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. Every product must look attractive. Instead of rattling and making a deafening racket, printers virtually hand the pages to you, humming, and make the tea. The change feels like the difference between my old Austin Minger, which was so rusty you could see the road through the floor, and a new Lexus. This smoothness is spreading to all kinds of gadgets. One that I was scarcely even aware of back during the dark days, the mobile phone, is now becoming the ultimate expression of hi-tech style. Think Motorola's Razr, the Lipstick and that chocolate bar-style Nokia model dubbed 'entry level', as if to imply we all want to climb a mobile-phone ladder whose summit affords the climber a giddy sensation of power. Even so, I am attached to my second-hand mobile that looks way older than its supposed age (a year). The fascia is held on by sticky tape; motes of dust have crept under the screen, adding to the smears and scratches. Likewise, I feel warm and fuzzy towards another recent relic: my infrared pocket PC with a battery life of seven minutes, a dodgy USB and an infrared port that has to be in the mood to function. The device's mediocrity makes me feel almost parental towards it. I am tempted to dump the few glitzy gadgets I own (digicam, titanium laptop) in the trash and go retro with a vengeance: hunt down an eyesore from the age when a phone was attached to a wall and equipped with a dial. I could try to acquire one of those mainframes built like a fridge and attached to a real one to stop it overheating. No fancy interface, just meaningless metres of ticker tape spewing onto the floor. But I know of course that my love affair with retro garbage is romantic nonsense. After 10 minutes in the dark ages, I would wind up retrieving my snazzy gadgets from the trash. Inside every reactionary lurks a trendy with a zest for change, speed and power. Confused by computer jargon? E-mail technopedia@scmp.com with your questions
