I think I can speak to this a bit since I run a hobby business[0] selling restored Mac mini G4s (originally from 2005) with a hacked version of Mac OS 9 on them from Mac OS 9 Lives so that retro computer users (people still using production software for Mac OS 9) can have the fastest possible machine to run classic Mac OS. After selling more than 60 of them, my customers (from what I can tell) are largely in five categories:

- People doing this for their kids so the kids can use the software of their parent's youth (my own motivation that led me to fall into this [1])

- People doing this for work (still using old music production software for example)

- People doing this because they care about historical software (had a couple museum curators buy one)

- People who are tinkerers but want to tinker with software not hardware so they buy from me

- Retro gamers

In all of these cases I don't think it's really about feeling old or young. It's just about doing something that they perceive as better than they can achieve on a modern machine. And by "better" I mean better to them. Not objectively better. They just love those games from the 90s. Or they just think that the educational software back then was less addictive/better for their kids than the software today.

Sure, if we think about anything from our distant past it can make us feel old. But I think it's more that this hobby (or work) actually serves a purpose for these customers and they don't think along the old/young axis.

0: https://os9.shop 1: https://x.com/davekopec/status/1780032912768770448