It makes me feel constrained in a good way, neither older or younger. For me it's like playing with Lego's. Then I also do microcontroller, mini Risc-V electronics and programming that feels similar, though embedded systems are incredibly more powerful in different aspects.
Neither. I like retro gaming and it’s interesting to appreciate it for what it was and how things evolved, but it does nothing to my sense of self or age.
I don’t know if retrocomputing makes me feel younger or older, but it makes me feel nostalgic for the younger days of computing. My retrocomputing niches are classic Macs, NeXT (I own a few machines, including a NeXT cube), and older versions of Windows (pre-XP). I dream of owning a Symbolics Lisp machine, but they are very expensive whenever they show up on the market.
Neither it makes me feel nostalgic. I remember going to DEF CON and playing with classic Mac OS using a real Mac and it was magical. I think its similar to someone using an old Porche 911.
It reintroduces control of your own destiny when things were much simpler. The complexity of gaming and programming nowadays means you are far removed from the HW.
It makes me sad, the contrast between then and now, as we're fighting for the right to run arbitrary code and on a path to losing it. Applications have been replaced by apps for many who don't use or see the benefit of desktops over mobile.
I do some occasional tool and game programming for 8-bit machines for fun because it's so close to the metal and different from modern software development. It has nothing to do with feeling older or younger.
I also despise forced anachronistic "retro" graphics "aesthetic" and I'll never again play new games that feature overly blocky "pixel art". I've had enough of that in my childhood, it's ugly, almost always uninspired and lazy, and I really don't want to see it anymore.
I feel the same about old HW as I do old cars: some deserve historical recognition for their importance, and I'm thankful for the uh, passionately committed people who maintain them against all odds and sometimes at ridiculous expense, so that these important historical icons remain, but they are the past, and I don't live there anymore.
While we can learn from them and their inventors/creators, if we choose, I'm much happier with my rock solid highly reliable five year old RAM and my new MacBook Pro. I've driven a lot of the Jeeps ever made, and off-road I'll take my JKU Rubicon over any of them (except maybe the 2004 "LJ") any day. It's a beast to maintain mostly because I am beastly to it, and the older ones are worse for that.
I don’t rush after the newest and shiniest (my M3 replaced a 2013 Air), but when it's time, the RAM and JKU will be replaced with new.
Well, I run a retro-computing web site (https://twostopbits.com/) based on the Hacker News Arc code (https://github.com/jgrahamc/twostopbits) and the site makes me neither feel young or old. And not even particularly nostalgic. I mostly remember things I had great fun with a long time ago and it's fun to read about them again. I do like the preservation part of retro computing and helping keep things working, but even that is partly just personal satisfaction of making something work (again). For example: https://blog.jgc.org/2023/12/restoration-of-ibm-thinkpad-701...
I think I can speak to this a bit since I run a hobby business[0] selling restored Mac mini G4s (originally from 2005) with a hacked version of Mac OS 9 on them from Mac OS 9 Lives so that retro computer users (people still using production software for Mac OS 9) can have the fastest possible machine to run classic Mac OS. After selling more than 60 of them, my customers (from what I can tell) are largely in five categories:
- People doing this for their kids so the kids can use the software of their parent's youth (my own motivation that led me to fall into this [1])
- People doing this for work (still using old music production software for example)
- People doing this because they care about historical software (had a couple museum curators buy one)
- People who are tinkerers but want to tinker with software not hardware so they buy from me
- Retro gamers
In all of these cases I don't think it's really about feeling old or young. It's just about doing something that they perceive as better than they can achieve on a modern machine. And by "better" I mean better to them. Not objectively better. They just love those games from the 90s. Or they just think that the educational software back then was less addictive/better for their kids than the software today.
Sure, if we think about anything from our distant past it can make us feel old. But I think it's more that this hobby (or work) actually serves a purpose for these customers and they don't think along the old/young axis.
Yep! My family's first computer was 21 years old in 2005. (I remember scouring the classified ads in the newspaper each week with my dad in late 1987 to find the best computer deal we could. We wound up with an Apple //c from 1984.)
The difference between machines in the 2000s and 1980s is much, much larger than the difference between machines now and machines in the 2000s, though, making the "retro" timeline nonlinear.
It's not really that the computer itself is retro, it's that people use it for retro computing because it's pretty much the fastest Mac you can get that can still run Mac OS 9 (1999). People then run games and apps from systems 1-9. So people buy this computer from 2005 to run an operating system from 1999 to run apps from 1984 to 1999.
Yeah for me OS9 is pretty retro - Classic Mac OS was great with some awesome apps many of which didn't make it into OSX and using the classic emulator in OSX doesn't help the experience.
The Mini is a great compact hardware platform to run them on. I have four minis that run various Mac OS generations.
A thought dawned on me this morning when I was thinking about the Power Mac G5, which came out around the time I first started getting into Macs: over 20 years have elapsed since the release of the Power Mac G5 (and it's been almost 20 years since the release of the original Mac Mini). 20 years ago was the 20th anniversary of the original Macintosh 128K. The Macintosh 128K was decidedly retro back in 2004. Even though the curve of evolution between 2004 and 2024 is much flatter than the curve between 1984 and 2004, I still consider a 20 year-old computer retro, even if a Mac Mini G4 or a Power Mac G5 is much closer to contemporary Macs than a Macintosh 128K was to a Mac Mini G4.
I am born in the early nineties, so what I consider retro probably sounds surprisingly modern to some HNers. But I love replaying older games occasionally, emulating the Nintendo64 for example. Or using my actual N64.
I guess in some ways it makes me feel older when I talk about this with friends whom are younger and have missed the N64 generation, for example. But I don’t mind, I will embrace the “old man yells at clouds” when the time comes.
Older, when retro computers were new they were exciting because they suggested an amazing future. That future didn't materialize (thanks to the MS-ification of the world). It's impossible to reconstruct that original feeling (with retro hardware).
Younger. As someone who never could afford a computer as a kid or teen, and not much people around me had one either, while I felt really really attracted to them and to tech in general there was nothing I could do abut it. Other than dreaming about getting one some day.
So now that I can have a few of them, every time I get one I feel like a kid.
Not that I buy them by the dozens or I'm becoming a collector, that's something I can't do nor want to do, but getting something new (old, but new to me) once a year or every couple allows me to discover all that I missed. Since I'm not "re"discovering it, it's all new to me in a sense.
People will glorify retro stuff but if you say you're using OpenGL 2 to support cheap hardware they ask why you don't use 4 and some new high-end feature
There's a valley where something is old enough to be uncool but not old enough to be cool again
Neither? I appreciate old hardware and software because of what it could achieve despite its limitations - because it's simpler, with fewer levels of abstractions piled upon each other, which makes it easier to understand.
The other day, I wanted something to hack on (wanting to use Linux to automatically play useful & fun playlists on a cron - but don't want it dependent on my MacBook). Looked through the closet, and realized I had given my Raspberry Pi to a friend - what else could I program on? Then I had a thought - I wonder how powerful the computers used for "POS" (point of sale / cashiers) are? I went to a local tech-oriented mall, and found many vendors selling small form-factor computers. I found a Dell computer, small case, with 8-16 GB of memory, Intell Core i5 processor, 256-512 GB solid state storage - price range was $150-250 USD.
I bought one! When I got home, I was thinking - wow, it's been awhile since making a bootable linux USB drive. After figuring that out, the computer booted nicely into Debian, install was easy, but it brought back all these memories from college (at that time, I was using Mandrake and Gentoo - also on a Dell!).
My mind - full of ideas & possibilities, have been plugging random things into it to see what works - Logitech 3D Extreme flight stick: Yes! Yamaha keyboard - let's see!
I'm now on a journey to figure out how to get the sound system to work at root-level (so that 'cron' can play audio when a user's not logged in)
The whole point of the comment is that (1) this is so much fun, (2) Feels surprisingly good to be in open-source labd and not in MacOS world, (3) Debian Linux feels like a sturdy workhorse tool (4) Exploring the creative possibilities of open source tooling (and having patience for their user interfaces). For example, Inkscape, Blender 3D, music production.
Note: Even Steam worked, and the first game I installed (Lovers in a Dangerous Spacetime) worked on the first try (!).
If you're in end-of-year tinker mode, consider picking up a used "mini computer" ("mini" is relative!) - slapping Linux on it, and making something cool.
I was enjoying this comment very much, and then nearly got whiplash from the twist at the end! Wow. Rediscovers Debian and all the creative possibliites of open source tooling, and then at the end, sits back for a nice proprietary gaming session.
No judgment on a personal level, they have lovely games, of course, and it sounds like a nice ending - but there's so many wonderful games to try inside of the "open-source" realm! Here's a list I was perusing the other day, being quite amazed at all the stuff that was there:
Thanks for sharing that link! My brothers and I used to play Command & Conquer, so I'm interested in trying OpenRA (https://www.openra.net/). Maybe you've got ideas on this - I'd love to find a space game that's sort of a mix of Elite Dangerous & X4.
Thanks for bearing with the whiplash - my usual approach with open-source is that I try to figure out what the absolute best commercially-available tool is to solve a problem, then I go find out the best open-source equivalent and invest in that for the long term. Recent example (in speech synthesis): I'm prototyping with ElevenLabs (commercial/proprietary), and then investing in PiperTTS (open-source).
I wonder if I had a demo of Command & Conquer on a CD we got from some magazine back in the day, because shots from the game seem oddly familiar, and we used to play the odd demo like that on our family Windows XP machine. Not sure if I'm imagining it.
OpenRA looks very cool! Added to the list! I'm only picking games back up myself, last I was hard at it was the PS2 a couple of decades ago nearly now. So I could only tell you what an internet search would tell you, i.e.,
I did try Endless Sky recently though, and haven't gotten into the meat of the gameplay, but an hour in, and I think I like where it's going. More space trading, but the storyline is cool, and I like the feel of it.
Otherwise, maybe a bit left field, but perhaps something like
Have yet to try it, but a thread on here about MUDs that I found had a few people who swore by it, so I was very tempted! Terry Pratchett is great, so I imagine the MUD could be very, very fun to get lost in (plus I've discovered MUDs exist, and want to try one).
I'm seperating concerns here with a seperate answer: I do exactly the opposite, when it comes to software! I started "learning computers" a few years ago, rather than just pointing and clicking in a Windows 7 laptop, understanding nothing, hoping it all works, being vaguely terrified something might go wrong, panicking if it does.
I moved to Linux (Ubuntu first, then tons of distro-hopping, etc etc). I look at what's available in the repositories, and allow that to frame my universe. You don't miss what you don't know.
So there's a chance I could be missing some wonderful stuff, sure. However, I've found a solution for everything I've needed at every stage of the past 4 odd years. My understanding has skyrocketed, no real expertise but tons of little things I was terrified of before now seem standard to me, and I feel that exploring terminals and operating systems and text editors and so on has been a big part of that.
Documentation and tutorials and all on that side of the "tech world" seem just lovely, and like they're not trying to trick me into anything. Going "open-source-first-and-only", with extremely rare exceptions if I absolutely must, was the key for me there.
I understand how not everyone's personal and professional situation permits them to do that though, just sharing my perspective :)
Retro gaming is a necessity: modern games, like most modern software, are too good at manipulating the player's psychology and I certainly won't let my kids play free-to-play crap or let them on social media.
For myself: I genuinely like old games more than modern (with a few exceptions, eg. Balatro comes to mind)
I don't see a lot of appeal for retro programming; sure, dependency hell was not a problem in the past and tooling was simpler, but modern stacks have a series of productivity multipliers. You need to be careful in selecting the right technologies - but after that you are literally flying compared to old SDKs.
73 comments
[ 1.4 ms ] story [ 145 ms ] threadIt's when I start to think about dates, that it makes me feel old.
I also despise forced anachronistic "retro" graphics "aesthetic" and I'll never again play new games that feature overly blocky "pixel art". I've had enough of that in my childhood, it's ugly, almost always uninspired and lazy, and I really don't want to see it anymore.
While we can learn from them and their inventors/creators, if we choose, I'm much happier with my rock solid highly reliable five year old RAM and my new MacBook Pro. I've driven a lot of the Jeeps ever made, and off-road I'll take my JKU Rubicon over any of them (except maybe the 2004 "LJ") any day. It's a beast to maintain mostly because I am beastly to it, and the older ones are worse for that.
I don’t rush after the newest and shiniest (my M3 replaced a 2013 Air), but when it's time, the RAM and JKU will be replaced with new.
Remembering things you had great fun with or found meaningful a long time ago is nostalgia.
- People doing this for their kids so the kids can use the software of their parent's youth (my own motivation that led me to fall into this [1])
- People doing this for work (still using old music production software for example)
- People doing this because they care about historical software (had a couple museum curators buy one)
- People who are tinkerers but want to tinker with software not hardware so they buy from me
- Retro gamers
In all of these cases I don't think it's really about feeling old or young. It's just about doing something that they perceive as better than they can achieve on a modern machine. And by "better" I mean better to them. Not objectively better. They just love those games from the 90s. Or they just think that the educational software back then was less addictive/better for their kids than the software today.
Sure, if we think about anything from our distant past it can make us feel old. But I think it's more that this hobby (or work) actually serves a purpose for these customers and they don't think along the old/young axis.
0: https://os9.shop 1: https://x.com/davekopec/status/1780032912768770448
https://obsolescence.dev/obsolescence-newsletter-dec-2024.ht...
Now excuse me, I need to go chase some whippersnappers off of my lawn.
The difference between machines in the 2000s and 1980s is much, much larger than the difference between machines now and machines in the 2000s, though, making the "retro" timeline nonlinear.
The Mini is a great compact hardware platform to run them on. I have four minis that run various Mac OS generations.
I guess in some ways it makes me feel older when I talk about this with friends whom are younger and have missed the N64 generation, for example. But I don’t mind, I will embrace the “old man yells at clouds” when the time comes.
So now that I can have a few of them, every time I get one I feel like a kid.
Not that I buy them by the dozens or I'm becoming a collector, that's something I can't do nor want to do, but getting something new (old, but new to me) once a year or every couple allows me to discover all that I missed. Since I'm not "re"discovering it, it's all new to me in a sense.
People will glorify retro stuff but if you say you're using OpenGL 2 to support cheap hardware they ask why you don't use 4 and some new high-end feature
There's a valley where something is old enough to be uncool but not old enough to be cool again
I bought one! When I got home, I was thinking - wow, it's been awhile since making a bootable linux USB drive. After figuring that out, the computer booted nicely into Debian, install was easy, but it brought back all these memories from college (at that time, I was using Mandrake and Gentoo - also on a Dell!).
My mind - full of ideas & possibilities, have been plugging random things into it to see what works - Logitech 3D Extreme flight stick: Yes! Yamaha keyboard - let's see!
I'm now on a journey to figure out how to get the sound system to work at root-level (so that 'cron' can play audio when a user's not logged in)
The whole point of the comment is that (1) this is so much fun, (2) Feels surprisingly good to be in open-source labd and not in MacOS world, (3) Debian Linux feels like a sturdy workhorse tool (4) Exploring the creative possibilities of open source tooling (and having patience for their user interfaces). For example, Inkscape, Blender 3D, music production.
Note: Even Steam worked, and the first game I installed (Lovers in a Dangerous Spacetime) worked on the first try (!).
If you're in end-of-year tinker mode, consider picking up a used "mini computer" ("mini" is relative!) - slapping Linux on it, and making something cool.
No judgment on a personal level, they have lovely games, of course, and it sounds like a nice ending - but there's so many wonderful games to try inside of the "open-source" realm! Here's a list I was perusing the other day, being quite amazed at all the stuff that was there:
https://www.slant.co/topics/1933/~best-open-source-games
Ones that caught my eye were endless sky, teeworlds, hedgewars, but there are actually loads.
Thanks for bearing with the whiplash - my usual approach with open-source is that I try to figure out what the absolute best commercially-available tool is to solve a problem, then I go find out the best open-source equivalent and invest in that for the long term. Recent example (in speech synthesis): I'm prototyping with ElevenLabs (commercial/proprietary), and then investing in PiperTTS (open-source).
OpenRA looks very cool! Added to the list! I'm only picking games back up myself, last I was hard at it was the PS2 a couple of decades ago nearly now. So I could only tell you what an internet search would tell you, i.e.,
https://alternativeto.net/category/games/space-game/?license...
https://github.com/akarnokd/open-ig
I did try Endless Sky recently though, and haven't gotten into the meat of the gameplay, but an hour in, and I think I like where it's going. More space trading, but the storyline is cool, and I like the feel of it.
Otherwise, maybe a bit left field, but perhaps something like
http://discworld.starturtle.net/lpc/
Have yet to try it, but a thread on here about MUDs that I found had a few people who swore by it, so I was very tempted! Terry Pratchett is great, so I imagine the MUD could be very, very fun to get lost in (plus I've discovered MUDs exist, and want to try one).
I moved to Linux (Ubuntu first, then tons of distro-hopping, etc etc). I look at what's available in the repositories, and allow that to frame my universe. You don't miss what you don't know.
So there's a chance I could be missing some wonderful stuff, sure. However, I've found a solution for everything I've needed at every stage of the past 4 odd years. My understanding has skyrocketed, no real expertise but tons of little things I was terrified of before now seem standard to me, and I feel that exploring terminals and operating systems and text editors and so on has been a big part of that.
Documentation and tutorials and all on that side of the "tech world" seem just lovely, and like they're not trying to trick me into anything. Going "open-source-first-and-only", with extremely rare exceptions if I absolutely must, was the key for me there.
I understand how not everyone's personal and professional situation permits them to do that though, just sharing my perspective :)
Retro gaming is a necessity: modern games, like most modern software, are too good at manipulating the player's psychology and I certainly won't let my kids play free-to-play crap or let them on social media.
For myself: I genuinely like old games more than modern (with a few exceptions, eg. Balatro comes to mind)
I don't see a lot of appeal for retro programming; sure, dependency hell was not a problem in the past and tooling was simpler, but modern stacks have a series of productivity multipliers. You need to be careful in selecting the right technologies - but after that you are literally flying compared to old SDKs.
Anything before that makes me younger, in a look at the neat things the old people used to use.