Gird yourselves! It’s my blog and I will use it as the platform from which I can shake my fist at the younger generation of developers and computer enthusiasts if I want to!
I’ve always loved older technology. Making a thing that everyone else says is obsolete do something it shouldn’t be able to do, or at least we were told it can’t do, is one of life’s great joys. Having worked in tech for the last three decades, I have swayed in and out of the hobby aspect of computing, from learning to code in BASIC on our first computer, a VIC-20, to pretty much ignoring them until the C64 was no longer new and I could afford one. Then right back out for a while and only back when the siren song of PCs showed me the way towards my degree of choice.
I hadn’t touched much in the way of “old tech” until about a year ago when I picked up a Thinkpad T420, which is admittedly “old” but not exactly “OOOooold”. That said, it was the machine that showed me that all of the nonsense that the tech influencers and their channels are spouting was just that – nonsense. Upgrading for the sake of saying you did. Having power you probably never actually use. And here I was with a $50 laptop from 2011 that was serving every need.
After that resounding success (to be documented here for posterity, don’t you worry), I didn’t take a victory lap, I doubled down.
An ad came across my FB timeline for an original IBM PC 5150. Boxy and beige with a similarly beige monitor in monochrome green. I took a screenshot and send it to my wife with the caption “aren’t you glad I have impulse control?” and thought little more about it. That would turn out to be a delicious bit of irony later when Facebook, aware that I had dallied briefly on that original ad, found me on that was local, lacked a monitor but was a quarter of the price. I decided to pick up a version of the PC we used in high school to learn programming and how to use the office suite of the time – WordStar, Lotus 1-2-3 and dBase III.
And that was the beginning of the end. I started looking for the other bits I needed to make the system actually useful: DOS diskettes for one. A monitor for another. RAM expansions crossed my mind as well as ways to equip it with a hard drive – or a modern equivalent that might make it even easier to use. This snowballed when people I had purchased things from contacted me with other things they had found in their basements, garages, barns and attics. It really turned into a full-on hobby, and I was pleased to have finally found something constructive that also made me happy.
Fast forward to today and I have a quarter of a basement full of this nonsense, I’m putting together multiple systems that represent the heyday of classic PC computing (1981 to 1994), and I’m selling off all the bits that I acquired as part of bulk purchases but don’t need, and are sometimes rare and collectible bits that neither the seller or I knew at the time.
So, this is the place. This is where I intend to start cataloging this stuff and spinning yarns about either the machines themselves or how they interface with my memories of my youth. One part technical jargon, one part wanton nostalgia.
So grab a beverage, get comfortable, and for once in your life – listen to your elders!