Archaic tech: Making old things fun
Your unusable skills could make a great hobby
When I was growing up in southern Ohio, my family had a few computers. Early on I inherited my grandmother’s Commodore 64, which I kept through at least middle school. Other than that, my dad had a habit of bringing work home with him from time to time, and we had a handful of temporary computers in the house, starting with a classic Mac (I think it was an SE or an SE/30, but that’s not important to the story.) I spent a lot of time figuring out things (and sometimes breaking things) on these old computers.
We eventually got a more permanent family computer (a Macintosh LC II) and I built PCs in high school, mostly for games and maintaining my on-again, off-again web presence on various free website providers like GeoCities or Tripod.
It was around that time that I figured out I was pretty good at solving computer problems, and made a bit of money here and there doing that, which turned into a work study program in college, and several jobs over the years.
Now, in 2021, technology has greatly changed. Some of the support needs are the same (things break. A lot.) Even so, I’ve made my way in the world supporting the people who support people, so a lot of reading and understanding the latest technology is crucial.
What’s to be done, then, about the technology of my youth?
Certainly, some old tech is still in use. The manufacturing sector, in many cases, relies on 20 to 30 year old technology to keep equipment (for example, tool and die production) running, and a lot of vendors just never updated their code. Even the U.S. military uses Windows 95 for some applications. There really isn’t a widespread use for a lot of this old technology on a daily basis, outside of extremely specialized use.
Last fall, I decided I would work on recalling some of my knowledge of this older technology, and set up some computers in my garage.
First off is this Macintosh Classic that I’ve had gathering dust for almost 10 years. I bought it on eBay on a whim at some point, but never got much use out of it.
Next up is this “Sunflower” iMac G4. I got this one on eBay as well, without a keyboard or mouse, but thanks to a friend with a broken iMac, I acquired a suitable mouse (and used any old keyboard.)
Finally, an old Dell computer. PCs just weren’t that sexy around this time, so a beige box it is.
It’s actually been a lot of fun to get these machines working, despite a number of headaches:
Windows 98… what can I say? Drivers were hard to find and painful to install. But remembering how things was done gave my brain a boost.
Networking two Macs together required a deep dive into my memory. AppleTalk ended up being the way to go. I used this to transfer applications from the iMac (with Internet connectivity) to the Mac Classic (with only local network connectivity.)
Finding discontinued software took a bit of time, but only because I had to find browsers for the old computers. I went with Classilla on Mac and K-Meleon on the Windows box. Once I had a functioning browser, searching for software was pretty easy on two sites: Macintosh Garden and Abandonware DOS.
It was a fun project that isn’t quite done.
What old knowledge can you turn into a hobby?
