’cause they so often bring a smile to our face?
— Arthur! 
So, what did she upgrade to? Mac Classic? Palm?
I dunno dude, but I was sick at Oregon Trail
I had a //e and then a Mac when they first came out. I wish I still had them though when we gave them away I didn’t think anything of it. I’m holding on to the 1400c that got me through college though – I know better now.
— Evan
“Why are we so attached to the things we’re attached to?” – beats me, but you’ll have to prise my Commodore 64 out of my cold, dead hands.
In the case of old computers, it reminds us of the excitement and curiosity we had when learning all about them. Imagine – there’s a machine, you can tell it what to do, and it _does it_!
— Jim
With every passing year, we get older, and start noticing all the horrible things the world has to offer us, things we never noticed earlier. Those little memories (in my case, it was my Atari 600XL computer, and my Omni magazines from ‘79-’80) are like little oases of tranquility; they give us an anchor to hold on to, to remind us that no matter how bad things are, or how much the world changes, there will always be that little piece of home to comfort us.
— Sherif Tariq
Mmmm… Apple //e goodness. Far too many hours at Wizardry and Lode Runner for my own good. Though — oddly — I never owned one, just jonesed off friends. I pine for the easy days of yore with my VIC-20 and my original Mac ($3299 w/ Imagewriter printer, MacWrite and MacPaint!).
With all this nostalga, the first apple ad is worth looking at.
http://www.zock.com/8-Bit/Ad_Apple-I.GIF
That logo is hideous for a tech firm, no?
I definitely think it’s a comfort factor. It’s also rare, I think, for adults to enjoy something for the sheer joy of it. We feel guilty if we’re not doing a milliong things at once, getting to sit endless hours at a time playing with something that has no (visible) redeeming value is unthinkable. I think things from our past take us back to those moments when we did things simply because it was fun. Sure, maybe we were learning something, but that wasn’t the main reason for doing it.
I still have the typewriter that I used all through high school and the firts years of college. I haven’t used it in forever, but whenever I look at that, I remember fondly sitting in front of it and banging out my ‘writing’. It helped me create some truly questionable teenage poetry, but hey, who didn’t write crappy poetry in their teens? :)
— patricia
I wrote mine on that Apple //e. :)
— Mark
Mark, you just answered your own question.
diveintocrappyteenagepoetry.org, here we come…
— Mark
I had saved my crappy teenage poetry to floppy disks, which I tried to open recently. Luckily my modern computer failed to read the disks…
— Richard
Mark, have you taken a look at http://superfluousbanter.org/archives/000105.php yet?
Mark — you might be interested in this old post on my site:
http://www.laze.net/fait/archive/2000_08_01_archive.php#720748
It describes simply how to transfer files from your Apple II to your PC. Now you can have your crappy teenage poetry on your gigantic hard drive. You will need a modem on both your PC and your Apple, though.
I, personally, kept my high school journal on my Apple (compatible), so it was great to be able to grab all those old text files and then transfer them into my PC’s journal app.
— Ryan
I loved my Amiga. It made me the man I am. Thank god for emulators!
— Paul Ford
Commodore 64 all the way. Sure the VIC 120 blew its doors off, but the C64 had that brown-on-brown three inch thick invitation to carpal tunnel keyboard I just couldn’t stay away from. I’ve still got the machine, but alas it has ceased to function so no more BASIC-y goodness without an emulator (as Paul above has pointed out). load “goodmemories”,8,1
— Nick
My two Commodore 16s trumps everybodies C64, newbies :-)
I even had them set up as terminals to my Amiga 500.
— BenM
The real question is, why not?
My dad always let me use his newest Mac he didn’t use. This worked good up and until when he gave the current “old Mac” to a friend. I had to share his Mac from there on. We never did get back the Mac, but who knows, maybe in 2013.
— Jesper
I’m nostalgic for my Apple //e because that’s the first machine I really understood top to bottom. It was also the first real computer I owned. I learned 6502 assembly and how to call it from Applesoft BASIC. I loaded Manx C and got my first Unix-like shell. I hacked on the editor Manx provided without knowing that it was vi. And then there were the games. Wizardry, with it’s invisible opponents and wire frame 3d dungeon. /(Ms )*PacMan/, Dino Eggs, Joust, LoadRunner, Repton, and on and on.
I got to try so much software, because I was stealing it. This gave me my first exposure to the issues surrounding piracy. At first I was uncritically in favor of trading software. Soon however, I was forced to recognize that software developers were losing enormous sums to piracy. I was a broke student, so I couldn’t begin to pay for the stuff I was using. So I evolved this rationalization: “I can’t afford the software I’m stealing, so the developers aren’t losing money on me. In fact, If I like their software, once I start working, I’ll buy it. Thus the piracy will have worked out to their benefit after all.” I’ve actually stuck to that rationalization to the point that it’s more like a plank in my ethical platform. I make good money, so I buy a lot of software. I never copy software now, because it’s rare that I don’t know what I’m getting when I buy.
So the Apple //e was the system on which I grew up, both technically and ethically. So that’s why I’d love to have my old system back, and would keep it forever.
— Howard
I still have a Apple Mac SE. I wish I still had our Mac 128l
My first computer was an Apple IIc. I spent the better part of my formative years on that thing (incidentally, this explains why I didn’t date much – geeks are loveable today, not so much in the mid-80’s). I wasted a lot of time on Lode Runner and Bard’s Tale. *sigh* Good times…..
— Larry
A friend dared me to post one of the poems I wrote while in my teens, and after spending a few minutes cringing and shuddering over all my teenage drama, I chickened out. i took a lot of ribbing, but I didn’t give in. Trust me. It was a good decision for all!
But I can’t wait till diveintocrappyteenagepoetry.org is live. It will be a ton of fun. :D
— Patricia
Hate to admit it, but I still have most of my original Macs, dating back to an SE. I can’t give them up. Now if they were DOS/Win machines they’d be living in Value Village…
I could use an Apple IIe with 5-1/4″ disk drives right now. Our Computer Science department was cleaning house and tossed a nice robot Turtle in the trash, complete with manual and software (runs on Apple Logo). The bot is circa 1983 and has a 20 foot long tether/serial cable. Don’t know why, but I would love to figure out how to make the thing go. Guess I’ll have to keep my eyes open at garage sales or the Goodwill, eh?
— Cheekygeek
We had an Adam computer.
Anyone remember those things?
No hard drive. It had a tape. Yeah, like a cassette tape.
I still have nightmares about hearing the swoosh swoosh swoosh when you hit “save” and had to wait for 5 minutes while the tape adjusted.
Man, that thing was horrible.
The //e was much cooler though….
— TjL
In the UK we had the Sinclair ZX80 – based on a Z80. 1k of memory. When you typed in too much code the display shrank, eventually down to 3 lines.
Then the ZX81 with only four ICs.
Then the Spectrum with 16k. I disassembled the ROM by hand – how sad is that?
The Spectrum 48K was the first computer I owned. It was brilliant. Smaller than your standard PC keyboard, yet containing everything besides the tape drive. Rubber keys too. About the only computer you could put on your lap back then, and so many killer games for it.
Then I got a Commodore 64, Atari ST and eventually a 486 PC (with a 33MHz processor and 4Mb RAM!). It didn’t have a CD-ROM drive.
I had to envy a friend who owned the original Apple computer (the one in the ad above) and another friend who had an Imsai with 8k RAM (go go programming machine code using bit switches on the front panel!).
So I wasn’t hip until I had my first Apple ][. Ended up with 4 floppy drives and an 80-column card. God, me and a friend spent weeks trying to program a Lisp interpreter in 6502 assembler.
I sold that one and would certainly like it back now, but don't miss all the others I've had to throw into landfills: an original Mac, a Lisa, a DEC VT100 terminal that I managed to attach to the Apple ][ and use as a console for the UCSD Pascal OS, and an original (2 floppy drives only) IBM PC.
I've learned my lesson though, the only hardware I have now has been paid for by employers :)
— Anonymous
Mark,
be prepared for a shock – unfortunately not all things are as good as we remember. I cut my teeth on a Sinclair Spectrum 2+, the one with the built in cassette.
I remembered learning basic, that GOTO was good (grin), and how to type in machine code by entering in very long REM statements, and overwriting them, then jumping to that address.
Of course, I was eight, so I didn’t exactly realise what I was doing. I do remember the sytax for the jump was RANDOMIZE USR(address_in_decimal).
Anyway, getting back to the point, I got rid of the Spectrum when I moved house – it wasn’t functional anyway. I tried a Z80 emulator with a Spectrum ROM loaded.
What a disappointment. This machine I’d spent *years* loading tapes that came with magazines into to play with was unbearably difficult to use. I remember how cool it was that the first letter you typed in BASIC was translated to a whole command. Now it was impossible to do anything of worth.
I had a similar experience after resurrecting my Dad’s BBC Micro B, though it’s analogue ports and the series of things he built for it made it more fun.
On the positive side, I have found that discovering old things that are new-to-me is great! I got a circa-1991 Mac SE/30 in 1999, and had loads of fun getting this 512×384 machine to run SSH, work as a terminal, and run old stuff from mac archives.
I got a 1994 DECstation 5000 and Sparc SS10 for lots of Unix history fun.
The one computer of mine I did enjoy resurrecting was my first PC, a twinhead 8086 with 20Mb HDD. I accomplished a f-ck ton of things on this machine, driving lots of custom hardware, and using the seemingly limitless space for docs and programs.
Umm. So there.
Aaron
How fitting! I intend to get back my first computer soon enough. And though it’s not 20 years old (primarily because I am), I did punch out angsty-teen poetry on it (the floppies are still around here somewhere) and my first attempts at BASIC. I miss that thing.
— Brock
Patricia’s comments above (I quoted her below) would explain an awful lot of this kind of thing:
http://www.houseinprogress.net/archives/000080.html
Comfort factor and nostalgia. I definitely long for records sometimes, though I have no feelings for 8-track tapes whatsoever. It’s why I got all excited when I visited the Chase Cafe after work in Chicago and ran my fingers along the keyboard of the Apple II in the lobby.
But if I had found a bunch of old Apple computers in here, I’d be much MUCH happier.
-j
“I definitely think it’s a comfort factor. It’s also rare, I think, for adults to enjoy something for the sheer joy of it. We feel guilty if we’re not doing a milliong things at once, getting to sit endless hours at a time playing with something that has no (visible) redeeming value is unthinkable. I think things from our past take us back to those moments when we did things simply because it was fun. Sure, maybe we were learning something, but that wasn’t the main reason for doing it.
I still have the typewriter that I used all through high school and the firts years of college. I haven’t used it in forever, but whenever I look at that, I remember fondly sitting in front of it and banging out my ‘writing’. It helped me create some truly questionable teenage poetry, but hey, who didn’t write crappy poetry in their teens?…” – Patricia
p.s. oh, right. I don’t MISS my crappy poetry but it is stashed in a box somewhere… -j
— j
Anybody up for a round of Pitfall? Those old machines had teh best games ever… and on floppy disks that were actualy floppy, if I recall. Nostalgia rocks…
— Jai
While I don’t have my original TRS 80 (loved the games on that thing) nor my Apple IIgs, I have built up such an attachment to all my computers (and equipment) since I owned my first Mac (the Mac Classic) that I have not thrown or given a single one away!
I have, on shelves in my room (not an exhaustive list, by any means), all in working condition: 128k, 512k, Plus, Classic, IIci, Centris 650, Quadra 950, Portable (the original!), PB160, PB540c, PB1400cs, and many related cables, floppy drives, mice, etc. Not to mention my collection of Newtons (including the eMate), and a few PowerComputing clones and one Radius clone.
I’m sure there’s more, I just can’t see beneath the other stuff :-)
I keep digging up interesting things from my computing past (like an AOL 2.5 floppy, still shrink-wrapped!) which is why I’m running (semi tongue-in-cheek, obviously) “The Old Technology Giveaway” at superfluous banter (http://superfluousbanter.org/archives/000105.php) — some of you should stop by and post a link to pics of this stuff, that is, if you want to win a Quadra 950 motherboard or a 3M Optical Disk ;-)
It’s a bit pointless to keep all this stuff around, but I can’t bring myself to get rid of it — every machine has a strong association with my past, and I fire each of them up every once in a while just to get a blast of nostalgia.
— Dan R.
I miss so many gadgets that I lost/broke/threw away/stopped working. My TRS-80 handheld, the size of an overgrown calculator, with a one-line display that ran a BASIC interpreter. My early-90s PoqetPC which ran for weeks on two AA batteries and had a ROM version of DOS 3.1, I believe, and was the size of a paperback book, except thinner, and possessed a keyboard more usable than anything I’ve seen on a PDA since. More recently there was the PocketMail device, circa 2000, which was phenomenally useful for that brief interval when wireless technology hadn’t caught up with miniaturization in terms of affordability and ubiquity: it let you send and receive e-mail over any phone by dialing a toll-free number, and had an acoustic coupler. I submitted more than one freelance writing assignment on that thing.
I’m still hanging on to my first CPU, a Sol-20, I built it from a kit, it must have taken at least a hundred hours. No way I’m ever pitching that machine. But I’d kill to get my hands on my first computer, a DigiComp 1.
I’d love to have some means to transfer all my old Apple][ files to my Mac, but I don’t know anyone who has an Apple anymore. Hell, I have some old files on PC 5 1/4 inch floppies I’d like to copy, but I don’t know anyone who has a PC with the proper drives. I even have tons of old 3.5in SSDD Mac disks that don’t work in modern Mac USB floppy drives.
Starting to detect a theme here? I’ve recently come to the conclusion that paper is the only proper long-term storage medium.
— Charles
re: “paper is the only proper long-term storage medium”
+1
I’ve ruminated on this before. It’s a huge problem.
http://diveintomark.org/archives/2002/01/06/aptitude
— Mark
I still have my Commodore 64 with Datassette(I/O), Commodore 128, IBM 286.
I have four Mac SEs and two Commodore 64s. The MIT Flea Market kicks ass.
One of the C64s I was forced to take, actually. I was buying an ethernet card and a box full of C64 games from l0pht who was having some kind of attic-cleaning sale at the Flea, and they said I had to take the C64 if I wanted the games.
MY C64 will never leave my possession.
— Matthew
I don’t miss old data storage methods. Originally the Commodore 64 tape unit took TWENTY MINUTES to load a game. Luckily when I bought one they’d invented “fast loaders” and the time was reduced to 5 minutes. Still laughable when games and programs load in seconds today.
Remember too you could only have 1 program running at a time. No multi-tasking or windows back then. Often a game would fail to load halfway through, so you’d curse and start again. I once left my C64 running for days just to ensure I had a loaded copy of Elite!
I then had a 5.25 floppy drive for the C64. Extre-m-e-l-y slow, but reliable. Someone once took it apart to discover it was designed to load data off the disks at only 1-BIT at a time! They hadn’t been able to make it handle a byte!
Spectrum 48K tapes were just as laborious. But who remembers the Atari ST? You had to load the Operating System off a floppy disk every time you used it!
Hours of fun were had on those machines though.
ZX-81 -> Coleco ADAM -> Amiga for me. All broken, lost, sold off, or thrown away. Stupid! Ah well. There’s always emulators.
Aaron’s post above just set off a lightbulb for me: I remember staring at the program listing for a Star Trek game on the ZX-81, wondering what those REM statemets full of gibberish characters were for. Now I finally get it!
// Someone once took it apart to discover it was designed to load data off the disks at only 1-BIT at a time! //
Don’t all drives read a bit at a time, strictly speaking?
The 154x drives were 8-bit inside (and had a similar CPU and level of grunt to the C64 itself) — the bottleneck was the crippled serial connection and protocol between drive and C64.
There were a number of “fastload” cartridges and software fixes to accelerate C64 disk access, essentially by reprogramming drive and C64 to tun the serial link faster and more efficiently.
Personally, I think what makes the 8-bit micros so affectionately remembered was not their capabilities (in retrospect, quite poor) but that they were masterable: small and simple enough that a spotty teenager like me could have a pretty good working knowledge of the entire system. At the same time, though, they provided lots of depth to investigate: for example, there were lots of tricks you could pull with the C64 video system with carefully-timed code.
6502 assembler still rocks as an intellectual exercise, too…
— James Kew
I still have some tapes at home that’ll suddenly stop playing ‘yazz – the only way is up’ and screech ZX Spectrum code at me.. :) good old days indeed.
— User24
Ahhh, I remember those days. I never had a IIe though… I think I went directly from an II+ to a IIGS. Was I the only one in the world who had one? Apparently not, since you had one too, but it seemed like it at the time. It was just a little while later I started using my first Macintosh, and by the time I got around to buying one, I had an SE/30.
Those were the days. Now we sit around debating when we are going to buy the new G5 and when the powerbook upgrades are coming out.
Speaking of getting rid of old technology, I flipped when I found out my dad sold the old Atari 2600 to a friend with kids. “I didn’t know you wanted it,” he said. Serves me right for thinking that my dad’s pack-rattish habits would protect the things I wanted without me speaking up.
— Michelle
why the nostagia for the old machines? what’s the comfort of these old shirts? a nice question to ruminate because it brings them back to us a little.
i just wanted to note how people never seem to add a wintel box to these discussions, though many started there and do get lost in memories when you show them 3.1 again. i’ve always kinda wondered why that is, and try not to take an easy cliched way out. perhaps it was the upgradeability as much as anything; your box grew and changed and couldn’t become just one memory.
had a ][e for a little while. it was good fun. not my first; that was a commodore pet. but the nostalgia point for me was an amiga 1000 that i had between the apple and the wintel ladder. that’s the one i miss most fondly, more friend than acquaintance.
— owen