The new Scientist has an interesting article on why retro computing is becoming so popular these days:
REMEMBER your first time, when you sat in front of a keyboard and monochrome screen and joined a brave new world? You may have been playing Pong or Manic Miner, or carefully crafting your first lines of code. But you won’t have forgotten the joy of discovering personal computers.
It’s time to revisit your youth, because BBC Bs, ZX81s, Spectrums and Commodores are cool again, part of a wave of computing nostalgia. Today’s stylish PCs may perform billions of calculations a second and store tens of billions of bytes of data, but for many, they have got nothing on the 32, 48 or 64-kilobyte machines that were the giants of the early 1980s.
This renewed interest in old-school computing is more than just a trip down memory-chip lane. Early computers are a part of our technological heritage, and also offer a unique perspective on how today’s machines work. And within growing collections of original computers and home-made replicas, and the anecdote-filled web pages and blogs devoted to them, lies the equipment and expertise that will one day help unlock our past by reading countless computer files stored in outmoded formats.
Oh how I miss the good old days playing Elite & Cylon Attack on the BBC Micro, having to wait for half an hour for the tape to fully load (a tear forms in my eye). The thing I find the coolest about the old machines though was the fact that it was so easy to get hacking and learn how they work.
These days everything is so high level a lot of programmers don’t even know what happens on the register leven when you declare a variable for example. That’s just a damn shame. Ah, sweet memories…
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