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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."
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.
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)
HP-48GX calculator in my desk. I have had it for about 14 years now, and I still use it every day.
"Get a life"!
I go to textfiles.com and read some of the old docs I remember from my BBS days.
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.
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..."
Man, go buy a 486DX. Those SX systems do indeed suck.
Rethinking email
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.
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?
...alive and well!
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." :)
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.
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.
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.
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)