Episode: 3117
Title: HPR3117: The joy of retro computing
Source: https://hub.hackerpublicradio.org/ccdn.php?filename=/eps/hpr3117/hpr3117.mp3
Transcribed: 2025-10-24 17:09:14

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This is Hacker Public Radio Episode 3117 for Tuesday, 14 July 2020. Today's show is entitled,
The Joy of Retro Computing. It is hosted by Nightwise and is about 32 minutes long
and carries a clean flag. The summary is,
Nightwise talks about the old computers in his attic and how it is a lovely geek getaway.
This episode of HPR is brought to you by archive.org.
Support universal access to all knowledge by heading over to archive.org forward slash donate.
Hey there, Hacker Public Radio. It's been a while since I've done one of these. This is Nightwise from the Nightwise.com podcast.
Checking in. It's been a while but I'm on my way to work in Brussels and I'm taking the car.
It's been quite a couple of, I think, two years since I've done this.
Mostly I commute by train and of course since the COVID thing I've been working from home mostly.
So the new rule is going to be that we have to head into work occasionally.
So today is one of those occasional days. And because of the fact that when I'm taking the train,
I'm using quite a busy public transport for about three hours a day,
especially with the rate of contamination at this moment I decided,
no, I'll just go by car. So for once in a while, just taking the car and driving to Brussels is fine,
as long as you don't have to do it every day.
Perfect time to sit back and pick up an old hobby, recording podcasts in the car.
I've done this for a while.
Spec'd out to do everything that I need. I'm just using a lapel bike.
So excuse the road noise, but that's not really what HBR is all about,
about high definition quality.
What I wanted to talk to you guys about today is about a little donation that I got.
I'm an IT consultant, I have my own company, and I'm always working with technology,
and of course when you're a geek and you're a nerd, a geek actually.
You also like working with technology when you're free time.
All of my computers are kind of centered around work.
I either work as a contractor for client or I work for my own clients,
so all the laptops that I have, I have a MacBook Pro and have an X1 ThinkPad,
are all like spec'd out with stuff relating to work.
And especially since I've been working from home so much whenever I look at those two machines,
I go like work and there's stuff to be done.
So I decided, especially during the lockdown, to give myself a little play pen,
where when I use those computers in that room, I've got a hobby room upstairs,
it's all about play.
And one of the things that I've done to step back out of the busy rat race
of modern day technology was to give myself technology that just couldn't handle modern day technology.
So I've been kind of going into retro computing a little bit.
To picture this or to frame this story, I would have to go back to the beginning of my IT career.
It was 1993, when I'm after owning a Commodore 64 and a MEGA for games,
I needed a computer to write some essays for school.
And I got my first Pentium 75 running Windows 95.
I kind of used that computer and I was kind of getting interested in computers again for a couple of years,
but mostly using it for school when I met my current wife.
And her dad was a major, major computer, well not geek.
I remember meeting the man for the first time and I had a little problem with my computer.
And it was the first time I met the father of my girlfriend.
It's always a very intimidating moment.
And I had mentioned to my girlfriend, she said, my dad can take a look at that.
So, you know, I met the man and I said, I'm really, I've got, you know, problem.
I said, oh yeah, bring it on, we'll take a look at it.
So, you know, next time we go up, take my little tower up his arm, walk it upstairs,
and I follow him and he opens this door.
And this door is a massive room filled with computers.
It's 1996, he's got every imaginable machine there.
From a TRS-80 to a PC-10 Commodore to Pentium's, Pentium 2's,
dual core machines, the whole thing.
It's like Valhalla.
It's filled with discs and illegal copies of software.
It's filled with books with all kinds of stuff.
It's this massive, massive hobby room.
And this is where I learned my trade.
He taught me everything I know.
And a year later, I finished my studies and went to work into the computer shop
that he started to, he helped to start up.
So, I got into IT thanks to him.
Fast forward 25 years to the current date, the man's retired.
He still has a laptop, but he's not really into computers anymore.
The day he stopped teaching, he kind of stopped geeking out.
He went like, you know what, I'll just put a laptop downstairs and I'm fine.
That's great.
So, this massive room has just been standing there, preserved in time,
filled with magazines from the late 80s, early 90s,
filled with discs and software and stuff like that.
And the room has always fascinated me.
So, because he doesn't use it anymore, I've started to curate it.
So, I've asked him, you know, will he, can I take some of that old stuff?
Because he was thinking about clearing it out.
And I'm like, no, no, that can never happen.
You cannot clear it out.
So, he said, you know what, you know, just take what you want.
You know, we bought a new house two years ago, I have a little den upstairs
and he's like, you know, take whatever you want.
You know, just put it in the den.
If you want to play with it, go for it.
So, I have started the process of collecting some of the things
that he has up there.
And it's beautiful.
I mean, reading magazines from the early 90s about how, you know,
computer magazines like computer totale, computer totale,
which is a Dutch magazine, stuff like that.
You know, he has massive collections of those.
So, I started, you know, whenever my wife goes to visit her parents,
I dive upstairs and my wife groans and go like, oh my god,
he's hoarding again.
So, I just be like, like in Indiana Jones, I'm collecting tidbits
of beautiful, beautiful retro technology.
I've found a couple of two libretos running Windows 95,
a couple of old laptops, of course, one or two old PC towers.
And I've started bringing this stuff home and started collecting it.
And this has become my new hobby.
This retro PC, I don't know, not a fixation, but, you know,
my retro PC world, I go upstairs to my little den,
and I step back in time.
You know, it's messy there.
I don't care.
It has cables and stuff all over it.
It actually is starting to look like the office of my father-in-law.
But I love it there.
It's like a little spa, you walk back,
you take a step back from the internet of the day,
and it might be a wave of nostalgia passing over you.
But it's also this little room of challenges,
challenges to get stuff working again,
and the satisfaction of doing so.
So, I've started collecting old PC towers.
But whenever I go to the recycling center or I see one of those, you know,
dumpsters with tech in them, I always start sniffing around.
If I can find something from the past,
then the past is fleeting, so my time is short.
And I'm trying to hold on to as much as I can.
So, one of the missions that I'm trying to do is putting together
a Windows 98 machine with original pieces.
And the original pieces by that, I mean the pieces that I used to work with
when I started my career.
I started my computer career in 1997, 1998, about there.
In this small little computer shop that used self-assembled PC
for their customers.
And I've assembled many, many, many PCs there.
We did our own assembly, we learned to do it in a certain way.
And this computer shop was very highly regarded
as an excellent reputation because of the material that they used
and the way the computers were constructed.
Because, you know, we learned the trait and we had a reputation.
This shop was called Bell's Computer Shop.
And when you'd work there, people would say, you know,
and you would move on to other gigs and other things.
Your resume would mean something.
Well, whoa, yeah, you're a Bell's Guy.
Yes.
Okay.
You have been trained in assembly and software configuration
by the best, you know, they were very strict.
And they were at a very, very successful business because
they were so, so very focused on quality.
So fine, I am trying to reassemble one of those machines.
So I have been looking for a case, you know, once in a while,
the boss would order one shipping container full of computer
cases in China.
Shipping container would arrive, we would pack it all out,
stuff it in store, everywhere.
And that would be the case that we used for the couple two months
or three months until the next container arrived.
And we got another model.
So these Bell's computers had very distinct cases.
And you could know by the case what time it was that the
computer was working.
So what was assembled?
So I'm working on one of these cases to get the pieces together
again.
So I found some pieces that my father-in-law,
and I'm scrounging pieces all over.
And I'm putting a machine together from the olden days.
With the speakers, monitors are almost impossible to find.
But I'm trying to find a keyboard from the time.
Speakers from the time, you know, because the Yona would also
order a container of speakers that would go out with every
PC's and these speakers would be branded with this logo.
They were shit, you know, they didn't sound good at all.
But, you know, they did stuff like that.
And it was great.
It's great doing that because it's so much fun to dive back
in time, dive back into your old knowledge, your own knowledge
to kind of remember yourself, you know, what was this
like back in the days?
What was this, what did we, what were the challenges that we met?
And I continually, continually find myself challenged by this
technology, and it's beautiful, you know.
I remember getting the mainboard up and running in a way
like, oh yeah, good.
I got a Windows 98p, a CD, I'll just pop it in there.
And oh yeah, that's right.
These things don't boot from CD.
They didn't boot from a CD.
You need the dust disk.
Oh, the frilly freaking, where am I going to get the dust disk?
So you find yourself a floppy disk, and then it begins.
You know, you have the massive internet to assist you
and bless the Matrix, and Jason Scott, and his goons
for the internet archive, which is absolutely stacked
with these things.
I also love his podcast.
Check out Jason Howell talks his way out of it,
which is all about all technology, retro, and his past,
stories like this.
And you know, you find these things, and then you go, yeah.
Oh yeah, how do I get this to a disk?
All right, okay, I got a USB floppy drive.
That's fine, okay.
And it goes on like this, but it becomes even more interesting
when you go way back, and you suddenly go towards
five and a quarter inch floppy disks.
How the hell am I going to get software on there
from the modern day internet?
So bridging that gap from today to yesterday
is a beautiful challenge, and requires quite a bit of thinking.
So I've been working on a couple of projects.
So far, I have restored a Windows XP laptop
to Shiba from the day, because I found it
with its original restore CD in there.
I'm working on a Windows 98 laptop at the moment.
That's a challenge.
No, it's Windows 95 laptop.
It doesn't even have a CD-ROM.
So I need to find the ATP CD-ROM driver
and modify the auto-exec.bat.
You bloody young kids don't even know what I'm talking about,
but think about brain surgery on your iPad to get it working.
And getting a CD-ROM operational again
just to install Windows 95, and then you know the quest
for drivers begins, and it's archaeology.
It actually is.
And all of that has been a very refreshing opportunity,
a very refreshing way for me to be around computers
yet not feel the stress of work
and the rush of everyday internet
with its information overload and its constant distractions.
And I've been working on a couple of machines,
and lost weekend, I actually got the chance
to get my hands on a couple of retro Macs.
The local community center was vandalized,
and these guys are actually next door.
And some kids broke in and smashed a place up,
and you know, I live in a small town, a little community,
so everybody knows everybody.
And since I own an IT firm together with my wife,
I immediately called up the guys
that are responsible for the community center,
and said like, hey, I heard about this.
Is there anything we can do?
Just say it.
And they went like, yeah, can you help us with cameras
and internet and stuff?
So I helped them out with installing a couple of ringcams,
making a new Wi-Fi network for them, stuff like that.
So while I was working on it, these are beautiful,
lovely people that do this, you know,
just in their spare time, totally for free.
So I decided, you know, my firm is going to help them out
pro bono.
So I did that, and it was fun.
It was really nice.
And as we were doing this, we start talking about, you know,
hobbies, and I went like, yeah, I'm into PCs,
but I'm into, you know, my free time,
I love to have some retro PCs.
And the guy says, well, you know,
and he says, where do you get them?
I said, well, mostly, I sometimes I get a donation,
or sometimes I find them in the recycling center,
and I love doing that, you know, finding them, fixing them up,
and donating them, especially the machines that still work.
And he says like, well, really?
Because, you know, I got a couple of old Macs at home,
and I went like, oh, you do?
Yeah.
There's one, there's this little ball, and you know,
two others over there.
And I was going to take them to the recycling center,
but if you want them, you can pick them up.
And I went like, yeah, sure.
So, weekend rolls are wrong.
He calls me up.
He says like, hey, I found them in the attic,
and I'm cleaning them up, and they're downstairs,
and you want to come and pick them up.
So I was kind of excited about this.
And I was like, oh, yeah.
Maybe there's a G3 in there.
I wanted to get my hands back on an iPad.
No, no.
I'm Mac G3.
Because these are one of the machines I used to work on
when I was a kid.
When I was a kid, when I was a youngster,
when I was just getting into computers, you know.
I worked at a multimedia testing center
that had a couple of Macs.
And I remember opening up a Mac the first time,
which was amazing.
And I went like, oh, yeah, maybe there's a little, you know,
I'm Mac G3 there.
There's a lot of Bonnie blue little ball.
That'd be nice.
They're pretty.
So I go up and he opens the door,
and there are two G4 iMacs.
You know, the ones with the half the ball
and the TFT screen on a swivel.
And these things are rare.
Yeah, two of them.
And an iMac G5, first generation.
And I was like, holy, beep word.
This is awesome.
So sorry for the road noise.
I'm not really, really bad Belgian roads for the moment.
So I'm sorry about that.
So I'm like, wow, this is amazing.
I really want this.
And he said like, sure, sure.
So I came home with two iMacs and three iMacs,
the G5, two G4s, a couple of all the keyboards,
all the mice, all the cables.
And these machines were perfectly operational.
So this is going to be my next quest.
We're storing one of them to Mac OS 9.
And we're storing one of them to Mac OS 10.
The software, the OS is that they use to run in the day.
And I've found a lot of things on the internet archive
but I've also found this beautiful site called the Mac Garden
that curates Apple software from the days.
It's like the internet and mother load archive for Mac users.
And they have a massive, massive amount of software in games.
All beautifully described, all downloadable.
But they also have an FTP server.
Wow, I mean, just doing this over FTP is bloody great
because these machines are old.
I think that's an 800 MHz G4 and 900 MHz G4.
And I think it's a gigahertz G5.
I'm not sure I have to check.
And you can't run any modern operating system on them anymore.
Because Apple doesn't support BBC anymore.
You can go up to 10.4 or something, that's it.
And you know, they're also horribly underspect.
Now you can open them up.
And I think that I have a lot of recycled RAM at home
so I can probably bent them up ramwise
to about a gig or two gigs of RAM,
which is, you know, for the 256 megabytes,
they come by a massive amount of RAM.
And there are even adapters that you can get to put in an SSD.
So you can pin that little Mac a little bit to get faster.
But you have to, you know, take into account that, you know,
the processor just isn't there yet.
And I've seen beautiful projects of people just yanking out the guts,
putting in a Raspberry Pi into this beautiful case of an iMac G4
and using it as a computer that way.
But, you know, the TFTs are good, but they're not fantastic.
I think this was the first generation TFT, of course.
They have white bleed, you wouldn't believe,
but they're beautiful and they're wonderful to work with.
So instead of pimping it up to a modern day machine,
I decided, you know, let's just leave them in the past.
Let's just, you know, enjoy the past
and restore them to their original states
with the original software they used to run back in the day.
So that's becoming my mission.
So next week, last weekend, I took off all the data from the previous owner
because he asked me, he said, like, there's so many pictures on there.
I don't know how to get them off. Can you please help me?
So I've been spending, you know, setting them all up on our living room table.
My wife is going like, you're nuts, they're beautiful,
but you're nuts and I love you.
And trying to get the data off.
These things are USB1, they are horribly slow.
And, you know, finder wouldn't really work with me.
So I just, you know, opened up the terminal,
zipped all the local data, exported to a USB disk.
And it was beautiful seeing these machines,
shugging to get it everything, to get every single file into a USB zip file,
and then painfully staked, painfully slowly copying them to a USB disk.
It was delightful to see.
I mean, while I took out, I pulled out the keyboards,
and these are these transparent keyboards, remember from the days,
and they were full of gunk and nails and food rests.
And I cleaned them up, cleaned them out,
put them back together. It's beautiful.
It's absolutely fantastic.
And it's a step back in time.
And I love that, to do just that.
And maybe you have some old stuff lying around as well,
that you want to play with, that you have forgotten,
and you think like, hey, that's just lying around.
Maybe I should get rid of it.
Maybe you should go back to that day, and that you bought it,
and maybe you should go back to that time,
and you had the challenges that you used to overcome
in order to get it working, and kind of feel the satisfaction,
again, of doing that.
It's nostalgia on one end, but on the other hand,
it is confronted me with the fact that how easy computers have gotten.
I mean, I'm taking an iPad Pro to work these days.
Yeah, an iPad Pro to work these days,
with a keyboard and a mouse.
And this is becoming my mobile computer.
I'm not even taking a PC to work anymore.
Just the iPad.
There's no skill involved in turning on an iPad.
There's no skill involved in getting iOS on there.
There's no skill involved in Android.
It's just, you go to the store, you tap, tap, tap, tap, tap,
and it's done.
And for the average user, they go like,
the kids these days are really good with computers.
Yeah, A, that's because they grew up with them.
And B is because they're frequently easy.
I mean, a two-year-old can start up an application on a Mac,
or on a PC these days, or on a tablet, or on a window.
I don't know.
They just have to tap.
I would give my two-year-old niece a libretto,
a couple of dust discs, and challenger to come on,
get Doom running there.
A two-year-old could really successfully pull that off.
I can fairly confidently say that the 46-year-old,
me, has a hard time getting that working again.
Because it used to be harder.
And it also used to be a challenge,
and you used to be able to learn stuff.
These days, we'd learn mostly of, you know,
how to do things with computers.
They're becoming more and more appliances.
And in a way, that's a good thing.
That's what they're for.
But learning, or going back to the times that you had to
really learn to get something working,
that was also a very nice time.
So, I've got my little 10 upstairs,
and I've got an RG-45 connection that I still need to hook up.
And I decided I'm not going to do it.
I'm not going to hook up my upstairs,
little 10, with the network.
Because then I connected to the internet,
and the modern internet comes with all of the distractions
and yet, yet, yet, yet.
So, I have one laptop, a Linux machine over there,
disconnected to the internet.
I used that one to download everything,
and to do what it has to do.
And the rest, well, the rest is the rest.
The rest is disconnected and gets fed
with USB steaks and external drives and floppies.
In order to restore them,
because they lived in a land where the internet was not a button.
And by the way, if you take a modern day internet
to a non-supported machine with a non-supported browser,
it's kind of like leaking the toilet seat on the train station.
The chances that you'll catch something are pretty big.
And I'm not really looking forward to doing that.
But it's a beautiful experience to do that again,
to play around with all technology.
It feels like stepping into a spa after a long day at work.
It's this little tech jacuzzi that's running on a different pace.
Because one of the things that I've learned with working
with these old machines is waging patience.
My god, patience.
Installing Windows 98s?
It takes a while.
Putting about, I think,
three gigabytes of pictures into a zip file using the command line
on a 900 MHz machine with 256 Mbps of RAM,
or gigabytes, or gigabytes, megabytes.
That takes a while.
And you have to learn the art of waiting again,
and thank the Matrix for all the magazines that I found.
Because then I dive into those.
And my journey to the past is complete.
It's really fun.
Last weekend, when I went to my father-in-law,
I also started the next part of my collection.
I've fetched most of the machines.
And I've also fetched a bunch of cables,
because you know, a very simple,
dint PS2 connector.
You can't find that anymore,
but if you need to hook up a keyboard to a very old machine,
you need them.
And it's like stuff like that that I'm looking into,
that I'm working on, that I'm collecting,
and I'm digging through his office and his old bags.
And, you know, piece by piece,
I'm starting to get things home.
Last week, it was time to bring home the CDs.
So I've got six massive shopping bags filled
with CD ROMs that I have to sort out.
So I'm going to collect and sort them out into OS disks
and stuff like that.
OS disk, application disks,
there's a massive amount of wires on there.
I had the moment of the car,
and I'd sit in my dad-in-law.
I said, like, if we take the cost of all of these software licenses
that I have in my car right now,
and you would have actually had to pay for them.
What would they have cost?
He said, like, I don't know,
but I think there's a small streets of houses
in that car at the moment.
It was back in the day.
You could do that.
They didn't even have a bit for it.
They would copy CDs and exchange wares and stuff like that.
It's beautiful.
So I've got a lot of bags of outdated software
that needed to be sorted.
I've got magazines that I need to fetch.
And he also has a complete covered of bucks
that need to be sorted out.
And there are things that are going to go to the recycling center.
I cannot hoard them all.
But I am going to try to keep some of the books like, you know,
Windows 95, the unwritten guide.
N-T-4.
N-T-4.
Workstate.
No, N-T-3.5.
Workstation.
The missing manual.
You know, books like that.
Office 97 for dummies.
For idiots.
For idiots.
Before it was called for dummies,
it was called the Idiot's Guide to Windows 97.
To Office 97.
And the books were orange and not yellow.
I love those things.
I really enjoyed learning back then.
And having them back is vast nostalgia.
There's no productive use in there at all.
But that's the nice part.
There's no productive use in there at all.
It's like sitting in a jacuzzi.
There's no productivity in there at all.
It's just the experience.
And that's what retro PC stuff is to me.
So yeah, I hope you enjoyed my little journey down memory lane.
And maybe you have a machine that you want to play with from the past.
Or that you want to teach your kids about or challenge them to do something with, you know,
take them back to that time.
When things were harder, they couldn't do what they wanted to do.
But there was, to me, maybe I'm just gonna say,
more magic in computing than they used to be.
So that was my little rant.
I hope you enjoyed it.
I will try if I find anything else that is interesting to keep you up to date.
But until then, I am going to go upstairs this weekend.
Open up these little one little iMac, clean it out,
take good care of it, nurture it.
And maybe I'll hook it up to the internet just to connect with this cyberduck application
to this web server of Macintosh Garden and download some of that old software like Photoshop 2.0
or the unarchiver 1.0 or toast to write CDs, stuff like that.
And enjoy my little journey into the way back when computers were slow, frustrating,
but also extremely satisfying to work with.
You can do your own episode for Hacker Public Radio if you're a listener.
Just do what I do. Record it on your phone in the car.
You have all the modern day technology that you can.
And enjoy talking about the things that you're passionate about.
Submit it to the community and make sure for yourself.
Until then, this was Nightwise from thenightwise.com podcast.
The occasional walk to the edge of real and cyber space
where I, if I have the time, talk about technology and how to let it work for you.
I will see you on the flip side. Bye-bye.
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