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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.
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.
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 keep my Commodore on the desktop, plugged in, READY. Right next to the 1541 (disk drive, for the young-un's) and 1702 (monitor). The other 1541 is plugged into a 386. I download software (written in the 80s) off the internet, save to floppy (3.5 inch) transfer to 386, and save to a REAL floppy (5.25 inch) for use in the '64.
And when I really want to get my nostalgia on, I read some old-school Compute!, Compute!'s Gazette, or RUN (all available in .pdf online).