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

Well, I run a retro-computing web site (https://twostopbits.com/) based on the Hacker News Arc code (https://github.com/jgrahamc/twostopbits) and the site makes me neither feel young or old. And not even particularly nostalgic. I mostly remember things I had great fun with a long time ago and it's fun to read about them again. I do like the preservation part of retro computing and helping keep things working, but even that is partly just personal satisfaction of making something work (again). For example: https://blog.jgc.org/2023/12/restoration-of-ibm-thinkpad-701...

I don’t know if retrocomputing makes me feel younger or older, but it makes me feel nostalgic for the younger days of computing. My retrocomputing niches are classic Macs, NeXT (I own a few machines, including a NeXT cube), and older versions of Windows (pre-XP). I dream of owning a Symbolics Lisp machine, but they are very expensive whenever they show up on the market.

The other day, I wanted something to hack on (wanting to use Linux to automatically play useful & fun playlists on a cron - but don't want it dependent on my MacBook). Looked through the closet, and realized I had given my Raspberry Pi to a friend - what else could I program on? Then I had a thought - I wonder how powerful the computers used for "POS" (point of sale / cashiers) are? I went to a local tech-oriented mall, and found many vendors selling small form-factor computers. I found a Dell computer, small case, with 8-16 GB of memory, Intell Core i5 processor, 256-512 GB solid state storage - price range was $150-250 USD.

I bought one! When I got home, I was thinking - wow, it's been awhile since making a bootable linux USB drive. After figuring that out, the computer booted nicely into Debian, install was easy, but it brought back all these memories from college (at that time, I was using Mandrake and Gentoo - also on a Dell!).

My mind - full of ideas & possibilities, have been plugging random things into it to see what works - Logitech 3D Extreme flight stick: Yes! Yamaha keyboard - let's see!

I'm now on a journey to figure out how to get the sound system to work at root-level (so that 'cron' can play audio when a user's not logged in)

The whole point of the comment is that (1) this is so much fun, (2) Feels surprisingly good to be in open-source labd and not in MacOS world, (3) Debian Linux feels like a sturdy workhorse tool (4) Exploring the creative possibilities of open source tooling (and having patience for their user interfaces). For example, Inkscape, Blender 3D, music production.

Note: Even Steam worked, and the first game I installed (Lovers in a Dangerous Spacetime) worked on the first try (!).

If you're in end-of-year tinker mode, consider picking up a used "mini computer" ("mini" is relative!) - slapping Linux on it, and making something cool.

I recently hosted a retro computing get-together of a few old buddies I met through the Commodore 64 BBSs and demo/cracking groups. I haven't seen them for about 30 years. One of the guys still had some old C64 disks that supposedly had some of my old source code on it for an intro I wrote for his cracking group. Well, I bought a refurb Commodore 1541 disk drive, we got a USB adapter and proceeded to pull stuff off those old disks. We also attempted to revive my old non-functioning C64 that I've been hanging on to for decades. There was stuff on those disks that I had no remembrance of creating.

It was a lot of fun. It brought back old memories of us in our late teens in the 1980s, when we used to meet up regularly for "copy parties" and demo coding parties. I would absolutely do it again. We had a great time looking at old and new demos while the 1541 whirred in the background. There's still so much going on with the Commodore 64, people are still pushing it past its known limits (See https://www.pouet.net/prodlist.php?platform%5B%5D=Commodore+... ).

I feel the same about old HW as I do old cars: some deserve historical recognition for their importance, and I'm thankful for the uh, passionately committed people who maintain them against all odds and sometimes at ridiculous expense, so that these important historical icons remain, but they are the past, and I don't live there anymore.

While we can learn from them and their inventors/creators, if we choose, I'm much happier with my rock solid highly reliable five year old RAM and my new MacBook Pro. I've driven a lot of the Jeeps ever made, and off-road I'll take my JKU Rubicon over any of them (except maybe the 2004 "LJ") any day. It's a beast to maintain mostly because I am beastly to it, and the older ones are worse for that.

I don’t rush after the newest and shiniest (my M3 replaced a 2013 Air), but when it's time, the RAM and JKU will be replaced with new.

Younger. As someone who never could afford a computer as a kid or teen, and not much people around me had one either, while I felt really really attracted to them and to tech in general there was nothing I could do abut it. Other than dreaming about getting one some day.

So now that I can have a few of them, every time I get one I feel like a kid.

Not that I buy them by the dozens or I'm becoming a collector, that's something I can't do nor want to do, but getting something new (old, but new to me) once a year or every couple allows me to discover all that I missed. Since I'm not "re"discovering it, it's all new to me in a sense.

It reintroduces control of your own destiny when things were much simpler. The complexity of gaming and programming nowadays means you are far removed from the HW.

Personally, it makes me feel young because it brings back memories of when I used older machines for the first time. Sometimes it can be a whole memory trip where I remember the first time I used a particular program, figured out a difficult problem, or finished a big job.

Now I'm curious about how others see it. I work with several people who are younger than computers I actively use for testing, and I just pointed out an article on The Register (1) because it talks about the same machine I use for email server load testing, which is a Macintosh LC III+ (2). I wonder what the youngsters think about that, so I think I'll ask :)

1) https://www.theregister.com/2024/12/02/apples_design_reverse...

2) https://www.klos.com/~john/lciii.jpg

Makes me feel worse

People will glorify retro stuff but if you say you're using OpenGL 2 to support cheap hardware they ask why you don't use 4 and some new high-end feature

There's a valley where something is old enough to be uncool but not old enough to be cool again

It makes me sad, the contrast between then and now, as we're fighting for the right to run arbitrary code and on a path to losing it. Applications have been replaced by apps for many who don't use or see the benefit of desktops over mobile.

Neither it makes me feel nostalgic. I remember going to DEF CON and playing with classic Mac OS using a real Mac and it was magical. I think its similar to someone using an old Porche 911.

While discovering emulators recently and playing a few older games and just enjoying it immensely, I've asked myself if it's not a bit unfortunate, or suspicious, or misleading, the way the world of software and hardware is split into two so neatly by this word, "retro", and other unfortunate terminology ("AAA games", etc).

It suggests that systems or games from the past are somehow by definition less good. And that one would have to have a "hobby" or "interest" to possibly want to spend time with them. That the experience is somehow lesser.

The quietly radical thought I've been entertaining recently is that maybe "retro-computing" people have more of a right to be considered computer enthusiasts than the usual crowd you'd associate with that category, and similarly, maybe "retro-gamers" are more "gamer" than the "gamers" themselves.

Picture the two archetypes - the person who regularly investigates the near-infinite cave of treasures which is all the games humanity has produced the last 50 years (as well as sometimes some of the more modern games), or someone who plays exclusively "AAA-rated" games released the previous year, who never ventures outside of the ps or xbox store, who owns a ton of skins, and follows a few YTers who talk about games?

Who is more of an "enthusiast"? Whose fondness and engagement is more open-minded, fresher, "younger"? Who knows more? Who has more respect for the games, the developers, the hardware and software world?

Neither. It reassures me that I am not crazy and that a huge chunk of the world is crazy instead.

For me it’s one of these “it’s not about the destination, it’s about the journey” kind of things.

Few years ago one day I discovered retropie and decided to install it. Was a bit of a rabbit hole for me but in a good way, reminded me when I first installed Linux when it was still on multiple floppy disks.

And it was quite cool that my son discovered Duke Nukem 3d or Mortal Kombat that I played with my cousins in my youth.

I only do retro stuff for things that are older than I am. I spent several years restoring antique Teletype machines from the 1920s and 1930s.

RetroComputing makes me feel thankful that I've lived through so much progress in hardware with Dennard scaling[1] and Moore's law. It's a good reminder of just how limited the hardware was, and what a total pain in the ass some things were.

I've got a VAX/VMS 7.3 System that runs in my cheap ass android phone thanks to SimH. I can even telnet into it. ;-)

It's also a good reminder of the era of actually secure computing, and the most secure computer ever, an IBM PC XT with no hard drive ... but that's a rant for another thread.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dennard_scaling

It makes me feel constrained in a good way, neither older or younger. For me it's like playing with Lego's. Then I also do microcontroller, mini Risc-V electronics and programming that feels similar, though embedded systems are incredibly more powerful in different aspects.

I recently moved and while unpacking a box, I found a still shrink-wrapped copy of OS/2 version 2.1.

I was tempted to open it and see if I could install it on an old computer, but realized I no longer had one with a 3.5 inch floppy drive.

System requirements on the side of the box: Intel 386 SX compatible computer 4.0MB of memory minimum (6.0MB recommended) - yes that is Megabytes! The 3.5 inch floppy drive A mouse or compatible pointing device.

Brings back memories...

It doesn't make me feel any kind of way.

Retro gaming is a necessity: modern games, like most modern software, are too good at manipulating the player's psychology and I certainly won't let my kids play free-to-play crap or let them on social media.

For myself: I genuinely like old games more than modern (with a few exceptions, eg. Balatro comes to mind)

I don't see a lot of appeal for retro programming; sure, dependency hell was not a problem in the past and tooling was simpler, but modern stacks have a series of productivity multipliers. You need to be careful in selecting the right technologies - but after that you are literally flying compared to old SDKs.

I grew up coding C on djgpp on DOS and I remember seeing win3.11 and Desqview/X and then jumping to an early red hat (CDs ordered through the mail!) with gnome and OpenVMS/CDE

I keep a set of emulated machines that can boot me back into these environments, I click around, play a game for a few minutes, maybe code game of life or a maze solver in C, and then go … “Ha! Those were the days” and then go back to my 4k 120Hz waaaaaay more advanced IDE and say “phew it good to be back, this is way better”

It doesn’t make me feel old or young, but I enjoy the stroll down memory lane every 4-5 months.

It's not about older/younger for me, but rather satisfaction that young have his mind blown knowing I'm toying with that piece of hardware.

It's when I start to think about dates, that it makes me feel old.

For me, it has nothing to do with feeling younger or older (I'm 40 so mid-age).

Retro computer programming satisfies two of my needs:

1. Low level programming in C and assembly. I can definitely do the same in modern boxes but it helps a lot to reduce complexity.

2. To help with my interest in RE. The idea is to get familiar with many architectures so RE an unknown one is not a rocket science.

Neither. I like retro gaming and it’s interesting to appreciate it for what it was and how things evolved, but it does nothing to my sense of self or age.

Neither. There's certainly more than a little nostalgia involved, but I like retrocomputing (retro programming more than retro gaming) because it's fun. I have no age-related reactions to it.

The hardware of "back in the day" is much more accessible and enjoyable to work with than modern computers.

I'm possibly answering a different question than the one you meant to ask, but I feel like I think and program better if I set my terminal and IDE to retro colours. Green screen terminal, Turbo Pascal colours. (aka the colours of my youth) Muted desert and autumn colours do not light up my brain the way those colours do.

I wouldn't say younger/older is the proper axis.

It's amazing to realize that much of the key insights and abilities of computing can be experienced on an 8 bit CPU with less RAM than the L1 cache of today's processors. A 32bit CPU like the 68030 running System 7 and some applications is 95% of the same stuff we do today.

I'm doing it out of historical interest. I was doing it for that reason when I was 12, as well, and I'm the same age as the C64. It does not change the perception of my own age in any way; rather, I have the feeling of operating a little ROV that I've sent through the TimeStargate(TM) into the mid-1970s.

Older, when retro computers were new they were exciting because they suggested an amazing future. That future didn't materialize (thanks to the MS-ification of the world). It's impossible to reconstruct that original feeling (with retro hardware).

Makes me feel free as in speech. My acorn electron didn't phone home. It was home.

There is the video that mocks mongodb because it returns success before the data is persisted. Try writing your data to a cassette tape ;)

Neither? I appreciate old hardware and software because of what it could achieve despite its limitations - because it's simpler, with fewer levels of abstractions piled upon each other, which makes it easier to understand.

Explaining to a junior dev how the terminal streams output from the bottom and must be scrolled up to find earlier output from the build makes me feel old

I can't tell. My (adult) kids and I have a fondness for technology that is older than we are.

Kids enjoy 1980s and 1990s computer tech. I briefly like the nostalgia but that's it.

We drive cars older than me. We enjoy their simplicity.

Neither. I'm not young anymore but also got into computing relatively late, so the earliest machine I had was 32 bit. I think the 8 and 16 bit stuff is neat, with no rose tinted goggles of that time.

For me retro computers mean pc runing ms dos or windows 3.1 or 95/98, and they make me feal nostalgic.

Anything before that makes me younger, in a look at the neat things the old people used to use.

kind of depends on your individual definition of "retro" - for me it's anything prior to win95.

retro computing doesnt make me feel either older or younger, it makes me appreciate how far computing has come in my lifetime.

Old Computers Never Die. Their Users Do.

Mostly nostalgic.

Neither, just enjoying myself either way.

When I was younger, I used to roll my eyes at older guys who would seemingly do the same and old thing everyday.

Today, I am that older guy seemingly doing the same and old thing everyday as younger guys roll their eyes at me.

I'm getting too old for this.

I do some occasional tool and game programming for 8-bit machines for fun because it's so close to the metal and different from modern software development. It has nothing to do with feeling older or younger.

I also despise forced anachronistic "retro" graphics "aesthetic" and I'll never again play new games that feature overly blocky "pixel art". I've had enough of that in my childhood, it's ugly, almost always uninspired and lazy, and I really don't want to see it anymore.

I am born in the early nineties, so what I consider retro probably sounds surprisingly modern to some HNers. But I love replaying older games occasionally, emulating the Nintendo64 for example. Or using my actual N64.

I guess in some ways it makes me feel older when I talk about this with friends whom are younger and have missed the N64 generation, for example. But I don’t mind, I will embrace the “old man yells at clouds” when the time comes.

ancient

Nothing, I've never understood retro computing, for me are useless machines, so I throw everything away as soon as they're outdated