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⬅️ Previous capture (2021-12-03)
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I am a man who is extremely prone to fits of nostalgia, of all kinds. Today I'm just thinking of computer-related nostalgia though. So far, I have been practically minded enough not to turn my house into a retro-cave, thankfully.
There is a recurring loop in my thinking which goes something like this:
In doing some introspection about _why_ this keeps coming up, and how it can be channeled into more useful impulses, I've a few observations about what brings me back to the computing environments of my youth -- hardware, software, networking etc.
It'd be foolish to not acknowledge that at least some of this is just getting older and the pleasant feelings that come from reliving my youth. How I used to get excited for sound of a modem dialling up, or spend hours fruitlessly building bad software in Visual Basic 3. No piece of hardware or software is bringing my youth back, though.
I work in R&D for a large ecommerce company. Everything in this industry seems so complex compared to when I started.
I work on a tiny slice of the stack but that means dealing with Kubernetes for container orchestration, Docker for image building, a mountain of YAML, Google Cloud APIs, complex role-based access control. We haven't even gotten to the system I actually work on (Kafka) -- those things are just the table stakes to do anything. If I was building something end-users worked with I would probably also need GraphQL and Typescript/React.
When that's your day job, the days of booting up DOS and programming work done by calling INT 21 after filling the right registers or just using IN and OUT to poke actual hardware ports feels very appealing.
It didn't make sense to just sit down at a 1990's computer without an intention to do something. Without an always-on Internet connection (or with no connection at all) -- I would sit down to write a document, or to draw something, or to play a game -- but I was always deciding to do something and _then_ using the computer as a tool to achieve that thing. Even if it was something abstract and open-ended like "learn how to do linked lists".
My computer on my desk is the default thing I sit down to. It's where I go to talk to my friends, it where I watch TV (in the form, mostly, of YouTube), it's where I listen to music, I code for myself, I code for my employer, I read the news. My first choice is to "do computer" and then when I am sat down I figure out what I will do.
The amazing relative power of modern computers also means I probably have 4-5 applications open, a dozen or more tab in Firefox, and background apps feeding me notifications. When I used DOS, I single tasked. When I had a 486DX2/66 I couldn't play an MP3 and do anything else at the same time, even with a multitasking OS.
In a way, my computer as a teenager was an extension of myself. Not in the practical way that a smartphone is today -- an outboard brain -- but part of my identity. I was a computerer. I had a single machine, which I cherished, and a highly customized and personalized environment. My computer was baffling to other people. I optimized every last KB of base memory.
I hope that people still have this experience today. In part, due to economies of scale and "because I can", I have come to treat computers as a commodity.
I have my dotfiles in a GitHub repo, so I can quickly make any machine feel familiar. I have five computers, including my work-supplied one. It's easy to just kind of ... accrue them. A busted old laptop that isn't worth donating but still works. A Chromebook that was rescued from e-waste.
There is nothing there that evokes the old Marines snowclone -- /this is my computer, there are many like it, but this one is mine/
Because I work on lots of computers (including ones very far away, or ones I share with colleagues or family) the customization is dialled down. No one wants to pair program on someone else's custom Emacs environment with DVORAK key mapping.
All of these are things which the computing environment of the 1990's avoided -- but they are all possible to achieve today, with the amazing and ubiquitous hardware we have. I don't need a DOS PC from my youth to single task. I just need a bit more will power. I don't need System 7 for simple aesthetics -- those things are available today (with trade-offs) if you go search for them. It's not modernity's fault that I have a basic vimrc or a half-dozen computers and that my Mac looks exactly like everyone else's Mac.
I am driven to computing nostalgia because I am looking for simple answers to complex problems, and I am looking to use the imposition of old restrictions as a crutch for deciding what I want computing to be for me, in my life.
(The cyberdeck is just a fetish for this -- I have a purposely low-power and low-capability device. It's modern, but it's not really a different concept than choosing to use retro tech -- it's just ... newer. Nonetheless, I am continuing to explore cyberdecks as a form of very personal, intentional, computing)
As I wrote recently, I broke the IPS panel intended for my cyberdeck panel. I got in a real funk about it, but it also lead to me looking at devices I already had -- such as an old Moto G4 Android phone running LineageOS.
It's surprising that there's no terminal applications to my liking on F-Droid -- the one that I am using seems to try and reserve space on the screen for the virtual keyboard, even when I have a bluetooth keyboard attached. 🤷 This phone is underpowered (fine!) and has a crack on the screen that I've covered over with a sticker (fine for now, but let's see). The screen is a little _too_ low resolution, but I also have a plan B:
I have opened up and started experimenting with a broken Mi A1 which used to be my son's. The battery is no good and I've removed that, the screen had come away and the body bent -- but I've extracted everything from its case and the screen is even still fully working. It could be rehomed into a nice deck (which would need to supply USB-C power, as the battery is gone). It feels even better to work with e-waste instead of buying more fresh materials for this project.
(Yes, I _did_ just buy a Pi 400 for this project, thanks for remembering. It's going to be my workbench computer for the time being, paired up with an 11" 1366x768 screen I had spare. Doesn't this mean I once again have another damned computer? Also true!)