Since finally getting much of my vintage computer collection back into a usable location I’ve somewhat run back into a kick of playing around with the old machines and watching / reading media related to them, their operating systems, what have you. It’s been a nice break from work, current events, and music related studies and practice (recall I’m back to playing Guitar and Bass nearly daily alongside my other hobbies.)
While thinking about the machines I haven’t set up and tested yet, something hit me — just why do I like these things? What makes them so damned interesting and, for actual usage, fun to me? Is it nostalgia? Is it curiosity? Or is it something else?
In short form, it’s all of the above. Let’s take for example Windows 2000 – my favorite computer operating system of all time, by far. While I think it’s a damn fine OS for its time it was what was on the non-Macintosh computers we had in high school, and I’ve got quite a bit of experience using it for both learning productivity and just playing games in class (see Memories of Vagabonds Quest for an example of how “productive” I was some days) so my love for it may well be as much the act of using it as it is just remembering those days.
The same can be said of Mac OS 9, my next favorite oprating system — that is what was on many of the Mac systems in high school, even though these years crossed into when OS X should have been on many machines, most still were older. I only recall once us using some iBook G4 systems and what was probably MacOS 10.1, but every other Mac I touched in high school, I believe still ran OS 9. That operating system was, in all seriousness, just a continuation directly from System 7 which is what many of the machines in Elementary School just shy of a decade before then ran, and if you know Classic Mac OS then you know how similar all variants are, at least at face value, so it all felt so damned familiar I couldn’t help but have a soft spot for those older Macintosh systems, with OS 9 just happening to be the last one, and the one that stuck out in my memory the most.
Let’s contrast this though with Mac OS X, now known simply as MacOS. I actually hated the thing for many years, feeling the Classic Mac OS was what a Macintosh should be. Sure, that’s pretty damn nearsighted but that’s how I was back then, and still can be from time to time. Then I began watching videos from various YouTube content creators (adiblasi, itsmynaturalcolour, thisisadamb, thecreativeone, etc) who always showed off their Mac Pro systems in a fun way, or who would look at old systems like the iMac’s and iBook’s I remember in high school, or some other boss system like the Power Mac G5 and show off a 5-10 year old version of OS X that had a charm to it — It’s stuff like that which actually made me begin to take interest in possibly collecting older Apple computers like I do now — nothing ancient like a 128K or a LC (although I do have a dead SE and wouldn’t mind a Performa or something similar, again for nostalgia sake) — but recent enough machines to let me enjoy OS 9 where fitting, but otherwise use Mac OS X in its early to mid-life forms and get to experience that from a very after-the-fact perspective. Learn to appreciate what they were from a “safe” perspective, if you will. It’s kind of neat to fire up my Power Mac G4, see Tiger load, then see Classic load and know I can run Oregon Trail while (attempting) to load a YouTube video! That’s the idea, anyway… in practice that video ain’t ever going to load, but damned if I can’t play the game all I want!
Then come other odd machines — outdated but still useful scrap PC’s that I throw Linux, BSD, or whatever on. There’s that server I’ve neglected for the past few months since my network went down (more on that in the future) and I’ve got an old Windows 95 laptop sitting at work for a special project, but it doesn’t change — each machine is something I want in my collection, that I wish to use to its fullest potential, and appreciate for what it is, be it a Mac, a PC, or whatever.
I don’t actually know what it is truly that makes me enjoy these things — they have problems sometimes, they will eventually all die in some way, and when that happens I’m going to spend far too much time trying to fix them, but until that happens the problems are part of the fun of owning them. Hell right now my Windows 2000 machine needs a new hard drive and I’m just waiting for the day that I actually go on and swap it out. That will be a bit of a challenge but damned if by the end of it I won’t be happy and playing Dungeon Keeper 2 again!
I guess it really is just the experience. An appreciate for tech long past its prime, my history and personal experience with some versions of software and hardware, and the idea that I’m keeping these machines alive that little bit longer — that I’m keeping one more of these things out of the trash pile.
More to come, as always.