Is retro computing about time traveling back to your childhood?

No, more about the joy of programming in an era of comprehensible systems, where everything doesn’t include everything else or is written in the current religious scripture.

Can't speak for everybody, but for me it's like looking at a photo album. I don't travel back to my childhood, but I do once again feel feelings that I haven't felt since the Reagan Administration.

But that doesn't mean it isn't about the tech.

Nostalgia

Yes. These are the roots of all the things you take for granted now. And those times were different: you really dug deep into things back then. Very undistracted times compared to now.

Many of us are still on the edge of tech now, which means we have around 40 years of evolution, concepts, pitfalls - and the things that happened to society when we let it loose to the masses. It's a bit like putting genie back in the bottle again and enjoy the naive times.

Nostalgia is one aspect of retrocomputing to me, but one of the things I also like about retrocomputing is being able to experience platforms I never got to use during their heydays, either because I wasn’t around when those platforms were available, or because I couldn’t afford them. For example, I’m the owner of a NeXT Cube setup, which I’ve had since 2021. I was born in 1989, not too long after the 1988 announcement of the original NeXT computer. I’ve never heard of NeXT until 2004, when I started learning about Mac OS X and its history.

I also think people can learn a lot from the platforms of the past. While computers have gotten objectively more capable over the decades, I think there’s a lot we can learn from the systems of the past. I feel this is especially true in the area of usability. There was a lot of work done in the 1980s and 1990s on usability research, and Apple and Microsoft published human interface guidelines describing how software written for the classic Mac OS and Windows should behave. However, consistency has been sidelined in favor of branding and other marketing concerns at the expense of usability. Using applications designed for Macintosh System 7 or Windows 95 will give people the experience of using applications back when conforming to UI guidelines was a big deal.

Nostalgia is great and is one reason I retrocompute, but it’s more than that for me.