Tech Nostalgia Matters Because it’s the History of Us
We can retire technology but not the memories of 40 years of computing
It doesn’t matter if you’ve been using computers for five or forty years, there’s an impulse to cherish the technology of your youth.
Millennials, for instance, wax rhapsodic over AIM, Myspace, and their Nokia and Sidekick phones. Gen Xers corner you to tell tales of their first bulky Toshiba laptop and the stack of useless 3.5-inch floppies they still have stored in a desk.
People my age spin stories of 5.25-inch floppies, Apple’s first Macintosh, and cassette tape-based, programmable computers. However, no system played as central a role in my computer history and education as the Commodore 64, a now 40-year-old 64-bit system I started using shortly after I graduated high school.
Comprised of just a keyboard, which housed the motherboard and CPU, and floppy drive (I believe you bought a monitor separately), its CP/M operating system, which was an early competitor to DOS, was equally adept at games and word processing. I vaguely recall a vibrant underground Commodore game-trading community. In other words, one person would buy a game or application, make floppy disk copies, and then trade them at meetups. Over time, my father amassed a massive library of…
