The Sixth Stage of Grief Is Retro-Computing (2014)

What a lovely and strange essay. I never perceived the technological side as “grief” before, but it really is. People bonding over technologies and proceeding to make new technologies, all entwined. So many good connections brought out in here.

> When you read oral histories of technology, whether of successes or failures, you sense the yearning of people who want to get back into those rooms for a minute, back to solving the old problems. How should the mouse look? What will people want to do, when we give them these machines? How should a window open? Who wouldn’t want to go back 20 years—to drive again into the office, to sit before the whiteboard in a beanbag chair, in a place of warmth and clarity, and give it another try?

OK, wow, that was perceptive.

> That was when I said to my wife: If we do not have children, we will move somewhere where there is a porch. The children who need love will find the porch. They will know how to find it. We will be as much parents as we want to be.

I had a very similar experience growing up. Instead of Amiga, it was Atari. The common thread was that we both shared this very strange (at the time) interest in computers, he actually listened to me - a nobody kid, and he asked for absolutely nothing in return.

Given that experience, I can say that if you have the porch and the inclination, consider being that adult. You have no idea the good you can do.

One thing that never happens anymore -- innocent wholesome friendships between generations. When I was a kid (I'm older than this writer, born in 1962), my parents thought nothing of me going to hang out with an older neighbor in his workshop to see his computer, or fixing an old radio. I used to meet people on the phone on the party lines and loop lines, or on ham radio, and I'd go see them in person when I was 14 or 15.

Today, no parent would let his kid socialize with strangers, especially adult ones!

I've been doing this recently, since it's easy to do without leaving the house.

A pretty good amount of the broken "parts only" 8 and 16 bit computers on eBay are fixable solely by replacing all the tantalum and electrolytic capacitors. And since they are pretty large through hole components with clear markings, it's easy. Even if you've never soldered before.

I go down this rabbit hole occasionally. Besides the occasional arcade game (R-Type is the only reason I run MAME, really), I had a Raspberry Pi where I ran Basilisk II to emulate a Mac running System 6 (a poor replacement for the Mac Classic I refurbished in the late 90s, now long gone), WindowMaker (because I used to have a NeXT on my desk) and (for the longest of times) Plan 9, which mostly ran its weird VNC and SSH clients for me to pop over to headless machines.

There is a lot about those early computing environments that we still haven't caught up on, and probably never will--they're different evolutionary branches that went nowhere (especially Plan 9, which I rather liked but is unusable without a 3-button mouse).

I'm tempted to grab one of my 3A+ and either install Plan 9 or see if I can cross-compile NextSpace (https://github.com/trunkmaster/nextspace) and get a working environment.

What a long, but somehow still economically and modestly written story. A touching read.

May grief, when it hits us, eventually leave us with our sense of humanity enriched.

A similar phenomenon I have heard about is searching out old music records/albums. I think part of this is about completing some ancient want/need from one's childhood, or matching achievements of one's childhood role models. Resources and time are finite, so the thought of experiencing something you missed out on as a child that could potentially fill some hole or increase fulfillment is enticing. It often doesn't, but examining this behavior from the viewpoint of coming to terms with loss makes a lot of sense.

“taking screenshots like a tourist”

An underrated practice. We spend so much of our lives inside computer screens. It’s nice to take little random memento screenshots, for all the same reasons it’s nice to have photographs to look back on.

If anybody remembers ftrain.com, this is the same writer.

I suspect this is more in line with the third stage of grief, bargaining. This is the stage when you attempt to assert control. When the person has already died and you have no hope of control, then the bargaining can become more abstract and take the form of a raspberry pi. Still a nice read though.

Discussion from 5 years ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8565459

I made this vintagesimulator.com thing in case anyone thinks it's interesting.

Link has a paywall (well, mandatory registration: "To keep reading this story, create a free account").