nostalgia gone horribly okay

The promise of computing, the reality

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)

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.

Do I miss software stores? Kind of!

A floppy disk. Kids, ask your parents! I graduated from 5.25″ floppies to DVDs over the years.

In the weird old days when you wanted software for your computer (because software for a portable phone was not a thing yet), you had to go to a physical store, buy a box with a disc in it, take it home, install the software, then hope (especially if it was a game) that the copy protection didn’t screw things up. If you didn’t want to insert the disc every time you ran a game like some kind of savage, you’d have to go to some skeevy-looking website and grab a no-CD fix.

Sometimes the no-CD fix worked flawlessly, sometimes it required the tech equivalent of arcane magic to work, sometimes it did nothing (or put malware on your PC).

I don’t look back fondly on any of the stuff I just described…except for the actual experience of looking for new software/games in stores. Back in the timeframe I’m describing, roughly the mid-1980s to the early 2000s, I would learn about new games through magazines like Computer Gaming World or PC Gamer. Or sometimes I would learn about them by actually finding the new games sitting on the shelves of a software store. It seems absolutely quaint now that this was how you could discover a game, but it’s true!

Some random memories:

  • Convincing a store clerk to sell me the Not For Sale version of the Commodore 64 game The Castles of Dr. Creep, circa 1984. A friend and I played it co-op in the store and I had to have it. I can’t recall what store I bought it from, other than somewhere just outside of Victoria.
  • Going to the Eaton’s store in Duncan and buying some generically-packaged versions of old Infocom games for cheap, back around 1985 (think Zork and a few others). To this day, I have no idea if these were legit copies. They were about $20 each, which was very cheap back then.
  • Buying OS/2 4.0 on floppy disk at Egghead Software. I don’t remember how many disks it came on, but more than a few! It was also surprisingly cheap, around $50 or $60 because IBM was trying to undercut Windows upgrade pricing. I never made much headway with it, and IBM abandoned OS/2 not too long after.
  • I want to say I bought my Windows 95 upgrade (on CD ROM!) at Computer City, where I worked during the launch of Windows 95 (at the Coquitlam store), but I’m not 100% sure. It seems like the logical place to have picked it up, and I know I grabbed it right away. I worked at Computer City for six weeks before quitting. The chain collapsed and vanished the following year.
  • Going to Super Software in Richmond and splurging one day by buying two games at the same time, each costing $50. I picked up Populous and SimCity, both for my Amiga 500. Probably the best 1-2 gaming purchase I ever made on physical media. Super software was also relatively gigantic and catered to every major platform back in the day: Apple II, IBM, Commodore 64 and Amiga, Atari ST, Atari 8-bit (and probably others I’m leaving out). It seems nutty how many different systems existed back then. There’s actually a 1989 commercial for Super Software on YouTube.
  • Buying the last copy of Age of Empires II (1999) at a Future Shop location on the day of release. It came in a gigantic box and had a relatively thick manual.
  • A few years later, I bought Medal of Honor: Allied Assault (2002), one of the first games to come in a mini box, with little to no documentation. Steam was only two years from launching and the end of physical media was nigh, though you’d be able to buy games on disc for some years after.

Four years ago, I left tech support. Now people just ask ChatGPT how to turn it off and back on.

You can read my full write-up about leaving the Langara College IT Department at this link, my thoughts have not changed in the year since I posted this: Three years ago I left behind the life of telling people to turn it off, then turn it back on

Today, the college is among many post-secondary schools being hit by declining enrolment, particularly from international students. Budget cuts and layoffs are happening and as you might imagine, it’s not great for morale.

I’m more glad now than ever that I left it all behind. I wish everyone there that I know and like the best, though!

I leave you with this photo of a snazzy new label maker we got shortly before I left.

My one quarter game

Video game arcades emerged in the mid-1970s and flourished through the 1980s. During this same period, I was 10–25 years old, so pretty much the prime age to indulge in arcade gaming as a pastime. A friend and I would sometimes even get in his van and drive from Duncan to Victoria, a roughly 50-minute trek, to check out the latest games at the snazzy arcades in the capitol. This was around 1984, just when the first (and as it turned out, some of the only) laser disc games emerged.

I was never great at arcade games, but also not horribly inept, so I usually felt I got my money’s worth when I exchanged a $10 bill for a roll of 40 quarters. Unless I played anything from Williams (Robotron 2084, Defender, Stargate, Sinistar), because their games were technically brilliant, a blast to play and required a level of hand/eye coordination I never had, even as a nimble youth.

But there was one game that I actually mastered and could play from beginning to end (because it actually had an end) on a single quarter. That game was one of the aforementioned laser disc titles, Space Ace.

I was never that good at its predecessor, Dragon’s Lair, but loved the film-quality animation and being able to “control” the same. I put control in scare quotes because both games were ultimately just variations of Simon–hit the button or push the joystick when a colour flashes onscreen, and the animation continues uninterrupted. Guess wrong or take too long to react (measured in fractions of a second in some cases) and you got to watch Dirk the Daring (in Dragon’s Lair) or Dexter (in Space Ace) die in some horrible way, you’d lose a life, and the game would play through the sequence again, giving you another chance.

Space Ace was a bit more generous in the clues guiding you through the game, and this was apparently enough to get me to keep trying, to where I could get through the entire thing for only 25 cents.

Last night, YouTube served up a video of a complete playthrough of the game. The video is about nine minutes long and is linked below. Watching it, I am kind of amazed I managed to get through the entire game on a quarter, even with 20-year-old reflexes, because there were so many times decisions had to be made so quickly, I couldn’t even suss out which was the right one before two more had already popped up and flown by.

Clearly, I was a maniac in 1984.

I continued to hang out and play in arcades until the early 90s, or until I was around 30 years old. By then home video game consoles were getting good enough to make them credible alternatives to the arcades and today arcades are just a niche for either nostalgia buffs looking to play the cocktail table version of Ms Pac-Man (which was the best way to play), or for indulging in novelty games with weird controls that are two bucks a pop or something.

But I’ll always remember those early years and my only single quarter game, even as it seems totally bananas today that I could pull off those moves back then.

Games of my youth and random thoughts on them

I was born in 1964. This means that when the first video games hit the mainstream, I was already in my teens. I got an Atari 2600 when I was 16 years old. It was still cool and I loved it to bits.

But my time of birth meant that many of the games I played as a kid were of the board/non-electronic variety because video games just weren’t there. Let’s have a look!

Note: I have linked to each game on BoardGameGeek when possible, with a few exceptions.

Lawn Darts. I still don’t know how these things were ever legal. We had a nice grassy boulevard in front of our house, which was the perfect place to throw giant metal darts into plastic hoops. No one ever got hurt, mostly because we were just smart enough to know standing on the receiving end was a very bad idea.

Monopoly. Yeah, it’s not really a great game in the popularized form we played (no movie/TV tie-ins back then, just the capitalist “bankrupt everyone else for fun!”) but sometimes you just want to crush others and accumulate piles of money. I am a product of my culture. We played with a lot of the common house rules–fines and payments going to Free Parking being the most prominent.

Careers. I really don’t remember much about this game, other than each career track had its own internal mini-path inside the main board and one career was Ecology because it was the 70s. I do remember playing it a fair bit. I like that the game box seems to make you choose: Fame? Fortune? Happiness? Be rich or be happy! (Ecology was the “be happy” career.)

The grooviest game.

The Game of Life. First, this game was absurd. It looked at Monopoly money and then added three zeroes to everything, because more is more. You could go to school or have a career, but not both (?!) You could have kids. Lots of kids. We often had second cars just full of pegs that represented all the kids. Life is not just accumulating vast wealth, but also making babbies like you were a bunny. But the coolest part of the game were the little 3D hills and buildings built into the game board. They didn’t serve anything but an aesthetic role, but I loved them. The spinner was very satisfying to spin, too.

Just look at it:

The spinner would now be considered “woke”.

Trouble. I remember the TV commercial jingle to this day, cursed thing (“If you’ve got trouble, wait, don’t run/This kind of trouble is lots of fun”). The game was simple, but again, that “Pop-o-Matic” die roller (which meant you could never lose the die) was extremely satisfying. The game itself was fine.

Clue. A classic. One of the first puzzle games for me. I was drawn in by the miniature murder weapons and ornately laid-out rooms on the board, but loved solving the mystery.

Risk. A friend was really into this. I was never any good at it. I guess I’m not a warmonger. Or maybe I’m just bad at strategy. Whatever the reason, most games saw me adopt a defensive posture, then get squeezed and crushed early enough that I spent most of the game reading comic books. (This is the only game on the list I didn’t actually own.)

Tank Battle. I enjoyed this, not just because it came with neat little plastic models of tanks (when a tank was taken out, we would carefully disassemble it to show its defeat), but yeah, I’m a visual person, so it counted for a lot.

Mastermind. Another game of deduction. The presentation was simple, but effective. This was probably one of the first games where I wished there was an electronic version so I could play when a friend wasn’t around (they did, in fact, make electronic versions, but I never got them).

Mouse Trap. If there was ever a board game made for me, it was Mouse Trap. An entire board of Rube Goldberesque contraptions you put together over the course of the game, then set in motion at the end? Yes, yes and yes! The only problem was losing or breaking a piece. We did not have 3D printers back then to replace the boot if it went missing, alas. Apparently, a revamped version of the game swapped out the bathtub for a toilet, which is kind of weird.

Ants in the Pants. Not a board game. You flipped plastic ants into a pair of plastic pants (with suspenders for added difficulty) and the first to flip all ants in won. Simple, mindless, frenetic. A nice palette cleanser to all the brainier stuff.

Ker Plunk. Put a bunch of plastic sticks through holes midway through a chamber, cover with marbles, then remove the sticks without sending the marbles down to the bottom. Sort of a Jenga variant, but more kid-flavoured. The best part may have been that the player with the fewest marbles at the end wins. Now there’s a life lesson.

Down the Drain (WothPoint link). Weirdly, the version I played is not on BoardGameGeeks. Basically, you had a green plastic tube shaped like a drainpipe, with a grate on top. You dropped a bunch of fake coins in and used little toy fishing rods to try to fish the coins out (the coins and rod had magnets). Whoever got the most money won. I mean, not much. This was no Game of Life. A test of hand-eye coordination that would serve as warm-up for future video games, or maybe lawn darts. I did find an image! And the drain was actually yellow, proving memory is a LIE.

“We all have value down here.”

Gnip Gnop. It’s Ping-Pong spelled backwards! And it’s more fun to say. You used paddles to flip ping pong balls through circular cutouts in a plastic barrier. You won by losing all your balls. Another important life lesson. Like Ants in the Pants, this was a great game to play if you were hopped up on sugary soda and just wanted to spazz out.

Yahtzee. Not a board game. Shaking six dice in the cup was great for driving people crazy. I liked the Triple Yahtzee variant, because it was fancier and allowed a tiny bit of strategy. My uncle, who worked at a print shop, would print off scoresheets for us, so we didn’t have to buy extras when we ran out.

Boggle. The weirdest thing about Boggle is I still have it, sitting in its original box on a shelf in the bedroom. Flip the hourglass (how quaint) and write down all the words. Simple, but for a guy who would eventually pursue a BA in English, irresistible.

There are more games, but they are currently on the periphery of my memory. I’ll update this post when they inevitably come back to me.

Further updates:

Scrabble. How could I forget Scrabble? A timeless game that made me think, learn new words, learn that a bunch of words were not really words and when you won, it made you feel smart! And maybe a little lucky, too.

BeOS icons: It’s the Zaxxon angle

On Mastodon, someone linked to a full set of icons used in BeOS, an OS that tried to make a splash late in the 20th and early 21st century, failed, but still lives on as Haiku.

You can see the icons here: BeOS icon pack

I really like them. Warm, slightly cartoony, psuedo-3D. It’s the latter that one of my interweb gaming pals described as “the Zaxxon angle”, which is a great way of describing it. Today’s icons in Windows, macOS, and most Linux distros are generally flat, with maybe some slight bevelling or something to hint at 3D, but nothing is close to what BeOS did. And that’s kind of a shame to me. It’s not just nostalgia, either. The icons are distinctive and have style, they feel of a piece, not just random whatever.

Plus, giant eyeball!

And books:

Random things I remember from growing up in Duncan in the 1970s

I was six when the 70s started and 16 when it ended, so it pretty much encapsulates all of my childhood that I can still remember. Or think I can remember.

Kids, hold onto your smartphones as you hear about the primitive olden days:

  • Having a single phone in the house, in the hallway. It had a long coiled cord and was rotary. In the first few years it was also a party line.
  • One TV, in the living room. Maybe a 20 or 25-inch screen? It was colour, though! The guys watched Hockey Night in Canada every Saturday. I was not really into hockey. I was an artist! (See entry below on The Letterbox.)
  • The neighbours at the end of the block had seven chestnut trees in their year. We would put chestnuts on shoestrings and have chestnut fights, one of many dumb things we did as kids.
  • Speaking of dumb things: lawn darts! We played on the boulevard in front of the house.
  • A less dumb activity was bouncing on inner tubes in the same spot, using them as somewhat inefficient trampolines.
  • I would chop wood for our fireplace, because you were allowed fireplaces in the city back then. It was cozy in the winter.
  • I remember the Saucy Dragon arcade in downtown Duncan, which went on to be one of multiple arcades. In 1984, I even got my first job working at one. I eventually learned all the moves in the laser disc game Space Ace and could complete it on a single quarter. I believe all the arcades are gone now.
  • I’ve mentioned it before, but the stationery store, called The Letterbox, was a place I loved hanging out in. I was a writing nerd. I guess I still am. I’d buy fountain pens, refills, typewriter ribbons, art pencils and sketchpads there. And other stuff. It was my version of a candy store. It’s long gone. But there’s now a Staples.
  • Riding my bike without a helmet. No one wore helmets, it wasn’t even a point of discussion. I did fall a few times, but never cracked my skull open.
  • I got bit by every possible animal you can think of. I had probably 10x more tetanus shots than the average person.
  • The McDonald’s opening in August 1978 (yes, I remember) was a major event. The day before, a friend and I rode our bikes through the parking lot and counted the stalls. It was 70 or so, as I recall. A Filet-o-Fish sandwich, my favourite at the time, cost 65 cents. Previously, to eat at a McDonald’s, we had to have our parents drive us to Victoria or Nanaimo. In 1978, Duncan arrived. The McDonald’s, of course, is still there.
  • When I went to high school, literally just at the end of the street, I came home for lunch and got addicted to All My Children for a few years. Like the arcades, it, too, is gone.
  • More random things as I think of them.

Is nostalgia bad?

Yes!

But also no.

I think nostalgia can be healthy, as it provides an anchor to a past that is presumably pleasant and nice to reference back to. It can be a big warm fuzzy to embrace on a dull, rainy day, or when you’re feeling down and want a little mental boost.

It becomes bad or even dangerous when you ignore the things that were not so great in the past, or when you embrace those things instead.

For me, nostalgia is childhood memories of family activities like travelling, hanging out at picnics, going to movies and playing in the backyard, or bouncing tennis balls off the back of the high school gym (and occasionally hitting a ball at a bad angle, causing it to skyrocket up and disappear somewhere on the roof. I wonder how many balls ended up there?)

Sometimes my nostalgia goes retro and I think about what technology was like in the early 1990s, how I added a 2X CD-ROM drive to my first PC in 1994 so I could play Myst, or wrote a batch file to present a screen on boot-up that let me launch different DOS games, or boot into Windows 3.1 if I wanted to get my GUI on.

But in all of these warm, fuzzy memories, there is always some darkness. The fights with friends, the ignorance or mean-spirited behaviour of others, or little things like growing up under the existential threat of nuclear annihilation!

Mostly, though, my dives into nostalgia are like easing myself into the cool waters of a lazy river on a warm summer day. I’ll stop here before I start mixing metaphors.

Shopping like it’s 1974 (but with 2024 prices)

Today I popped into Save-On Foods after toodling around Sapperton Landing for a bit, and bought some fruit and cereal and vitamins. I didn’t have my backpack with me, and didn’t feel coordinated enough to carry the various items in my hands, so I bought a paper bag for 25 cents. I can’t remember the last time I got a paper bag at a grocery store, but I’m pretty sure it was in the 1970s. It felt strange, yet groovy.

Me and my quarters (gone)

Accurate. (From a YouTube thumbnail)

I remember when I would go with friends to a video arcade to play games, circa 1980 to around the early 90s. We’d get a roll of quarters ($10, or 40 plays for most games, except maybe new ones or fancy ones using laser discs like Dragon’s Lair) and we’d spend (ho ho) a few hours bopping from machine to machine, sometimes playing in turns (Player 1, Player 2), sometimes playing co-op (Mario Bros.) or head-to-head (Joust). It was great fun (kids, ask your parents!)

But the brutal reality was that the games were designed like slots–to give you just enough to keep you coming back. And that’s if you were a half-decent player. I was maybe one-quarter1I swear this is not a quarters joke decent. Still, I persisted and on some games I was respectable, like the aforementioned Mario Bros. or Space Ace, another laser disc game where I managed to memorize the moves so I could play through the entire game on a single quarter (after it dropped in price to a single quarter).

But there were so many games that I adored, but kind of sucked at. Most of them were made by Williams:

  • Defender
  • Robotron 2084
  • Stargate (Defender sequel)
  • Joust

And yes, Sinistar. Not only was I not great at the game, it had voice synthesis, so Sinistar himself offered commentary on my pathetic efforts. “Run, coward, run!” That’s the idea, my interstellar disembodied terror head! This only made it all the more satisfying when I did manage to blow Sinistar up. He screamed something fierce.

Here’s the actual video from above if you want to journey back to 1983:

Pen nostalgia

Back in my public school days, I wrote and doodled using a variety of ballpoint pens. I also really loved using fountain pens, and enjoyed the ritual of going to the local stationery store in Duncan, The Letterbox, and buying new ink cartridges for it. The idea of having and keeping a pen instead of just throwing it away when the ink ran out seemed a good one back in the ecologically-aware 1970s.

Alas, fountain pens and left-handed writing do not go great together, so some of my output would get a bit smeary. I adapted and bought faster-drying inks, while also learning to slow my writing, to further let the ink dry before my left hand would smoosh all across everything I’d just written.

Most of my writing with fountain pens was cursive, as the flow of ink from the nib just seemed to lend itself to that. But around grade six or so, I gave up on cursive (mine was fine) and went to printing everything. It was slower, but I enjoyed it more, and modesty aside, I had really nice printing. I even started doing fancy a’s.

Occasionally, I wanted to use different colours of ink to better emphasize certain words or phrases, and this is when I discovered the Bic four-colour pen, which offered:

  • Black
  • Blue
  • Green
  • Red

All in the same pen!

It was great. I loved it and kept buying them for years, until I finally just started typing out everything on computers instead.

But a few weeks ago I saw one in the stationery aisle of a drugstore and I had to buy it. And I did!

Yes, made in France. This delights me more than it should.

I still don’t have much need to write things by hand, but I do keep a notepad by my keyboard, and this pen sits next to it, ready to jot down things in four different colours. Sometimes I just click through the colours, like it’s secretly a fidget toy. Maybe it is a fidget toy.

I’m just glad to have one again. I am easily pleased, sometimes.

The difference 26 MHz used to make

When I got my first PC in 1994 (30 years ago!) I had to choose between Intel or AMD for the CPU. I chose AMD because their Am486 DX-40 CPU was both faster than the 33 MHz Intel equivalent, and cheaper. Win-win!

It served me well for several years.

Around the same time, a friend of mine, flush with money earned by working on the railroad (all the live long day) also got his own PC, but because he was Mr. Moneypants, he got a tricked out Intel 486 CPU running at 66 MHz.

We both had the game Crusader: No Remorse, which came out in 1995 and remains one of my favourite PC games of all time, despite having a shall we say, somewhat inelegant control scheme.

You can’t see any in the screenshot below, but if you look at the flashing red light on the wall, it’s about the same size as fans you would see spinning away in the game, as fans do. And this is where I saw that 26 MHz could make a big difference–on my friend’s PC, the fans spun smoothly. On mine, they hitched, like the wiring in them was funky or something. It made me a bit sad, and a little jealous.

Crusader: No Remorse (1995). Not shown: The million exploding barrels littering most levels.

Today, 26 MHz is about as relevant to CPUs as the first horseless carriages are to today’s electric vehicles, but back in the 1990s every new processor (save budget models) brought significant, noticeable speed boosts. It was in that environment that tech sites like AnandTech flourished, and I can see why it and other similar sites are dying off now–today, most people buy laptops and just deal with whatever it has when it comes to gaming (unless they are hardcore enough to seek out gaming laptops), or you have the enthusiast/gamer market where people aren’t looking for all-around good systems, but ones that can excel at playing very demanding games, cost oodles of money and have enough lights on them to be seen from space.

But yeah, for a time, if you wanted smoothly spinning fans in your games, a couple of hundred dollars more could buy you that.