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 past—including game playing—today using more modern systems like PCs, mobile devices, and hardware emulators. And as hinted at upfront, this is a wide-open, almost limitless topic. In just a short period of time, I’ve uncovered so much.

Given that, I need to focus. For example, I’m not going to cover how one might buy classic systems from the past—be they early consoles like the Atari VCS or early computers like the Commodore 64 or Amiga 500—and use them today. Don’t get me wrong, I feel the tug. But this approach is expensive and requires storage space, and with my new minimalist apartment-based lifestyle, it just doesn’t make any sense for me. Indeed, I used to have large collections of classic videogames and computer hardware, but I gave it all away years before we moved to Pennsylvania during one of our many decluttering pushes.

So what kind of topics might you expect? To frame this, I will again briefly step through my own history with personal technology, as it parallels the exact history with which I’m concerned. I’m sure I’ve covered much of this elsewhere, but it bears on the topics I want to examine later in this series.

I was just 9 years old when Atari released its Home Pong console in 1975, and 11 when the Atari VCS changed everything in 1977. I never owned either, nor did I get a Magnavox Odyssey 2 in 1978. But I experienced each at friends’ houses, and by the time my dad decided it was time for my family to get a videogame machine, he wanted to make sure we got the best one. And so he asked me, and I chose the Mattel Intellivision. This must have been 1980 or 1981, I can’t recall, but I accompanied him to an electronics store in Needham, Massachusetts to buy it and half a dozen games or so, and my parents gave the set to me, my brother, and my sister for Christmas that year.

In 1983, the videogame market crashed, and I picked up an Entertainment Computer System (ECS) add-on for the Intellivision for just $50 in the resulting fire sale, turning the Intellivision into my first computer. I taught myself BASIC on the ECS and could use in-game sprites—characters and other objects—in my own programs, which was very cool. And I used a Radio Shack tape recorder to save the programs I wrote.

What I really wanted, of course, was a dedicated home computer, as we called those early computers at the time. (The term personal computer existed, but it was popularized with the release of the original IBM PC in 1983.) And I got that in the form of a Commodore 64 in 1983. Over time, I added a plotter printer (a small printer that used cash register-like paper), a Commodore 1530 Datasette (tape recorder), and then eventually a Commodore 1541 disk drive.

During this time, my friends had different videogame systems and computers than I did, so I was able to at least experience other things, including consoles like the Atari 5200 and computers like the Atari 400, TI 99/4a, and the Timex Sinclair. And in 1985 to early 1987, I worked at Toys R Us and had my first 16-bit computing experience with a nice Atari 520ST setup before it was all summarily shipped back to Atari over some business dispute. I also witnessed the arrival of the Nintendo Entertainment System (NES), which came in three versions (standalone, with a light gun, and with a robot) and I judged it to be no more impressive graphically than my Commodore 64. The more impressive Sega Master System, with two kinds of cartridges, soon followed.

Thanks to Toys R Us’ liberal return policies, I upgraded to a Commodore 64C with a matching 1541C disk drive for free. But when I moved to Albuquerque, New Mexico in 1987, my house burned down, taking the C64C down with my Okimate 20 thermal color printer and huge collection of apps, games, and other 5.25-inch floppies with it. By that time, I had had some hands-on experience with the Mac at work, but it was too expensive. And so when I returned to the Boston area in early 1988, I was on the hunt for a new computer.

I wanted an Amiga 500, badly, but I couldn’t afford it. The local Commodore dealerships didn’t offer financing, and I didn’t have a credit card. And so I went with Plan B, which involved buying a fully decked-out Apple II GS system from the local Apple dealer because they did offer financing. I spent more money than I care to admit trying to turn that into something as good as the Amiga I really wanted. And by the time I got married in 1990, I gave up, sold it locally, and bought a used Amiga 500 with an external Commodore Amiga 1100 3.5-inch drive. Over time, I decked this thing out with a 1.3/2.04 ROM switcher with a physical, top-mounted switch and an internal 20 MB hard drive. But then I stupidly traded it in and bought a new Amiga 600.

Around this same time, my wife wanted to get a computer like the IBM PC she used at work. IBMs were very expensive, but the company had just launched the IBM PS1 line at Sears alongside the Prodigy online service. We bought the base model, with a 286 chipset, 512 KB of RAM, and a small grayscale (like black, white, and two shades of gray) display. It was a handsome little machine, and after discovering that my wife didn’t know how to launch applications like WordPerfect, I learned how to IBM/MS-DOS batch files and wrote a front-end application for launch apps. (A friend later took this and included it on PCs that his company sold.)

In 1992, Id Software released Castle Wolfenstein 3D, changing everything. I had tested a free copy of Microsoft Windows 3.0 on my wife’s PS1, but it ran so slowly you could watch the menus draw in real-time. But Wolfenstein 3D? This thing ran full speed even on my wife’s lowly computer, the only detriment being its grayscale display. It was eye-opening: here was a game that was impossible (in that day) on my Amiga, which was this graphics powerhouse, running great on the lowliest of PC hardware. The future was happening.

And then I moved to the Phoenix area to go back to school and study software development, and it became even more obvious that I’d need a PC. I was able to complete an entire semester of a class (minus the final project) that required Turbo Pascal using a Turbo Pascal clone on the Amiga, but that wasn’t going to work long-term. And so I made the switch sometime in late 1993.

I built my first PC. And while I don’t remember all the specs, it was based on an AMD 386SX chip and I was particularly happy with a 15-inch Packard Bell display I got at Sears. Id Software released DOOM in 1993 as well, and I sent a check to Mesquite, Texas so I could get the full game (on floppies). I needed a custom boot disk for my 386SX to optimize memory for the game, but it worked.

Around this time, I also started my book writing career thanks to a professor at Scottsdale Community College, and so I had to upgrade my PC over time. First with peripherals like a CD-ROM drive—by the time Windows 4.0/95 was in Beta, it was ponderous to use just floppies—and then with a new PC. My first purchased PC was a Dell 486 system. And we were off, writing books about Excel, Office, Windows, Visual Basic, and more, and getting involved with various Microsoft betas.

During these years, I focused on PC gaming. And the late 1990s was a high point for PC gaming with a rush of titles that kept pushing the bar higher. DOOM begat Duke Nukem 3D and was followed by Quake, Medal of Honor, and so many others. But we also played a lot of Sega Genesis and then the Nintendo 64. And then the 21st century arrived, with new consoles like the Sony PlayStation and the Xbox.

There’s so much there, but there’s also so much I left out, and so much I’ve probably just forgotten. One thing I’ve learned as I grew older was to move past the silly biases of the past. For example, I considered myself a Commodore guy in the 1980s and early 1990s, and I looked less kindly on competing systems from Atari and elsewhere. But then I learned that the Amiga’s chipsets were designed by the same guy who had designed the chipsets in the Atari 8-bit computers (400, 800, XL, etc.) and that they shared similar architectures. These days I have a deeper appreciation for the entire gamut of systems from any given era. We all should: in these systems, we can see ideas that pushed us into the future and others that faded away, perhaps unfairly.

Anyway, let’s see where this takes us. There’s no sense of order here, in that I won’t try to discuss things in any historical order. But perhaps it will get more cohesive over time.