You came back to see us. We are so glad to see you.

November 5, 2014 8:03 AM

A gorgeous essay on memory, mourning, weird forgotten forms of optimism, and emulating old computers.
posted by nebulawindphone (21 comments total)

> "Want to use Photoshop 1.0 in black and white with German-language menus? No? Well, I do."

Loving this.
posted by benito.strauss at 8:21 AM on November 5, 2014

(by Mefi's own ftrain (before languagehat gets here))
posted by dhruva at 8:28 AM on November 5, 2014 [6 favorites]

Here is a picture of him from 1999. He is the one on your left.

Brilliant.
posted by chavenet at 8:28 AM on November 5, 2014 [4 favorites]

I appreciate the alternate commencement speech very much.

I'd complain about how it's taking medium to get ftrain back, but then again, here I am writing on metafilter and my own blog hasn't been updated in three years, so...
posted by weston at 8:30 AM on November 5, 2014 [2 favorites]

Very sweet. Thank you.
posted by benito.strauss at 8:34 AM on November 5, 2014

Nice article, thanks. Though I wonder if Amiga's problem was that they gave up using so many xylophones in their demos and ads. Because, really, everything is better with xylophones.
posted by still_wears_a_hat at 8:39 AM on November 5, 2014

Very good, and gems to steal. Moore's Law is making the past smaller... (but in many more copies)

Emulation is deeply fascinating, and not just for Proustian thrills and historical illustration. What is memory but the past emulated? What is conscious perception but the present emulated? And they who emulate the future best, win. This piece is a rappel into the cave, but there are so many passageways beckoning into the gloom once you hit the ground.
posted by Devonian at 8:58 AM on November 5, 2014 [3 favorites]

Every so often I go get my Mac 512k out of its spot on top of the bookshelves in my office and bring it down and set it on the dining room table so my wife can play with Mac Paint 1.0. She is younger than me, and she never got to use one of the black and white all-in-one Macs and is still hypnotized by the flipping of pixels black to white. Well, she is for a little while, at least. Then she'll take a snapshot of her artwork with her phone and wander off, leaving me to stare at the little flickering screen and I'll try to remember all the muscle movements I once knew to coax art out of the machine and the hours will roll by, me at the kitchen table, clicking away, face bathed in the blue glow.

Which all is to say: This was good, and I saw myself in those words and images more than once.
posted by 1f2frfbf at 9:10 AM on November 5, 2014 [6 favorites]

I don’t really have a lot of emotions or admiration when using Windows. It’s sort of the Superbowl Halftime Show of operating systems. Given what everyone got paid, it should be a lot more memorable.

I like that.
posted by octothorpe at 9:35 AM on November 5, 2014 [5 favorites]

Bit of a coincidence that the topic of old computers would come up in an FPP. I was mulling over trying to put one together about the recent bit of published correspondence between a vintage computer hobbyist and (MeFi's Own) Steve Wozniak.

In it, Woz says:

I awoke one night in Quito, Ecuador, this year and came up with a way to save a chip or two from the Apple II, and a trivial way to have the 2 grays of the Apple II be different (light gray and dark gray) but it’s 38 years too late.

posted by Kadin2048 at 9:35 AM on November 5, 2014 [16 favorites]

This was so oddly touching. While I was hardly building computers as a child, I tend to forget how much more contact with computers I had growing up (at least compared to my classmates). Even just a few weeks ago I went to vote at our local high school and was amused to notice on the banner for the "Drama Bulletin Board" was a laminated dot matrix printout. I couldn't believe they kept that around, but also couldn't believe the flood of memories that opened up for me. I still remember the Christmas my dad got us a Commodore 64 (a gift that we only really came to appreciate after the fact....), the neighbours next door who pirated games for us (and trying to remember the convoluted boot commands), the day the bundle of discs arrived from California (so exotic!) with our first word processing program (though my mother still complains it could never keep up with her typing). So many small things that, in hindsight, are tied to much bigger things.

Neat article.
posted by Mrs. Rattery at 10:08 AM on November 5, 2014

I awoke one night in Quito, Ecuador, this year and came up with a way to save a chip or two from the Apple II, and a trivial way to have the 2 grays of the Apple II be different (light gray and dark gray) but it’s 38 years too late.

And that's the thing, innit? People do this all the time, with all sorts of antiquated stuff. And situations. You can be perfectly happy in your current life, with things you use, and still have regretful "what ifs"--or glowing nostalgic thoughts, untempered by the day-to-day reality of the time--about things long in the past. It's a curious bittersweet feeling.

I suspect if time travel was possible, the vast, vast majority of it would be spent going back to visit your former self, not seeing dinosaurs or historical events, people or places.
posted by maxwelton at 10:17 AM on November 5, 2014

Oh, wow: reading this so close on the heels of bondcliff's story of building a train set with his son is setting my Dad Sense tingling.

I so want to make sure that my kids -- sons and daughters alike -- have someone important in their lives for the times when our communications break down, which I know they will someday. I am self-aware enough to know that I can't be the perfect person to all of them, and I just pray that when they need a mentor/exemplar/leader, a good one will be there for them.
posted by wenestvedt at 10:41 AM on November 5, 2014 [1 favorite]

I've been watching ftrain tweet about emulators and wondering what the hell he's been up to. Between this and tilde.club he's pushed a lot of my own buttons about early computers and socialization. I was one of those computer nerd kids too. He's a hell of a writer.

For me, my early life was all about the Franklin Ace 1000 my uncle bought me. And the 300 baud modem I saved up my money for all summer delivering stuff on my bike. That led me to the Houston BBS scene in the 80s and a whole bigger world. I still keep up with some of those folks.
posted by Nelson at 12:06 PM on November 5, 2014 [1 favorite]

I have two Apple Lisas and four NeXT boxes in this house and I still don't have a tilde.club account.

(fantastic article, thanks for sharing...)
posted by tss at 5:06 PM on November 5, 2014

Ah, now this is stuck in my head.

(Time to go dust off the old BeOS image and reminisce...)
posted by fader at 6:28 PM on November 5, 2014

I want to read more like this. Where can I get another hit?
posted by dzkalman at 9:28 PM on November 5, 2014 [1 favorite]

Also, this essay reminded me a lot of a beautiful musing by Rabbi Zalman Schachter-Shalomi, the founder of Renewal Judaism, about his hard drive's failure.
posted by dzkalman at 9:31 PM on November 5, 2014

I liked this a lot, for a bunch of different reasons.

My brother was an Amiga entrepreneur.

My company just did a bunch of work on that Lisp Machine emulator.

I'm an Apple geek going back to 1984.

I've been a kid, and now I'm a grownup who knows kids.

I'm mystified by death.

Really good work, weaving all this together.
posted by alms at 8:28 AM on November 6, 2014

This piece is a rappel into the cave, but there are so many passageways beckoning into the gloom once you hit the ground.

Though they tend to be twisty and sometimes seem all alike.
posted by weston at 3:53 PM on November 6, 2014 [1 favorite]

After my friend Paul killed himself, the only memorial I could make was on an emulated ZX Spectrum.
I couldn't travel through time and steal handfuls of biscuits from the church coffee time tray, as we did.
I couldn't travel through space and clamber about on the tame mossy cliff under Mearns Castle, as we did.
But I could make an ever-changing display of all of the colours by writing dreadful BASIC programs on his Sinclair, as we did.
posted by scruss at 7:38 PM on November 6, 2014 [3 favorites]