I’ve been doing this computer thing for a while now, so I get the privilege of being able to pipe up on various forums and social media posts when someone is looking for some esoteric bit of technical information from “the good old days” of computers and / or the Internet… Which right now is essentially anything before 2010.
I do find it interesting how the recollections of us ‘old timers’ are becoming more valuable over time – mostly because of bit-rot… Every year the collective brain-trust of the Internet looses another few thousand web sites from the early days as servers are turned down, storage deteriorates, hosting bills stop being paid, ISPs are absorbed and cannibalized, or modern tech simply loses the ability to access information more than a decade or two old.
Take my recent posts about having to use my circa 2007 XPS M1710 laptop to do some pretty basic things with web-enabled hardware that is a mere five years old because of a simple TLS change. Now expand that timeframe out to the early 90’s when the Internet as we know it was just beginning.
I have copies of old websites I built in the mid to late 90’s for both myself and clients that are essentially impossible to view without resorting to antique hardware and software – simply because they use deprecated javascript and Flash components… Macromedia / Adobe Flash, as you should know, was the biggest thing on the Internet in the late 90’s and early 2000’s – but the ability to view that entire decade of content was essentially deleted from everything in 2011…
I also have things I created in the 80’s that are in formats that simply cannot be opened unless you have the right forty year old software that runs on dinosaur hardware you can only find in a museum.
Needless to say, if enthusiasts can’t get to the content without going to great lengths the chances of it ending up in an Internet search are essentially zero… Not that the Internet is much more than a context driven ad placement engine at this point; if someone didn’t pay to show it to you, you probably won’t see it.
As for me, I try to keep the torch lit with a smattering of old computer systems – but I’m pretty picky with my retro-computing habit and tend to only acquire hardware that I’ve actually owned in the past… This is mostly so that I can continue to access and / or modern-format-archive the stuff I’ve created on various computers since the early 80’s.
My current system catalog looks like this:
| Date | Computer | Status |
|---|---|---|
| 1977 | TRS-80 Model-1 (Z-80) | Software Emulation |
| 1978 | Ohio Scientific C1P (6502) | Software Emulation |
| 1981 | Sinclair ZX-81 (Z-80) | Software Emulation |
| 1982 | Commodore VIC-20 (6502) | Software Emulation |
| 1985 | Atari 800XL (6502) | The 400 Mini |
| 1987 | Macintosh Plus (68000) | Physical Machine |
| 1989 | Amiga 500 (68000) | MiniMig |
| 1993 | PowerBook 165c (68030) | Physical Machine |
| 1994 | SGI Indy (R4400) | Physical Machine |
| 1995 | PowerMac 8100 (PPC 601) | Physical Machine |
| 1999 | PowerBook G3 “Pismo” (PPC G3) | Physical Machine |
| 2000 | Presario 1400 (Pentium-III) | Physical Machine |
| 2004 | PowerBook G4 17″ (PPC G4) | Physical Machine |
| 2007 | XPS M1710 (Core 2 Duo) | Physical Machine |
| 2012 | MacPro 5,1 (Dual Xeon X5690) | Physical Machine |
| 2013 | MacPro 6,1 (Xeon E5) | Physical Machine |
| 2020 | MacBook Air 13″ (10th gen i3) | Physical Machine |
| 2023 | Gaming Rig (Ryzen 7950X3D) | Physical Machine |
Once it’s all put into table form, we can see where computers got boring in the mid 2000’s.
Prior to the mid 2000’s new architectures and new operating systems kept me going after the latest hardware. But once Apple went Intel in 2005, it was a bit of a slog for about fifteen years until something truly new happened: Apple Silicon.
Listening to "My Life" by FM Attack