Diary of a Retro Computing Geek – January 2017 (part 3)

I’ve always felt very lucky to have been born when I was. I was born in 1971 (and Share my birthday with Elvis Presley and David Bowie) and this means that I was 10 years old when the ZX81 came out (my first computer); 11 when the Spectrum came out; 16 when the Amiga 500 came out and so on. I feel that I and anyone else born around that time were just about old enough to witness and be part of the computer boom.

We’ve experienced the euphoric joy and in turn the extreme difficulties in making computers work with things like cassettes, 5.25” floppy disks, 3.5” floppy disks; hard disks (that had to have their heads “parked” before you could turn off the computer); acoustic coupler modems; token ring networks; RAM that was measured in KB; Operating systems that were all command line based (CPM, MSDOS etc) but man it was awesome! To have been part of the industry in the early to mid 80’s and on, whether creating and contributing or just consuming the output, it truly felt magical.

Sometimes it didn’t feel all that magical at the time however - trying to get dodgy disks or tapes working for the 10th time or having to wait until midnight (because phone calls were much cheaper then) to use my wee Commodore 300 Baud Modem to dial into the University and play MUD but time and nostalgia changes that frustration into something that feels different to me now.

We were early adopters of communication portals; whether it was just visiting the old Ceefax or Teletext, or getting actually “on line” with services like the excellent Compunet, or later when the first BBS’s came around. Then the first Internet providers made an appearance, and the process for connecting to them was cumbersome, but the browser (Mosaic) looked good when I got it to display anything but I distinctly remember thinking “I’ll just stick with my Favourite BBS’ because there was more there and it was faster”. Haha – things soon changed.

I believe that my generation (and maybe 5 to 10 years either side of it too) who are still into these old computers and systems; keeping them alive; playing their games; making them do things they weren’t designed for (because we can) and creating brand new technology for them - do so because we loved these brand new electronic computer things when we first plugged them in and sat in awe as its output appeared on our black and white portable TVs (or if very lucky – a colour TV!); we revelled in the challenges and exulted when we got them to work and perform well or do new things. We’re the generation who, in our working life experienced “office computerisation”, when businesses started to adopt a computer system to do finances, or word processing etc. We want to hold on to that time and remember it with respect for what it was – because it was a moment in time that won’t come around again. I can’t imagine a kid who is 11 or 12 years old, looking back 30 or so years from now and waxing lyrical about the PS4 or Xbox One, and I think that is because computer technology is a commodity now. It’s as present and normal in our Western world as turning on a tap and getting water.

So whilst we remain the generation of computer geeks of the 70’s and 80’s – we’ll continue to lap up the new innovations for our lovely machines and we’ll keep happily buying into the nostalgia.

With that in mind – you don’t need to look too far to see brand new technology making an appearance or about to make an appearance; such as the Spectrum Next; the handheld Vega+; new Amiga 1200 cases; replacement Key Caps; Vampire accelerators; Compact Flash solutions for just about every 8 and 16 bit machine from the day; the FPGA MIST; Gotek Floppy drive replacements and so on. The list is almost endless.