There's a certain emotional attachment that develops during the formative years of whatever your hobby/interest is. Whether it's computer hardware, computer software, TV shows, motion pictures, cars, clothing, music, or something else.

Yes - but for someone like me, that doesn't fully encapsulate it since I was born three or four years after the era which I'm most interested in (286-Pentium). There's something other than formative emotional attachment in it for me at least.

Past life? 😀

^ 🤣 that'd be much harder to explain...

keenmaster486 wrote:

There's nothing objectively better about any of it!

You could say that some of the older hardware does in fact have certain obscure capabilities that newer hardware lacks – but then you'd have to explain that almost no one seems to even bother running any of the software that makes use of those capabilities. Even the people restoring old cars take them out for a spin and show them off on occasion.

"Look! This is a period-correct 1996 machine! Top-of-the-line hardware! Nothing in here that was available after January 1997! I spent three years and hundreds of dollars meticulously tracking down each component! I use it to collect dust. But doesn't it just look so rectangular?"

Explain our hobby to my dad

or any other person.

You simply can't so don't even bother 😎

It has a few bonuses, you get that satisfaction of putting together a fully functional system just how you want it. Then you get to test it out and use it for the purposes it was put together for. The process of parts selection/building the computer can often be a challenge that is a pleasure to overcome what with compatibility issues, old age, etc.

keenmaster486 wrote:

Yes - but for someone like me, that doesn't fully encapsulate it since I was born three or four years after the era which I'm most interested in (286-Pentium). There's something other than formative emotional attachment in it for me at least.

Now you have me curious. How did you get into retro hardware? Did someone introduce you to it, did you come across it on your own? I'm trying to put myself in your shoes...I can't see myself being that interested in computers from the late 60s. 🤣. Although, I could more realistically see myself being interested in music from that era, because older siblings listened to that.

Everyone's got their own 'thing.' I've tried to explain it to others but people just don't get it. I'll keep explaining though because I love talking about this stuff.

clueless1 wrote:

keenmaster486 wrote:

Yes - but for someone like me, that doesn't fully encapsulate it since I was born three or four years after the era which I'm most interested in (286-Pentium). There's something other than formative emotional attachment in it for me at least.

Now you have me curious. How did you get into retro hardware? Did someone introduce you to it, did you come across it on your own? I'm trying to put myself in your shoes...I can't see myself being that interested in computers from the late 60s. 🤣. Although, I could more realistically see myself being interested in music from that era, because older siblings listened to that.

I'm in the same situation. I also like 70s tech, eventhough this was before my time. I dunno why.
Perhaps these are symptoms caused by an overdose of too many old sci-fi movies ?
Maybe I shouldn't have watched Westworld, Silent Running or Space 1999 in my early childhood.. 😁
About that music part.. Yup, I agree. But back in school this was risky to tell somebody.
If you admitted to someone you didn't dislike your older relatives (or even parents *gasp*) music,
they looked down on you. Why is the world so strange ?

clueless1 wrote:

Past life?

🤣

Jorpho wrote:

"Look! This is a period-correct 1996 machine! Top-of-the-line hardware! Nothing in here that was available after January 1997! I spent three years and hundreds of dollars meticulously tracking down each component! I use it to collect dust. But doesn't it just look so rectangular?"

Ha. Well, I try to build machines that I actually use on a daily basis. If I didn't use it I would feel guilty letting it just sit there 😐

kixs wrote:

You simply can't so don't even bother

Oh yes you can. We just need thinking caps which enlarge our brains, then it will be no problem.

clueless1 wrote:

Now you have me curious. How did you get into retro hardware? Did someone introduce you to it, did you come across it on your own?

Ironically, it was my dad who introduced me to it. His home computer while I was growing up was an early PIII machine, and one day he loaded up his shareware copy of Commander Keen 4 on it and let me play with his Gravis Analog Pro joystick. So maybe that's why I like Keen so much, it's the first game I ever played. Later on he loaded DOS up on an old Celeron/900 laptop, and taught me how to program in Quick Basic on it. After that I discovered DOSBox which allowed me to have sound in my DOS games for the first time (ooooh!) and lurked around VOGONS for years before finally joining. But I never had any hardware which was made before 1998 or so until quite recently when I got hold of a 486 system and started building Pentium 1 machines. I have a thing for doing things with the oldest system you can reasonably do it with (that goes for cars too, which is why I keep telling my dad he should get a Model A).

But I always liked DOS, and doing things with DOS that you normally would do only on Windows (e.g. WYSIWYG word processing). I guess it was kind of half thumbing my nose at Microsoft, half trying to do things with the oldest reasonable system possible.

clueless1 wrote:

I could more realistically see myself being interested in music from that era

Jo22 wrote:

If you admitted to someone you didn't dislike your older relatives (or even parents *gasp*) music,
they looked down on you.

Well, I really like 80's music, more than any other era - and big band & jazz music from the 40's & 50's (e.g.Glenn Miller, Ella) comes in close behind. So the time periods my grandparents and parents grew up in 😀 But I can't stand modern pop music. It has no style, no creativity.

Unless you grew up in the late eighties or early nineties, it'll be difficult to convince anyone of the "usefulness" of these "junks"...

For me, I still maintain my old systems, just to remain young ( 🤣 ) - I feel like I'm still living those period when DOS was the doorway to the golden age of computer gaming.. in otherwords, nostalgia.

keenermaster486-thanks for sharing. 😀 Agree with Malik on pop music of the 80s. 🤣. Although, what I like is technically from that era too. Classic and Progressive Rock from the 70s-90s. I do like some classic rock from the 60s as well, as well as other genres and eras.

Im finally getting my wife to understand, but my dad on the other hand back when i was younger would complain about me having to many 486 machines (you can never have enough) so i told him what would like my to do for a hobby then take up on meth... yea no thanks. He stopped bugging my about my collection as long as it what put away neatly.

I was born in 1991, and just have a thing for everything nineties. As far as retro computing is concerned, the first computer I used was a 486 DX4 iirc with DOS 6.22 and Windows 3.1. To this day, my favourite platforms are between the 486DX2 and the Pentium 233MHz. I absolutely love almost everything Amiga and PPC mac-related (always wanted a PMG4 in the late 90s but couldn't afford one). 8086/8088 boxen look uninteresting to me (I do like to tinker with them out of curiosity though), whereas my father appreciates everything up to (and including) 386s. I do like the ZX Spectrum and the C=64 but mainly in a curious way... I guess that, in the end, it all comes down to what computers were like in our early years 😕

I'm 20, born in late 95' and it also happens that I love music, games and overall culture from the 80's/90's. They just remind me of times when changes were more radical and there was that 'approach' to putting more risk in coming up with fresh ideas. 😀 To me it feels as if it had been a more spacious landscape to walk in and that people also were more 'connected' without all the social media stuff. IMO the thing with computer hardware from the day is, you just didn't have Intel/AMD/Nvidia and nothing else for the consumer. You had much more variety and brands to choose from, way differing or not between capabilities and speed would increase exponentially every year passing by. An example? moving on from running CGA/EGA/VGA pallete games just made out of semigraphics/software sprites all the way to the boom of hardware acceleration and cards that could render fully 3D worlds at 640x480, 30 fps, with bilinear filtering and mipmapping rivaling that of 10K$ arcade hardware. 😉 Or.. for those of us in a tight budget, "3d accelerators" that still couldn't move an scene at more than 15fps and 400x300 (I'm calling you ViRGE 😁) or warping textures all over the place.

As clueless said, like with many other things in life we get to appreciate, it's no exception that emotions come to place and that makes almost aaaaaaanything outside of interests common to people difficult to explain. So being short: just keep enjoying your thing and don't even bother to "explain". 😁 I have 11 rigs besides my main pc and I still haven't built anything older than Pentium yet 🤣

I maintain most of my old computers because old flight sims and late-90s games run better on them; EAW and RB3D in particular. There are many games that actually run better on modern systems with enhanced graphics and gameplay. Sadly, many others do not. For those, I prefer to just use an old Win9x system and enjoy them the way they were meant to be played.

I maintain my Pentium MMX system for Archimedean Dynasty, EF2000, and MechWarrior 2 (3dfx version). It's also very good for running old DOS stuff.

I've stopped trying to explain this hobby to others. I get raised eyebrows and confused looks. My advice is just to not mention it at all. At best, you confuse people. At worst, they think you're a weirdo. Nothing positive comes from mentioning this hobby to folks who do not, will not, and cannot understand. During the 90s it was pretty common to see a joystick on somebody's computer desk. Nowadays, people think it's weird. They fear what they don't understand.

Heck, even I don't understand why some folks here collect the things they do or the reasons why they do it. I especially don't understand the under-30 folks who enjoy this hobby. Without the nostalgic aspect of the whole thing it just makes no sense to me. Ultimately, it's just a hobby. Your motivation and reasons for engaging in it don't have to make sense to anybody but yourself. I mean, some people collect these horrible things and display them in special cabinets:

... and then there are these guys:

I just cannot make my brain comprehend those two hobbies at all, but the folks who enjoy them aren't hurting anybody and it makes them happy. So, do what makes you happy and share it with people you like who can appreciate it. 😀

I think, for a lot of guys hobbies can be about getting something they couldn't have when they were younger.

I was born in 1990 in a small city (only moved to Moscow when I was 12 or 13), started gaming around 1996 or 1997 on a 486-DX2 laptop with a passive LCD matrix, no SoundBlaster and no CD drive.

So let's just say that when I play something on a Pentium-166+Voodoo 1 machine or even my Pentium Pro box, I'm playing on a hardware that basically cost like a used car when I was a child. Few people in my hometown (if any) owned that kind of machines.

My dad actually has a similar thing. When he was younger and lived in USSR, music hardware was expensive and vinyl records were rare and had to be copied using a bizzare DIY process involving actual X-ray snapshots (it was called "recording on the bones", I shit you not). So, when he moved us to Moscow and we got our first appartment, almost the first thing he did was set up our entire living room around some pretty expensive sound equipment.

So, may be the analogy would be more relevant if he were to get some expensive turntable and a huge collection of vinyls, the point is — guys tend to overcompensate. 😀

Pure nostalgia for me, I am fully aware of it! Also, the nature of games means that while visual and audio technology has moved on, the gameplay of many old games is just as good or even better than new releases.

It's a relatively cheap and unobtrusive hobby and too, as long as you don't go crazy with sound cards etc. Compared to for example cars, flying, golf, shooting and many other typical bloke pastimes it's very cheap.

When I walk into our office and see my retro setup and a bookcase full of games, the teenager in me thinks "this is f*cking cool".