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<2022-01-29 Sat>
Nostalgia and me, we go way back. It hasn't always been a productive relationship - it's a sickness, after all, it's right there in the name - but sometimes it's a useful motivator.
In one of its more recent manifestations, nostalgia has led me to explore the worlds of retro computing. I will admit to being not a particularly adroit retro-computerist, mainly due to my limited skills ... and let's face it, limited interest ... in diagnosing and repairing problems with computer hardware. I greatly admire the folks whose skills and interests do tend in that direction, don't get me wrong. It's just that I'm forced to admit that I am not one of them.
No, for me the appeal of retro-computing isn't digging into the hardware. It's more ... I guess you could call it aesthetic. I like the look of the old gear, the solidity and clunkiness of it. I like the simple and often cartoony look of old software, its often "hand-built" look, and the different and sometimes quirky assumptions its creators made designing the UI. Which often turn out to be more efficient than present-day UI/UX, once you wrap your head around their somewhat antiquated or bespoke conventions.
I've heard it said there are two kinds of nostalgia ... nostalgia for things you never experienced personally but wished you did, and nostalgia for your own past. My retro-computing interests encompass both kinds. The early eras of computing, personal and otherwise, which I never experienced directly. And the computing of the 90s, the early web era, which is when I first really got interested in computers. And which, for various reasons, I've been missing more lately than is probably good for me.
The project I'm writing about here is nostalgia of the second kind. Specifically, I wanted to reconstruct, more or less, the desktop computer I had back in the mid-late 90s. But with one big difference, which is that I wanted it to be usable for my present-day computing needs. I have a few older computers in my personal collection, and access to quite a few more as the curator of a somewhat larger collection where I work. And to be honest, I seldom make much use of them. If I was going to put time, effort and money into building a "retro" computer, I wanted it to something I would actually /use/, not something mostly gathering dust on the shelf, along with PiDP's 8 & 11, and the C64 that mostly gets fired up for Omega Race.
In other words, I wanted a capable modern computer with the aesthetics of a bygone era. Now, I'm not the first one to come up with this idea, because when was I ever the first to come up with any idea? Turns out there's a whole subgenre of gaming PCs known as 'sleepers', where builders stuff some pretty high-end water-cooled components into computer cases from yesteryear. And that's sort of, but not exactly, what I had in mind. First off, because I'm not much of a gamer, so I have somewhat more modest computing needs. But more importantly, I didn't just want to use an old case hooked up to modern peripherals, which is kind of a requirement for sleeper PCs built for gaming.
Hardware-wise, I wanted the whole "retro" package - keyboard, mouse and monitor included. Beige everything! And even more importantly, I wanted the UI to look like late-90s Linux (which I was, in fact using back then). So, a late 90s desktop running a classic window manager. But everything modern under the hood, because you really don't want to be using an outdated unpatched OS from the late 90s as your daily driver, and because 25 year old hardware would struggle even to cope with modern encryption, much less the software I wanted to run.
A picture of my modern, retro computer
In terms of finding a past era to emulate, I figured the late 90s was as far back as I could go and still have a computer that would be usable in the present day. Too much earlier and you're completely back in the pre-web, command line age. And while it's not impossible to install modern components into a pre-ATX (ie, pre-1995) case, it's more work than I wanted to do. Part of the appeal of this project was that so many of the standards of 20-30 years ago survive to this day: ATX, VGA, PS/2 ... it's actually pretty amazing you can install a modern motherboard and power supply into a 25 year old case and have the screw holes match up perfectly. And plug in a 20 year old monitor, and a 30 year old keyboard and mouse, and it all just works.
Despite which I had to make a few concessions to improve usability. What I wound up with looks like a computer from 1998 that's had a few upgrades over the years. The most noticable "upgrades" are the USB and other ports on the front of the case. Front facing USB ports weren't typical of late 1990s hardware, and most of the slots on the Rosewill hub are for media that didn't exist back then. The LCD monitor is another concession. While LCD desktop monitors were not unheard of in the late 90s, they didn't really start making headway in the market until the early oughts. This particular model is a Viewsonic VG191, dating from 2002. There were no technical obstacles to using a VGA CRT had I wanted to, but one thing I'm /not/ nostalgic for are those heavy, awkward, power-hungry beasts. Nostalgia notwithstanding, I am prepared to concede that there have been some (ok, many) real improvements to computing hardware over the past 20 years.
In parts 2 and 3 of this series, I'll go into more detail about the hardware and software setups, respectively. And in part 4 I'll talk about the experience of actually using this thing, day to day.
1998 Computer Project, Part 1 was published on 2022-01-29
