Tech Nostalgia (Premium)

After some internal debate, I've decided to launch an open-ended series of articles about classic personal technology and how it's still possible to experience the past today. Yes, my time in this industry has been largely forward-leaning---the SuperSite for Windows, you may recall, was about "the future of Windows … today!"---but that shifted to a more general personal computing focus with the move to Thurrott.com. And now, with decades in the rearview mirror, I find myself increasingly nostalgic about the past.

This is how I spend my free time. In just the past few months alone, I've read (or re-read) several books about the early days of personal computing, including Shareware Heroes by Richard Moss, Grateful Geek: 50 Years of Apple and Other Tech Adventures by Jean-Louis Gassee, Back into the Storm: A Design Engineer's Story of Commodore Computers in the 1980s by Bil Herd, TOO BLUE!: The IBM PC from an Acorn to a Renegade by Dennis Andrews, Commodore: The Final Years by Brian Bagnall, and Once Upon Atari: How I Made History by Killing an Industry by Howard Scott Warshaw (on Audible). I've also watched innumerable videos on these topics in the same time frame, including full-length documentaries like Viva Amiga and Atari: Game Over, and dozens and dozens of other videos too numerous to enumerate.

Separate from this, I've been experimenting with and learning JavaScript web development, and at some point in the past few weeks, it occurred to me that creating web-based games might make this process more fun and interesting, and provide a break from the Notepad-style apps I focused on previously. And in researching that, I discovered something fascinating (to me) that in retrospect should have been obvious: not only can you create high-quality modern games with JavaScript now, but JavaScript---even "vanilla" JavaScript with no add-on frameworks---is fairly ideal for recreating classic arcade, console, and home computer games from the past. And that's as true of simple games, like those found on the original Atari VCS, as it is for the more advanced parallax scrolling-based titles I remember from the Amiga.

That these two worlds---classic personal technology and software development---would intersect is doubly interesting to me. For example, enthusiasts have created BASIC programming languages for the Atari VCS and Mattel Intellivision (and, I'm sure, other classic platforms) that let anyone create new games for those systems today. These games can be played on emulators, of course, but they can also be made into cartridges that can be played on the original systems too. That is as delightfully insane as it is pointless, but I think it highlights the power of combining nostalgia with personal technology.

I'm not going to go down that path. And I'm also not going to write about creating games with JavaScript, at least not right away. Instead, I would like to examine how we can recreate the personal computing experiences of the p...