The first two paragraphs of the Mastodon post below resonate with me–my first computer was an Atari 400, but my second and “real” computer (the 400 was basically a gaming machine) was a Commodore 64. And I had an Amiga, too. The C64 and Atari 400 were completely offline, my Amiga and Atari ST connected to BBSes via 33.6 baud modem. It wasn’t until I had my first PC that I ventured out onto the internet at large, but even then, circa 1996 or so, the whole world of computers, rapidly evolving in performance and capabilities, still held such tremendous promise. I had absolutely no conception of how it might all be turned against us and exploited by capitalist companies more interested in earning ever-expanding profits, no matter the cost to the world, or the individual. I just enjoyed it in the moment, whether it was doodling with a Koalapad on my C64, writing short stories using ProWrite on my Amiga, or discovering weird blogs on my Windows 98 PC. Or starting my own weird blog (this one, to be specific).

datarama on Mastodon:

@Tattie I think one of the reasons I never really got into retrocomputing – despite nerding out with a C64 or an Amiga sure did feel a lot more fun than computing in the current day – is that what made it feel so great back then was that it felt like I could just make out the contours of the future, and it looked like it would be amazing. So much creativity waiting to be unlocked! We’d make kinds of art not even conceived yet! We’d be making wonderful discoveries!

Now I live in that future, and it fucking sucks. The fruit of all those great discoveries have turned out to be mostly figuring out new ways to spy on people and manipulate them – and now, to declare all-out war against even the concept of human creativity. My C64 still runs (I no longer have a working Amiga), but playing around with it won’t bring back that feeling of a promised future of wonders – all I see is that it turned out to become a present full of horrors instead.

I’m sure part of all this – from a purely personal perspective – is just that I’ve hit the point where I’m supposed to be having my regularly-scheduled midlife crisis. “Did I waste my entire life?” sure does feel to fit the stereotype. I’ve thought about trying to retrain to do something else, but I honestly have no idea what that could even be. I’m disabled, I’m getting old, and there’s not a whole lot I can do that anyone would want to pay me for that isn’t related to software development. (I’m currently an embedded dev; prior to that I taught CS at a community college for ten years.)— datarama (@datarama@hachyderm.io) 11/2/2025, 3:58:19 AM

I still dabble in retrocomputing and gaming, not because I have any illusions about things being better back then. They were simpler, and that had its own charm, but mostly it’s just straight-up nostalgia for being younger, and for the technology I geeked out on so much growing and improving year after year, with the possibilities of that growth suggesting so many great things to come–even if that fantastic tomorrow ultimately never arrived. Instead, we got Facebook and AI slop. 😛 This isn’t to downplay all the technological advances in computing since the 1980s and 90s, of course. I love great graphics as much as the next person, it’s just a shame so much of it is done now in service of garbage.

But you know what? It’s also not just nostalgia, it’s about looking back on a time when people wanted to make money off computer hardware and software, of course, but many also cared about providing a quality experience, whether it was through improvements to a word processor, a great sequel to a favourite game or better specs on the hardware that made everything run a little bit smoother. And as I noted in my recent reminisce on software stores, we used to have what now seems like a crazy number of not just operating systems, but dedicated hardware for each OS, and many companies–that today wouldn’t think of doing more than developing an app only for iOS (with IAP, ads, or both)–would release a game or program on five different platforms, because none of them were truly dominant (the PC won out in the end, of course).

Some still carry on that spirit of just wanting to make good things (and sometimes make money from it) from the early days of computing–indies, mainly–so it’s not completely gone. We just need to choose what and who we support, to keep the things we valued back in the early days from disappearing.