 5.25" floppies. If the floppies don't work anymore or you just don't have a floppy drive, you can always hop over to the various Abandonware sites and try to get a full copy of the game from them. My favorite site is Home of the Underdogs.
Emulators - For your old console systems, you can easily pick up any number of emulators. There are plenty of places like The Emulator Zone that let you grab both an emulator and various game roms for any number of console systems. Most of them let you install a USB Gamepad of some sort that gives you an even more old game style feel. Many of them are pretty good these days and a lot of computers are more powerful than some of the even more recent consoles. I use a PS emulator to run all my old PS1 games and they look better than on my PS2.
Online - An absolutely amazing number of games and other things have been ported to an online version of the game. A quick Google search for "DOOM online" returns a Flash based Doom Conversion. My experience has shown that most of the online versions of games don't play as smooth as on emulators, but they are usually free and no installation is needed.
There are plenty of other solutions out there as well. You could probably track down an older computer on ebay if you looked hard enough and what does it hurt to let it sit in a closet or your attic when you want to pull it out. If you need to ask these questions, you haven't been looking hard enough. Many others have forged this road long before you came to it and they have freely provided their solutions to all.
I have an old Kaypro 4 (or maybe a Kaypro IV, I can't remember which) about a year ago, though until I can find a boot disk I can't use it. I also play Zork and NetHack like everyone else....
Pascal on the DTACK Grande anyone?
68K assembly on the DTACK (a 68K coprocessor for the Apple II, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DTACK_Grounded). We debugged the portable portion of our code directly on the DTACK. We then assembled our early Mac programs using the DTACK and uploaded them to the Mac to see them run (or crash). We couldn't afford the $10,000 Lisa (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apple_lisa) development platform.
We also used our Apple II's for C64 development, much better assembler (LISA, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lisa_assembler). It was easier to build and uploaded using the Apple II than to build directly on the C64.
There are a bunch of classic shows, CommVEx is coming up in under two weeks (July 23 &24) and there are many others in various places throughout the year. Several Commodore ones, and many others including the Vintage Computer Festival. Even the Maker Faires have usually a classic computer or five in their midst. Another to look for are the Arcade/Videogaming expos that pop up, you can play on 8-bit arcade hardware.
There's always the Computer History Museum in Mountain View CA. Intel museum in San Jose, etc.
"Enjoy what you're doing! If it becomes drudgery, you're doing it wrong!" - Jim Butterfield
I go into the livingroom and turn on my NES and play any of my NES games. Just the act of turning it on and having to blow into the cartridge take me back.
Fire up the old NES, play a round of Tecmo Super Bowl.
My friend has an Apple II and Teipai on 5 1/4 floppy that she plays every year or so (the old versions had a bug she likes to exploit, so she won't play a newer version).
I've got an ibm 8086 motherboard (could be 8088) upgraded by the manufacturer from 512K to 640K (yes K) that has a monochrome 80 by 25 line text graphics card & boots to basic without a disk plugged in. It's so slow you can dir a floppy & watch it print on screen characters per second. Somewhere I've got dos 1 or 2 (pre directories/folders) for it. Here you are try this & see if you still think your modern PC is slow... Chris
Oh my. I'm not even 25, and I feel the urge to call "get off my lawn" in response to your "old school games" list and the configuration you call "old hardware"...
This is Slashdot. Common sense is futile. You will be modded down.
I still have a bootable 8088 at home. Takes it as long to boot a 5 1/4" floppy with DOS 6.2 as my dual core win 7.
That's DataSAAB Interpretive Language / DataSAAB Assember Language. Back in the days of minicomputers with magnetic core, punchcards, paper tape readers, and hard disk drives the size of washing machines.
If you post it, they will read.
I held on to stuff for a while. I do have a mint condition NES Max controller... But when I get nostalgic, I do an ebay search for Beige G3 PowerMac or Compaq 486SX and I look at the pictures, smile, and am generally glad my basement isn't cluttered with stuff I won't really use anymore.
Now, get off my lawn!!!
I will not be pushed, filed, stamped, indexed, briefed, debriefed or numbered. My life is my own.
I still have my Vic 20, boxed, and a boxed ZX Spectrum. My eldest son actually requested that I set up the Atari 2600 last weekend - but I cheated and set up the 7800 instead.
I have my Apple IIc that I use to play old Apple II games I played as a kid. I sometimes use it with its original matching green-screen CRT display, sometimes I plug it in to my 47" HDTV.
Another non-functioning site was "uncertainty.microsoft.com."
The purpose of that site was not known.
I have paper tape for various programs I wrote for a DEC PDP-8. I've occasionally shown the paper tape, just to show how much better things have gotten since then.
I also have an Apple ][+ and an Apple //e. The Apple ][+ is actually an original Apple ][, but with a new motherboard (due to a blown capacitor that fried the board). I sometimes bring out the Apples and run the games I wrote for them. A number of the disks are still readable, believe it or not.
As far as I'm concerned, what matters for games is if they are FUN. 100 FPS doesn't matter if it's boring. There are games that are text-only, or run on 40x40 pixel blocks, that are lots more fun, and that makes them better games.
- David A. Wheeler (see my Secure Programming HOWTO)
How else can I be sure that I can still hand-assemble MACRO-11 code for the PDP-11?
I still regret tossing all the DEC-20 manuals that I bought in college. Nothing like using 3 or 4 different bases to do anything with the operating system.
I look in the mirror.
Oh, wait. I thought you asked how I *fix* my geek nostalgia.
Post may contain irony: discontinue use if experiencing mood swings, nausea or elevated blood pressure.
I get my retro geek on via the C=64 emulator on my Motorola Droid.
Microsoft leads to Bluescreen; Bluescreen leads to downtime; downtime leads to suffering.
Uhm, who's William Shatner?
He's the 23rd century Wilhelm Sheakspear. He was in a lot of historical plays about what people in the 20th century thought being a captain on a spaceship would be like. People in the 24th century couldn't get enough of those period pieces about what they perceived as a simpler time.
He also used to hawk retro eight-bit model computing machines like the Admiral VAX-18.
the preceding comment is my own and in no way reflects the opinion of the Joint Chiefs of Staff
I'd turn off my PC, ride a bus to the library, pick up what books may relate to what I want to know and spend the afternoon taking notes by hand.
This post contains no rudeness or derision of any kind. All arguments are friendly. Terms and exclusions may apply.
Google Book search can help: http://books.google.com/books?id=zAEAAAAAMBAJ&pg=PA72&dq=falcon+northwest+mach&hl=en&ei=eMkcTqnSM5DCsAO0r9mUDA&sa=X&oi=book_result&ct=result&resnum=3&ved=0CEYQ6AEwAg#v=onepage&q=falcon%20northwest%20mach&f=false
I am a v1ral sig. Plse c0py me and h3lp me spread. Thank y0u?
Sometimes I go into work and boot up a Sun Ultra1, just for kicks.
Except it's not for kicks, and I don't have to boot the thing. Because we're still running Critical Infrastructure Applications on it.
C-x C-s C-x k
http://abandonware-magazines.org/
I love computing nostalgia. When I was 12, I got my first Android Nexus One phone. Man, that was good stuff, well before Angry Birds and everything. I wrote some of my own games using an old-fashioned programming language (Java). This was back in the day before Python and JavaScript and all that.
My geek nostalgia fix comes from typing "LOAD" and then pressing "PLAY" on tape.
Tell me about it. My second most powerful machine meets those specs, and I use it every single day! Perhaps this is what getting old feels like... :(
The SPIES wiretap archive, now owned by Area.com, and moved to HTTP from Gopher but the content is still there. First place I learned about Phreaking and Rainbow Boxes, as well as Core Wars, a ton of great old practical jokes.
http://wiretap.area.com/
I recently bought an Acorn Electron on eBay. It works. Now to think up something super-1337 to do with it.
I also still own the Pentium 233 MMX system I did my Master's thesis on.
...laura
> I will not be pushed, filed, stamped, indexed, briefed, debriefed or numbered. My life is my own.
(from his sig, if you have set things to hide them)
Oh, I also watch another few episodes of Danger Man/Secret Agent. I bought the entire series on DVDs (I probably missed seeing their first run on PBS, although I *did* see The Prisoner, its sequel, from whence came the parent's signature), including the first year's 1/2 hour series that was never shown in the USA.
One of the coolest computers of all times was the Xerox (formerly SDS) Sigma 9, an EBCDIC-based 32 bit machine running UTS or CP-V.
It maxed out at 2MB (yes, megabytes) of memory, but that would support at least 70 concurrent time-sharing users. When you took delivery of a Sigma, you were entitled to all the source code (operating system, compilers, assemblers, linkers, tons of utilities).
Unlike machines of the current era, the Sigma's machine language instruction set was very elegant. The thing I miss the most is MetaSymbol, a meta assembler of immense power and coolness.
Another thing I miss was the "S-in-column-one" embedded assembler instructions in Fortran! If you knew what you were doing, you could create recursive Fortran subroutines and do lots of other cool stuff.
When you shut down the operating system, the machine went into a loop playing the Star Spangled Banner on the speaker.
Who remembers System Reset, I/O Reset, Load???
I miss the elegance of that old machine. Other than Linux, you won't find much elegance in computing these days.
Circle the wagons and fire inward. Entropy increases without bounds.
I keep Firefox 4 alive in a virtual machine!
I remember a few weeks ago when it was the latest browser available - damn it makes me feel old!
It isn't a really old a piece of equipment, of course, but it's still cool to fire up WorldWideWeb (that's the WorldWideWeb) and see if anything still renders sensibly. Not that much, actually.
I do have a PDP-11 disk cache board hung on my wall. It's about the size of a pizza box and has a whopping 256KB -- huge! But the rest of the machine is long gone. About the oldest functional machine I have is a dual CPU 486. That's pretty cool. But I'm sure people around here will talk about 8-bit stuff and even older (punch tape).
There are about 100 issues PC Format in my bookcase. I still have (nearly) all the disks (5.25" and 3.5"), CD's (also nostalgic now :-). My first issue was issue 5 from 1992 featuring reviews of:
- Monkey Island 2: LeChuck's Revenge (need I say more?)
- Falcon 3.0 (awesome F16 simulator at the time)
- Oh no! More Lemmings
Find more old magazines here:
http://magazinesfromthepast.wikia.com/
I just get out my old trusty pentium 100 with awesome win98 and Caldera Linux on it and read /. with Lynx ! I havent tried for a couple years though, not sure if it will still even work.
"Computers are a lot like Air Conditioners" "They both work great until you start opening Windows"
Sheepshaver. Playing games like it's 1988.
I get nostalgic playing Avatar. NOT to be confused with the current movie-based crap.
Nostalgic for my 920+ Ninja lost in the old NovaNET system.
Nostalgic for the Wyvern Skin left behind.
Nostalgic for the first forays into the 'new' Avatar, back then.
So I play the Cyber1 version. And it is sweet.
And you can, too. See you in the dungeon, probably dead (you).
deleting the extra space after periods so i can stay relevant, yeah.
I don't get my nostalgia fix. I used it do it all: BBSes, tinker with assembly, love flipping through the computer shopper, play silly text/ascii based games... all of it. I've tried going back and doing some of those old things but it all just seems so boring now. Those 8-bit games, the MSDOS commandline, fiddling with the registers on my VGA card.... all boring. I feel like I have no use for a computer now that doesn't have a 24/7 link to the internet. BBSes (those that are left) feel so lonely and isolated. I still do geeky things. Don't get me wrong, but I do things on a whole different scale now. There's a dozen layers of abstraction between me and the hardware now and I like it that way. I use websites like Slashdot with thousands of simutaneous users and I like it that way.. No more single line BBSes.
Whenever there's a story about space, those nostalgic cuckoos known as Space Nutters trot out the same old, ancient desiccated drivel from decades ago. That's pretty nostalgic!
An x86 processor reminds you simpler times.
an excuse for people to come out and wave their 'I've been doing this since x" penis around as if it's worth anything.
If I really need some nostalgia, I find an LED calculator and type 5318008.
Seriously though, In this day in age, we have so much new stuff all the time, I don't want to waste it pulling out some game where the only redeeming feature is my emotional attachment to a PoS.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
You download the games instead
Good point. Which publishers sell emulated NES games over PSN?
beach head!!!! oooh nostalgia fest. off to play ik+ :)
I boot up Firefox 4. Man, that takes me way back.
http://www.atariage.com/forums/topic/167235-byte-magazine/
I still have a box of Bytes from 1983-1984. When Jerry Pournelle was cool...
An issue on portable computers compares the HP-75, Access Portable, Epson HX-20, Kaypro II, and Corona.
And has articles like "Does your Printer Work with Wordstar"
Good times...
Check out your local electronics flea market! In the SF Bay Area it's at De Anza College the second Saturday of each month. Every couple of boots you're sure to find a blast from the past! Enjoy!
I have a few options depending on how far back I want to go. If I want to go pre-transistor, I can fire up my Grandfather's portable radio. It is 5 tube and uses 3 batteries. It uses a 1.5 volt filament battery, a 9 volt bias battery, and a 45 volt B battery. I can't find the B battery any more but a few 9 volt batteries will do the job.
More recently I needed to recover some family history documents for a family member. They were properly backed up on 3.5 inch floppies. This required installing DOS 3.21 to do the restore, running Windows 3.1 to run PFS First Choice to open the documents (found them), then installing my old copy of Star Office which could then import the documents and keep the formatting, then save them in MS Word format. This enabled opening them on a more modern word processor. Since Windows 3.1 does not support USB or Networking, I had to save the result on 3.5 inch floppies, then load them into an old Windows 95 machine (again no USB support) to save them to a network drive.
Listening to the Data Guardian program make it's unique noise on the DOS/Windows machine was a true nostalgia hit. I should record the sound and save it as a ringtone.
The truth shall set you free!
Heh, you kinda spoiled it for me by anticipating what I would say :-) You whippersnappers had it all gold plated with those ready-built computers. I built my own Altair 8800 from a kit in 1975 by soldering all the components to the boards, one by one. Double sided fiberglass-epoxy with plated through holes. I splurged and socketed all the ICs with the real deal - Augat gold-plated machined-pin teflon sockets which cost about as much as the ICs plugged into them. Ah, the smell of that Ersin 63-37 eutectic rosin-core solder; the wafts of smoke. The CPU was a 2 MHz 8080 in the original gleaming white ceramic package with the beautiful gold plated chip lid. No heat sink necessary; 40 pin DIP. Row after row of 2102 1Kx1 350 ns static RAM chips in 16 pin DIPs on the memory boards. A serial port board with the fabulous UART on a single chip.
BIOS? Boot ROMs? HAH! There were 16 red address LEDs, 8 red data LEDs, and 16 toggle switches, all arranged octally in groups of 3 on the front panel. You entered the boot loader byte by byte, toggling in the binary codes, pressing load memory, and incrementing the address for each byte. Then you double checked it. Then you loaded the paper tape in the teletype and pressed run. If you got it right, away you would go, reading BASIC or other application program at a great rate of 10 bytes per second. Go away and get some coffee. Come back; oops, it crashed. Try again. Finally you got it right and the teletype hammered out "Altair Basic, OK." Orgasmic!
You had to do this each time you turned it on.
I still dig out my C64 Manual occasionally, you know the one with the full circuit diagram in the back. I still have the executive and intuition manuals from my Amiga days they bring back memories.. I miss programming in Assembler. 6510 and 68K were nice and easy. Moving onto the X86 series processors was nasty so I moved onto C :(
The beauty of slashdot is its simpletons; and they evoke simpler times in a way that no technology can. Its like taking a 5 minute mental holiday to be a Libertarian.
I floss my teeth, 9 edge leading
Hey, Mom! Is it beer, yet?
i simply boot up my families "first" computer and play on windows 98se. bunches of nice games for it. add irony is that its my only windows computer. While if i wanted to really go old school i would fire up the mac classic i have sitting under my desk and play the couple of games that are on that, although to be honest i don't do that often anymore due to the fact that the original keyboard and mouse got broken(stupid movers dropped the box it was all in snapping the keyboard and mouse to pieces, but the computer was wrapped in lots of bubble wrap). mac classic is strange when using a real keyboard but the shortcuts aren't always easy coming from a debian background.
I keep an abacus, a check printing machine with lots of number buttons, and a Model 100 on my bookshelf, to remember me where I've been.
The thing I've already purchased is an NES Game Pak. I can make use of it by format-shifting the program on the Game Pak using a cartridge reader. Which cartridge reader do you recommend?
If I have the urge to look back, I dig out the first computer I bought back in '77, an Infinite UC1800 made in Cape Canaveral, Fl. Hardly anyone has ever heard of it, let alone seen one.
I was a poor student at the time and couldn't afford the assembled version or even a case. For my money I received bare, unpopulated boards, some hardware, a few of the harder to find chips and a schematic. I scrounged the rest of the needed parts (including the processor, an RCA CDP1800), soldered it together, debugged my mistakes and screwed the bare boards down to a piece of plywood where it still sits today. Still works, too.
Beta sux! Join the Slashcott! http://hardware.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=4760465&cid=46173047
Generally, I don't. I have a life.
Nostalgia is when internet browsers use to know what to do with a gopher tag.
telnet telehack.com to your heart's content
Still, if you *need* NES roms, why not just download them? Assuming you've purchased the cartridge, there isn't anything illegal about that.
Ownership of a copy of a work doesn't necessarily imply the right to download another copy any more than ownership of a vinyl record implies the right to shoplift a CD. UMG Recordings, Inc. v. MP3.com, Inc., 92 F. Supp. 2d 349 (S.D.N.Y. 2000).
At least, not in the civilized world...
What country is "the civilized world", and how do I get in?
Six Amigas. :) :)
Google homepage looks almost the the same as in early 90's. I know the Wikipedia page says "Google began in January 1996 as a research project by Larry Page and Sergey Brin when they were both PhD students at Stanford University in California" but there must be something wrong there because someone showed me the google homepage while I was at university describing to me how revolutionary it was because it used the web itself to rank pages. Now as I graduated in 1994 that's the latest it could be, but I believe the event I just described was way back in 1990 - and I said goodbye to webcrawler, excite, yahoo(!), altavista and magellan on the spot. Perhaps 1996 was the year they incorporated? I've just realized I'm an absolute dinosaur.
Sometimes it's Pepper II/Ms. Pacman/Galaga via M.A.M.E, other days it's Dungeon (Zork), other days it's firing up WinUAE and playing Mind Walker.
I hope you keep it in a static-free baggie, at least. I understand some people keep whole computers for nostalgia purposes, not just processors.
[sigh] Makes me wish I still had my old Apple IIgs and the various accessories I'd brought from my IIe in it. I had an AE Z80 card plugged in there so I could run CP/M. I used Turbo Pascal 3.0 on that while my classmates were stuck sharing school-built XT-clones in the computer lab. Those were the days...
i'm 40. i don't ever recall nostalgia hitting the mainstream so hard as it did in the early 2000's with all the vh1 nonsense. it was fun, i was part of it. i'm burned out on it.
i spent a lot of time play apple //e emulated games on my laptop, but the fun is pretty much worn out.
i think i need a few more decades before i start feeling the urge to be nostalgic again.
maybe in 2032 i'll fire up WoW and look at my old characters.
https://www.accountkiller.com/removal-requested
(Note, given the rather late uid, first time posting to /. but am an avid reader. Apologies if anything goes wrong.)
For me it's an interesting case, as my nostalgia appears to be from between the late 90s to the mid 2000s (gee, how I feel young yet getting old at the same time). I typically read over old Maximum PC archives (I still have the issue I started from, May 2005, convinced me and my parents to get me WoW). For computing, I haven't given up my no frills (it's spartan enough to lack a volume slider) Dell keyboard that takes a little getting used to as it's more of what you call a "keyboard" with springs than those laptop style "media" keyboards which for some reason I despise. and still use an optical mouse from 2005 (two buttons and a wheel). But it's just "if it ain't broke do nothing." For a more typical nostalgia filter, I turn to, say, Need for Speed before Underground on the PC. Who says Snowy Ridge from NFS High Stakes isn't difficult?
For my mum (not my stepmother) it's an even weirder case (again more "if it ain't broke don't fix it" than anything) until last year she still used a Windows XP laptop from 2002 running IE6. She's now on the most recent Firefox using a netbook. Also she's still on $10/mo 56k dial up ostensibly a) to keep a Winnie the Pooh fan site from 11 years ago up and b) to prevent the hassle of Comcast installing cable internet to her apartment and/or its service problems, as it's either it or dial-up. (she does want to switch to DSL though) Another nostalgia-y thing: for photos it's an entry-level photo album software from '98 (she brags about how we got it at Best Buy and such with me) and as for a video player, it's freeware from '02. Hey, if http://oldversion.com/ exists, so do the people who fantasise about old freeware.
the civilized world is not a country. It's a part of the world. The part that is civilized.
On a second look, I notice that I had asked the question less than clearly, and I apologize for this. I gather that the country in which you live is part of the civilized world, and the United States of America is not. So please allow me to rephrase: In which country do you live?
I have two P3 computers in the warehouse complete with 17" CRT's, PS2 ball mice and Windows 98. All my favourite 90's games are loaded such as Doom, Duke3D, C&C etc.. I wanted to build the machines now while I could still find hardware old enough to have Windows 98 drivers available on the web. I imagine in a few years things like that will become quiet rare. I haven't seen a 486 chip in years.
An SGI O2 that I fire up every once in a while, and a pizzabox Sparc in my closet that I'm going to set up Real Soon Now. Gear that cost thousands and thousands of dollars when I first started working with computers (professionally, that is) can now be acquired for $0 - $25.
Oh, and every time I'm in the SF bay area, I try to hit the computer history museum. If you are EVER in range, go. Seriously. It's great.
Dear Slashdot: next time you want to mess with the site, add a rich-text editor for comments.
and build retro micro-computer kits, like the Replica 1 (Apple I clone, MOS Tech 6502), and Spare Time Gizmo's COSMAC Elf 2000 (RCA CDP1802 CPU). I also have an unfinished N8VEM Z80 single board computer (SBC) with an optional S-100 like backplane called ECB, and multiple expansion boards
Who needs more than 4 MHz, I can't type 50wpm anyhow; :-)
I usually play with emulated C-64 or Amiga. Unfortunately the oldest hardware I have is PS2 which I bought couple of weeks ago.
Ah the 2500+ Barton - a good CPU, I built a very similar system myself but running Win 2K (which I stubbornly held on to throughout the entire reign of XP) The CPU overclocked to 3200+ needed such a huge fan and heatsink, I remember it sounding like a vacuum cleaner was running when the system was on. First system I built was an AMD K6-2 with paired SIMMs and a 5.5 inch form factor Quantum 'bigfoot' HD
I get my "Geek Nostalgia Fix" by using WordPerfect for DOS 5.1.
I have it installed on three of my Windows XP computers. Using the function keys takes me back to the old days when my fingers never had to leave the keyboard to reach for the mouse. I have it running under TameDOS to make it operate more smoothly under Windows XP. I have not tried running it on a 64bit OS yet.
If I really want to take a trip back in time, I can look at the first edition of WordPerfect magazine that I have kept. It has a great picture of a Wizard on the front and expounds "The Wizardry of 5.0". I remember when I moved my users from version 4.2 to 5.0 of WordPerfect... They thought I was a Court Jester, not a Wizard... but they learned to love it.
A VCR, a Sharp 20" CRT TV, a Casio Data Bank 150 calculator watch, a bone conduction analog hearing aid that has been the same model (have three of them I think and probabably getting my fourth since no newer models exist and I refuse to go digital with implants) since 1994, PS/2 mice and keyboards, KVMs (VGA+PS/2) from Y2K, 3.5" floppy disks and drives on old PCs (mostly for testings and boot disks to DOS with Norton Ghost 2003), etc.
Ant(Dude) @ Quality Foraged Links (AQFL.net) & The Ant Farm (antfarm.ma.cx / antfarm.home.dhs.org).
To me, punch cards, TI 99 4/A, BASIC, brick cell phones, 80386, Yggdrasil, WindowsXP, etc. are all the same, clutter. If I kept every nostalgic item I've ever used, I'd be swamped with a bunch of crap. When I want to revisit old times, I pull up an emulator and am reminded of how much I like things better now.
Don't get me wrong, I can appreciate the simplicity and outright genius required to make those old memory starved devices do as much as they did, but I like the newer stuff.
I still use tcsh every day. I'm not living in the past!
Surprised no one else agreed with the Computer Shopper idea. I still have about a dozen of them from the 90s laying around. Every once in awhile I'll dig one up and read about the new "MMX" technology coming out, or how the 3600rpm Bigfoot hard drives compare to 4200 and 5400rpm drives, or the recent substantial drop in CD Recorder prices and how they compare.
Ah those were the days, when we thought computers could do anything, when an extra megabyte of ram or a few more mhz made all the difference. Now we have more ghz and cores than we can shake a stick at, and ram is only $10 per gigabyte.
my karma will be here long after I'm gone
My first computer: a 1991 Mac Classic II. Still have it, still flip on the back switch to hear the chime...when I'm feeling nostalgic.
Well, I use telnet about 40 times a day. It still looks the same as it did long before IRC. SSH is from the 90s, and that also remains somewhat the same.
Modding old video game console and doing ROM hacks of games I played back in the day.
While I still own a Commodore 128 and an Amiga 3000, I find that I rarely boot up the original systems anymore.
It is a heck of a lot easier to simply use emulators. If you're trying to revisit an old arcade game, it is often better to get the game for MAME since ports to home computers were often subpar. If you're trying to revisit games specifically for the home, it is better to get whatever system was considered the best at the time. For the earlier years, that'd be an Amiga emulator like WinUAE. For anything post 1990, that'd be a PC emulator like DOSBox. C64 and Atari 8-bit emulators tie for stuff that is ancient.
I like to boot up my old PDP1103 and listen to the therapeutic banging of the floppy drives and the soothing buzz of the green screen monitors. Nah not really I have a life...
MUDs... heck, I'm building one just for the nostalgia (because without the sound of the modem, using telnet just doesn't feel the same). Anyone remember playing MajorMud or TradeWars or other BBS games?
"The more pity, that fools may not speak wisely what wise men do foolishly" - Touchstone,Shakespeare's "As You Like It"
When I really wanna go back in time, I play with the Freshman Masterpiece, a battery powered, three voltage, 5 tube TRF radio I've got sitting on my desk at work. ca. 1925.
When I want a momentary break from the workstation, I grab the HP-11c sitting under the monitor, rather than fire up Calculator.app.
Luke, help me take this mask off
I'm surprised nobody has mentioned the HP 200LX. That was for me the most useful computer, all things considered, I have ever owned. I also have my original true-blue IBM XT which was my pride and joy after upgrading from a C64 ...
I'm a collector, I get my fix by playing with my Amiga 2000HD that's sitting next to me, or by getting out the Amiga 500, IBM PCjr, Compaq Portable I, or Commodore 128 that's sitting in my closet.
Now I just need to get back into the ship for a hot cup of joe. HAL? Could you let me in? HAL?
'I don't know what it's called. I just know the sound it makes, when it takes a man's life.' ~ Four Leaf Tayback
I'll have to be very gentle when I explain that to the Compaq Pentium 90 that is sitting in my closet, quietly running Debian and being my firewall / occasional server. I did have to replace the original drive. It finally gave up the ghost about 2 years ago. Other than that it keeps on ticking.
My 486 based Novell server is still around here somewhere...
-- "Never underestimate the power of human stupidity." - R.A.H.
As you pointed out, IRC still looks the same as it did back then. I still actively use it daily.
Regress? Not at all! Keep that simpler time part of your daily life. There are 1000's if not millions who do it every day.
with Z-CPR, and then under the awe inspiring blazing speed of a Z-80 running at TWO WHOLE MEGAHERTZ I run Word-Star, Calc-Star, and Data-Star; V-Edit, vi, and maybe a "c", pascal, ALGOL, or FORTRAN compile, or a Z-80 MASM assembler; XMODEM or STARTS; and maybe even a quick Colossal Cave. All on a machine with 56K of RAM, and two 256K 8" Floppy Disks that cost (at the time - 1977) as much as a new Cadillac.
Yes today's machines are faster.
Yes today's machines are cheaper.
Yes GUIs are *sometimes* easier to use.
Yes Color Graphics can display data in formats that are easier to interpret.
But the personal machines from 35 years ago could do almost everything that today's machines can.
I keep waiting for a true breakthrough.
Now, Get Off My Lawn !!!
Do a search on the torrent sites. I've contributed some of my old Run, Enter, and Computer language magazines, and a great fellow scanned them. I help seed the torrents.
Reading a few years of those should give you a good taste of what life was like when we had to work the bellows to do our computing.
My God, it's Full of Source!
OUTSIDE_IP=$(dig +short my.ip @outsideip.net)
. . . recreating model rockets which I saw in a catalog forty years ago but could never afford.
(And sometimes even older stuff
Bust out my SNES, and choose from my extensive library of 60+ games. Or, if i need a 3D hit, the Dreamcast, and my far more extensive library of every good game (IMHO) for the system ever, burned to CD -R.
To be fair, it's not even nostalgia for me, as i have never owned a later system, and not played extensively any games beyond the PS2 anyway.
I use an 8 k-bit chunk of core memory from a CDC-3500 as a doorstop.
... takes me back to the days long ago when I used to get ironically kicked out of the school computer lab.
My Sinclair ZX-81whisks me back to my mentors, an electrical engineer, workshop, writing BASIC nestled amidst oscilloscopes and breadboards populated with transistors( yup kids, there used to be SINGLE transistors, now get off my lawn ) late into the night.
This sig is not paradoxical or ironic.
I break out some of my old text games and try to avoid being eaten by a grue.
The Original "MMOs" of their time, text-based RPG/Hack 'n Slash telnet games!
Geek Nostalgia? At work I still have to maintain two old SCO Xenix boxes. They are for a Wegener ANCS satellite control system. Since Xenix knows nothing about networking I move files in and out of the systems via serial port using Kermit. If a hard drive crashes and I need to reinstall Xenix it's done with a batch of 3.5" floppy disks. Fortunately SCO did issue a Y2K patch. I guess that's enough nostalgia for me. If I need more there's always the DOS 6 box that runs a monitoring system. Yes, I'm an old guy.
Doesn't make any difference at all to the argument, does it.
I'm done with the argument; I agree with you that United States copyright and patent law are fouled up beyond any foreseeable repair. Again, I apologize for not making this clearer. I asked about your country so that I could check if its immigration requirements were reasonable, in turn so that people in my country might have a way out.
AMD 386DX40 with 8 megs RAM on two of those 4-in-one RAM cards because I only had 1meg RAM chips. I ran OS/2 on that machine, trying to run Windows3.1 and CorelDraw. In a window. On OS/2. Man those were the days..
Running SIMH which emulates the HP2000 Time-Shared BASIC operating system, I connect my Teletype to a serial port converter and play $BLJACK just like I did in high school...
I learned the hard way about how difficult things can be if you forget where you put something on your system.
Since I was about 17, I have kept a fairly consistent system for storing my files. I still have files on my computer that I created back in the mid 1990s. When I want to think back to the good old days, I look at them. Or I fire up one of my old retro rigs and play 15+ year old games.
LK
"Hi. This is my friend, Jack Shit, and you don't know him." - Lord Kano
For me it is my US Robots 9600 bps modem (the cool sysops had them too). I remember the arms race of modems, when I was so jealous of my friend's 300 bps modem that you put the handset of the telephone on to use, and my hands shaking with excitement when I opened the box that contained a brand-new, screaming-fast 2400 bps modem of my very own. But for some reason, it is that USR 9600 with the slick white plastic case of early 90's hardware and the array of LEDs blinking furiously while I carefully planned my next move in Trade Wars. I actually dug up the phone line between our house and the box at the street (we lived in the forrest, so that was a few hundred meters) and laid a new one in order to max out the subsequent 14.4 kpbs beauty. That and Commander Keen.
...Yesterday I was perplexed that my new Boxee Box only came with 2.4 GHz 802.11n and a 10/100 Ethernet adapter.
Actually, I wrote my thesis on life experience.
Pentium Pro = "Simpler times"... um... k...
Don't consider x86 boxes other than maybe a 5150 or an XT something to be very nostalgic about but that's just me.
For my nostalgia fix I have various emulators for the Atari 8-bit, Atari ST, CP/M, PDP11, VAX, etc.... also have an upgraded Atari 800XL hooked up to the TV. Have a bunch of old DEC and Sun gear but most of it is put away these days.
Penitum Pro, seriously, that was like 1995 ;P Nothing retro about that ;)
I like to visit Retrofairs, you can find "old", old, and really old stuff there :)
E.g. in Germany, go for www.retroboerse.de (next are Rosenheim and Wien/AT)
It looks just like it did when I first went on line in 1996, and I understand it was much the same all the way back to its birth.
Of course there have been some changes. Back in '96, seemed like half the return addresses were @anon.penet. fi.
If you're a bit of a classic gamer but don't want to fiddle with emulators, you might consider MUDs as an alternative. Text based, multiplayer games that are played via telnet, like multiplayer Nethack. (or so I've been told, I've never tried Nethack...)
Even better, you can always run one yourself. If you have $9/month to spend, there are 2 or 3 MUD hosts still out there who will gladly throw up a shell and some disk space for you. Hell, if you have broadband at home and your own Linux box (or windows, but only with certain MUD codebases) you can host your own for free. MUDs with 50 players online at once seldom eat more than 20KB/sec so even residential-level broadband can handle the traffic smoothly.
Also, most MUDs (typically based on some variation of Diku, Merc, or ROM codebases) are coded in C. However, there are MUD daemons/servers you can find coded in practically every language, from Java to TCL to PERL, PHP, Python, and even one in Coldfusion. No matter what your language of choice, you can code a MUD.
> How Do You Get Your Geek Nostalgia Fix?
Go down to my basement, where I have a full retro video arcade filled with coin-ops from the 1980s: Centipede, Crystal Castles, Quantum, Millipede, Tempest, The Empire Strikes Back, Tron, Frogger, Kicker, Robotron, Moon Patrol, Joust, Donkey Kong, Donkey Kong Junior, Mario Bros. (widebody), Punch-Out!!, Krull, Mad Planets, Out Run, Star Trek: Strategic Operations Simulator, Wild Western, Zoo Keeper, Elevator Action, Jungle King, Continental Circuit, Qix w/ 60-in-1, and two Atari System 1 cabinets w/ Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom, Marble Madness, Road Runner, Peter Pack Rat, and RoadBlasters kits.
Keeping 'em all running is a good way to geek out too.
Seriously - learn from the past but why-oh-why opine for what's old and less useful?
I still type on an IBM Model M keyboard that will be turning 20 on Aug. 19th. Even though it lacks a "Super" key ("Windows" key for people using Windows), nothing else can come close to its feel. Of course, I can always spring for a Das Keyboard or the ilk, but why?
Plus, I like the irony of having a twenty-year-old keyboard attached to a modern, liquid-cooled PC.
--- At my sig, unleash hell.
There's nothing like playing with simulated old gear, e.g. with simh, using old operating systems; but playing with old Unices also has its charm.
cpghost at Cordula's Web.
For my geek nostalgia fix I fire up my Amiga 500 or 1200. The sound of those floppy drives just gives me shivers: I'm instantly 12 again. I also constantly try to find BBSes that are still active, but it's just not the same these days. Using them used to feel like straight from a cyberpunk novel...
What's also pretty cool (for me): Digger, my first ever computer game. While playing it I feel like 10 on my dad's 8086 IBM clone.
The only problem with my old computers is the famous WAF. My Lady doesn't appreciate those old gray 'things' around.
cat
My first iMac G3 as a coffee table at my tech shop, a couple of Amigas and commodores at the shop's retro corner. Still brings nostalgia to some of my clients.
Roses are red, violets are blue, most poems rhyme, but this one doesn't...
My first real pc was somewhat akin to Frankenstein's monster. It was cobbled together from used parts my cousin had bought by palette load at a government auction. We spent a few days somewhat randomly cobbling things together using his clone pc as a blueprint for what we should end up with. Took a few processors before we figured out there was a difference between socket types. All I remember now is that it was a 66mhz AMD. A 486, I believe. I had no case, so it just sat on my desktop in pieces and was used until I hucked it at fourteen when my parents bought me a clone from The Brick. Such a shame.
Very old skool - Basic, 8bits, a few kB of RAM and ROM. Moving it from 68K ASM to C was very un-retro of me.
Much fun trying to squeeze the code in, managing memory one byte at a time, no OS, no debugger, and it actually worked!
I'm sorry to spam an url, but with this program I exactly tried to recreate that old-school feeling: http://www.vanheusden.com/banihstypos/ It is a program I used to play on my MSX home computer, 25 years (or so) ago. For extra nostalgia feeling it doesn't use any fance X11/SDL/whatever but runs on the console.
www.vanheusden.com - home of Multitail, HTTPing, CoffeeSaint, EntropyBroker, rsstail, bsod, listener, nagcon, nagi
i used to hook up my old oric (thompson, because my msx1 was already deep-fried ) to my video mixer to vj, 10 minutes to generate some logo's on the screen and a perfect backup for when my pc's got overheated (or messed up by vibrations)
for more old-school nostalgy, playing with microcontrollers could do the trick (okok they're a lot more recent, but risc assembler comes close to the old stuff, hooked a simple composite b/w output by using 2 pull up resistors to generate a video signal on a pic16 )
Not to pimp my company, but that's one of the reasons why I work for GOG.com; I own most of the games that we sell from back when they were new. I get my nostalgia fix every day at work, which is pretty awesome. Although occasionally I go to my Linux computer and go to shell just to feel like I can still do computer things.
TheEnigmaticT www.gog.com
DOC.TOS on Atari 520ST (Defender of the Crown), oh the memories :)
However there was a way to always win it, just start in the region most south-west, immediately move your armies down towards Cornwall.
As soon as the Normand who started in Cornwall moved out of there, you went in and attacked him. He always left 3 soldiers to defend his castle, just enough to always kill'em off with your three Greek Fire from the catapult. After that you were way more powerful than the others :)
Probable impossibilities are to be preferred to improbable possibilities.
Aristotele
I still use a Pickett 500ES slide rule for fast calulations. Three parts, no batteries and I can have the math done before you can open the calulator on your PC or smartphone.
Sure the ROMs are running in an emulator on a modern machine, but nothing beats a game of Mule with some friends for nostalgia.
Pulling out an old computer and seeing if I could get a pre-1.0 linux kernel loaded was what I did up until the hardware was finally recycled. Ahh, the days when command line skills really made the geek.
Okay, black boxing is out, but looking over old copies of 2600 is a walk down memory lane.
Karma: 0 (But I wield a mean +10 Vorpal Apathy)
My desk at home is a gigantic wraparound IKEA special. I work partly from home, so it's decked out with a 20" iMac, the 24" Cinema Display that I connect my MacBook Pro to, an Officejet, 3 PCs yoked together using a KVM, various chargers, an older Asus EEE 901, my radios, paperwork, and docks for the iPad and iPhone.
Amongst all that high-techery are a batch of diecast race cars, a Newton MessagePad 2100, and a black restored rotary phone. It's in perfect condition, and has been retrofitted with a modular jack. I don't dial it often (obviously), but I answer all my calls on it because it just sounds so much better than any cordless or cell phone that I've ever used.
Whenever I turn on the Newton, I remind myself of how awesome that could be on modern hardware. It's still a great mobile OS.
-- Josh Turiel
"2. Do not eat iPod Shuffle."
I've still got the old Apple ][ wire-bound manuals. Yeah, I know, it's extremely unlikely that I'll ever again go poking into the assembly code of Apple DOS, but I've just never been able to consign those manuals to the trash bin.
I've also still got the manuals for the TRS-80 Color Computer. I can still flip them open and immediately remember writing programs using those exact BASIC commands.
Elite
I have a couple of hard cover IBM equipment brochures from the early 1960's and box of colored Hollerith punch cards from the 1970's and a couple of reels of tape complete with write-protect rings. Anything later than 1975 or so is to new to generate feelings of nostalgia.
Ctrl+Esc, Type R, Type CMD, Hit Enter. :)
Or for the mouse driven/Windows 7 crowd, Click on Start ==> Run ==> Type CMD ==> Click OK.
I get my nostalgia fix by blowing some air into an old cartridge and firing up the NES. Yup, my 20 year old NES is still plugged in and working :)
~Syberz
...not piss off my girl and not keep a bunch of old junk I never use laying around.
:-) There's nothing like a big ground glass and rich flawless huge prints made from very accurately exposed transparencies... That process keeps me grounded in a digital world. For snapshots I use my iPhone 4 which, despite the low resolution, takes very rich digital photos. My 35mm film camera hasn't seen the light of day for a very long time.
We lead a minimalist lifestyle. It makes moving a helluva lot easier though we'll be in our current (did I mention new?) house for a very long time. Neither of us like clutter or stacks of tubs containing junk that will rarely be used again.
There is one piece of very old gear I use a lot... my 6x6cm twin lens reflex camera (circa 1962) and my Gossen Luna Pro light meter.
I'm an analog film geek and am a sucker for large Cibachrome prints made from large transparencies
Don't kid yourself. It's the size of the regexp AND how you use it that counts.
i always shutdown my ubuntu from the terminal :D
sudo shutdown -p now
it makes me happy
Conversing with all you old bastards is enough for me!
Maybe I got stuck in the early 90s, but the way I used computers then and how I use them now hasn't changed much. I prefer console software - mutt, links, and so on. (Slashdot on Lynx is better, frankly, for reading). I just got done building a gopher server for my home intranet (pygopher works great), and am a regular on Usenet. Just built my own news server, and my current project is a FreeBSD box and modem just so I can learn how the "other side" works when you dial into an ISP.
I'm mostly unimpressed by modern apps, and did serious, daily work on a PIII 550Mhz laptop from 2000 (Linux console mode) until last week when it finally kicked the bucket. Love reading stories about people whose definition of "Old" is a Pentium. Holy crap.
If this were Usenet, I'd killfile the lot of you.
Some of us haven't seen a need to migrate TO XP!
(Still running 98se in multiple boot with three Linux distros)
... on an emulated speccy, admittedly.
Every end has half a stick.
Read a technical article from an old Byte magazine or find some old files I downloaded from a BBS or read an early edition of Phrack.
viewing slashdot in Lynx is both functional and capable of producing all sorts of spontaneous instances of gooey* nostalgia :-)
*no pun intended.
J/\/
I remember the day I moved from Zork to "multi-player Zork."
A SNES? Emulators?
This is bound to sound a bit hokey but I don't believe emulators provide the same kind of experience. For starters, you're not going to have the original controllers unless you get some kind of adaptor. Sound emulation often isn't quite right, and a computer monitor is likely to be a bit too crisp for a lot of those old games. (Deinterlacing can have a bad effect as well...) But there's also issues of the experience that frames the game - the tactile nature of dealing with cartridges, the limitations on (or complete lack of support for) saving games, and how that affects the experience.
As a basic example of this "framing experience" thing - I enjoy going to the arcade and playing House of the Dead (when I can find it) - the game is kind of cheap sometimes, and it's kind of a quarter-pumper by nature, but I think if it were the same game but set on "free play" it wouldn't be fun, because there would be no more sense of urgency in trying to avoid getting killed.
Even the basic process of trying to get a cartridge (within an agreeable price range) can be part of this - if it's hard to find the game you want at a price you're willing to pay, that increases the apparent value of the game, and (assuming it's one you really want to play) you may want it for a while but not get it. Instant gratification (i.e. downloading a ROM) makes me less likely to stick with a game.
Bow-ties are cool.
I think this qualifies as "Geek Nostalgia": Lately I've been watching Star Trek:TNG on Netflix. Starting with the first season. I thought season 1 was just going to be really, really bad, but... I don't know, I'm enjoying it. Maybe just 'cause it's a bit kitschy, maybe 'cause it actually has a bit of TOS flavor to it but with higher production values (and I'm not just talking about the two TOS episode rehashes in the first three stories), maybe 'cause I remember watching those episodes as a kid (and never really felt the hatred for the Wesley character)
Bow-ties are cool.
I kept most of my magazines :-) You can also find some issues of old computer magazines available for reading on the internet here: http://www.atarimagazines.com/ (Not just Atari magazines, they have a few others too).
Coder's Stone: The programming language quick ref for iPad
I'm fine with a picture of my old TI 99/4A on my desktop. I don't need the actual device to appreciate it.
“Common sense is not so common.” — Voltaire
That would be non sequitur.
“Common sense is not so common.” — Voltaire
2. My original TI 99-4/A, monitor, tape drive and cartridges are in the attic and make an appearance every 3 years or so.
3. DOSBox on my MacbookPro allows me to play any public domain PC games. Currently about to finish Ultima IV for the 30th time.
4. Go to work. I'm amazed anything can run on this 10 year old crap, but hey, I remember how to support it.
I use on of the rare-but-still around public access *nix boxes, the SDF runs one.
if you ssh as new@sdf.org, you can get a free account or 666 days, and $1 plus postage brings you a account that will not expire. There is even hunt, nethack, and a mud.
73 KJ4IPS CL
I, too, eventually parted with my Byte and CC collection and bitterly regret it. To get my nostalgia fix, I use emulators. I have my Apple II, IIgs, MacSE (whose physical implementation remains in my attic), a Lisa (whose historical importance is very high, IMHO), an HP85, and IBM 1130 (the first machine I ever used in college), various Commodore machines including the C64, a Lilith (yes, I did do professional work on a Lilith, once), Digi-Comp I and II emulators and, of course, my Olivetti Programma 101 emulator of the first computer I ever touched, that I wrote myself. Oh, yeah - the Apple II emulators run Apple Pascal, and I have a CPM emulator running V4 of the UCSD System. How's all that score on the old nostalgia meter?
I went to Vintage Computer Festival a few times, and when it stopped happening on the west coast, I started running my own, much smaller, very Atari-oriented Atari Party out near Sacramento.
Last weekend I took the train down to California Extreme to play some old video games (and my 4yo likes the older pinball games a lot). I wish Classic Gaming Expo weren't back in Las Vegas, or I'd go to it.
Plus, I still read comp.sys.atari.8bit on Usenet over an SSH connection to my ISP's shell server. :)
I call get off my lawn too. You don't build a PC you plug the bits in. Nostalgia is remembering playing games like spacewar on a PDP, building your own S-100 machine, using a BASIC interpreter with a footprint smaller than 1KB, and the excitement you felt when you held your first Z80A.
The new right fascists are bilingual. They speak English and Bullshit.
I have Y-Fronts older than him
The new right fascists are bilingual. They speak English and Bullshit.
I was noodling around on the web and came across a site that was running an really good instruction set emulator for a PDP-11. I was amazed at how they were running the ancient DEC operating system, RSX, and you could open a window with the MCR> prompt in it. It was so fuckin cool to remember how I use to PIP files around and shit like that.
Turned it on and it all worked. Surprisingly, the disks I've tried are still working perfectly as far as I can tell.
I don't know what I'll do with this equipment in another 30 years, but it was satisfying to hear my wife exclaim "wow! I forgot how primitive those things looked!" when she saw the green monochrome display and fixed font. Now will my kid be impressed in a few years? Who knows.
Never hit your grandmother with a shovel, for it leaves a bad impression on her mind...
Im shocked your referring to this stuff as old, haha.
"The space elevator will be built about 50 years after everyone stops laughing." - Arthur C. Clarke ~1980
Dial your own phone number and enjoy the busy signal... It will be like you are calling into the most elite BBS ever!
I used to be able to diagnose a modem's connection by listening to it's handshake! I'm so glad those days are gone :)
Encryption: I may not agree with what you say, but I will defend your right to encrypt it...
because it's been 10 years since my last post.
I play Nintendo 64 games - Super Mario 64 and Zelda Ocarina of Time. Their 3D game play was just amazing when it debuted. It was the same impact as the first time I played Spacewar back in the day, or saw my first HP-35 calculator.
"It's the height of ridiculousness to say for those 9 lines you get hundreds of millions."
As someone rapidly approaching 40, I've got to say it. You're old! :)
Xenon, where's my money? -Borno
Not that much older than you my friend. I was just in the right places around the right people at the right time.
In 1998, I think.
When I want to feel nostalgic, I look at the BillG as borg logo, and remember when I truly did hate Microsoft and think they were such a terrible threat. I like to think about the Halloween documents and how exciting and subversive all that was.
I don't make the rules. I just make fun of them.