Despite a fondness for gadgets gone by, going retro is just romantic nonsense
Think back to when you snapped up your first computer. How do you feel about it now? Love? Shame? Anger?
Among hardcore techies, the form is to make out that the first was spectacularly primitive - the equivalent of a prehistoric unicellular blob. The machine should have had some dreadful name, such as the Microencephalograph Mach III.
The thing should have possessed no more memory than the pickled grub at the bottom of a tequila bottle. It should also have been bulky and physically repulsive - keeping with some design trend until somebody sentient noticed how vile it looked and the thing was discontinued, promptly attaining cult status.
Despite never approaching that kind of greatness, my first, a second-hand Amigodore 6534 with one megabyte of memory, was truly crap. I rigged it up to a daisywheel printer that made a noise like a skeleton tap dancing on a wood-block floor. Not so much quaint and quirky as pig ugly, No disrespect to pigs - they at least have cute, curly tails.
I sold my contraption for about the price of a sausage, surprised that it fetched even that. But I feel proud to have owned such an unabashed bucket of bolts.
Now the tech arena is a billion upgrades beyond monstrosities and low-tech non-entities. Like every other industry now, it is all about looks. Unless you get one made to order, you can no longer buy a beige machine. No longer are computers allowed to have numeric names spat out by programmers.