Spring 2025

When they saw that I had aficion, and there was no password, no set questions that could bring it out, rather it was a sort of oral spiritual examination with the questions always a little on the defensive and never apparent, there was this same embarrassed putting the hand on the shoulder, or a "Buen hombre." But nearly always there was the actual touching. It seemed as though they wanted to touch you to make it certain.

- Ernest Hemingway, The Sun Also Rises

There's a lot of discussion about why retro computing has become so popular and why - or even if - things where more fun in the golden era of home computers. Those of us who subscribe to the notion that things were indeed better before usually give a few standard reasons as to why, all of them true in their own right:

Old hardware was simpler. This meant that a single person could learn all, or at least most, of its features by heart.

Old hardware was limited. Slow processors, low resolutions and cheap sound chips impose restrictions that are fun to overcome with creative problem solving.

Old computers were offline. No attention economy, no SaaS subscription models. You could learn a piece of software and keep using it for as long as a decade without experiencing any major overhauls.

The Internet was mostly text-based. Things were comparably snappy and focused on human-to-human communication rather than passive content consumption and bloated advertising.

Old gits like yours truly where younger back then. We were, believe it or not, at the forefront of technology, instead of struggling to keep up.

As a counterpoint to this kind of reactionary reminiscing, a common list of positive developments are usually presented: Hardware is cheaper and faster than ever. There's a plethora of software for even the most gimmicky of occasions. The Internet is open to everyone, cheap and easy to access. Easy to use interfaces have made advanced computer technology more accessible than ever.

This positive narrative of abundance, however, touches on another, often omitted factor regarding the decline of fun in computing - perhaps because it's hard to deny that it's in some way elitist, exclusionary or even anti-democratic, depending on how much spin is desired.

It's simple but controversial: Computers were more fun when they weren't for everyone. There, I said it.

***

When I got started with computers, in the years surrounding 1990, they were both relatively rare and relatively expensive. My uncle, for example, got an 8 MHz Mac Classic from work that year. Its sole purpose was to let him run Excel at home, and then transfer those files back to the office on floppy disks. It set his employer back somewhere around the equivalent of $3500 in today's money.

While home computers were cheaper (and often more capable!) than a Mac Classic, they were still expensive. However, what I'm waxing nostalgic about isn't a high price tag keeping the hoi polloi at bay. The cost was more a way of probing a consumer's level of sincerity, because in most cases and for most people there was little real use for a computer. Apart from certain professional settings, nobody would spend that kind of money except if they wanted a computer for the sake of using a computer.

Today, we're steeped in consumer technology to the point that it's hard to function in society without it. Our devices - laptops, tablets and phones - often arrive pre-charged from the factory, have built-in displays, WiFi connection wizards - and, in many cases, a touch interface where you just point at what you want. The world is, quite literally, at your fingertips.

In contrast, even a relatively user friendly home computer, like the Amiga, required a bunch of cables to be correctly hooked up before you even got started. You had to learn about floppy disks, hierarchical file systems, mice, storage capacity, memory consumption, system software and the irrevocable crashes that inevitably came with limited resources and primitive software - and of course, about more esoteric software like that used for copying games.

Back then, computer users were more often than not rather alone in their pursuits. There were books and computer magazines of course, and a few friends to ask for help, but far less assistance - and far less accommodating user interfaces - than what's on offer today. If you wanted to do more stuff with your machine, you had to learn it the hard way. Unpacking archives? Making a bootable floppy? On the Amiga, that meant using the command line and reading thick, printed manuals.

Getting online was even more cumbersome. Setting up a TCP/IP stack was not for the faint of heart. In comparison, calling a BBS was the easy way: All you had to do was connect your modem, start your terminal program and configure the baud rate, handshake, transfer protocol and character encoding. Of course, you first had to learn what all of that meant.

Interestingly, the overall situation even regressed for a while. When GUI-driven home computers like the Amiga and Atari fell out of fashion, the hot new thing for eager gamers and tinkerers alike were PCs running MS-DOS. These proved even more problematic: people who couldn't get to grips with editing CONFIG.SYS, setting up IRQs and using a command prompt were effectively barred from playing a lot of the most exciting games.

Computers were, put simply, only for those with true grit and unwavering enthusiasm, and the machines themselves acted as gatekeepers for the pastimes they gave rise to. Those without the prerequisite passion were effectively sorted out and scattered, like shiftless hitchhikers, along the edges of a not yet finished digital superhighway. That didn't matter much, though: computers were an optional extra, not an implicit default.

Even casual gamers were typically more knowledgeable about their systems back then than the average iPhone user is today. This meant that software, in general, was designed by and for people with some kind of nerdy ambition. It also meant that if someone had a home computer, chances were that they liked the same stuff as you. This automatically created a loosely held together community of geeks, nerds, tinkerers and creative early adopters. Most other people didn't bother with computers at all, and even viewed us nerds with no small amount of suspicion. Left thusly alone, we were free to do whatever the heck we wanted with our mysterious machines. In other words: we had a good thing going. At least for a decade or so.

***

In 1995 - a monumental year in personal computing, for many reasons - the high effort threshold was slowly but surely starting to erode.

The entire western world had started outsourcing manufacturing, shifting towards a service-oriented economy: more office work, more computers needed. Fast 486 and Pentium PCs had dropped in price and Microsoft had launched Windows 95, finally enabling people disinterested in IRQs and DOS prompts to use a cheap computer with reasonable ease and efficiency. The original home computers were dead and buried: if you wanted a machine for anything from games to accounting, you'd be stupid not to buy a PC or, perhaps, a Mac.

Every Christmas, the Swedish association of retail stores officially declares something "the gift of the year" - an item that supposedly captures the annually shifting zeitgeist of Swedish consumerism. In 1996, this gift was the "Internet Bundle": a modem sold together with a dial-up Internet subscription, the prerequisite software and some easy to follow instructions. A sign of the times as good as any.

Owning a computer suddenly wasn't all that strange, and using one at work even less so. This shift also meant that there were strong incentives for both hard- and software vendors to reduce the perceived friction in their products - the very friction that had acted as both a school for nerds and a sorting mechanism for people without a passion for computers. The latter no longer had the option to ignore said machines, but were now forced, in droves, into various learning institutions - schools, evening courses, employment programs - where they were taught shallow, mechanical skills in Windows, Word and Excel.

Casual users kept pouring in, both on- and offline. What had previously been an activity exclusively for geeks was turning into a normal life skill. People were now online not because they loved computers, but because they provided an interesting new opportunity for social interaction: the machine was a means to an end.

The rest is, as the expression goes, history: The increased prevalence of computers and the Internet made very real impact on society and the economy. Consumption patterns shifted. Stores, newspapers and bank offices closed down. Paper mail all but disappeared. Sadly, this prevalence also made very real impact on computers themselves.

The gradual dumbing down of computing in general was hard to miss: Apple decided to hide the UNIX in their new OS underneath a layer of glossy, animated windows. Microsoft decided to give theirs a clown outfit and called it an "eXPerience". Configuration options and user empowerment was increasingly considered confusing or dangerous, because too many people made too many stupid mistakes. The mistakes were stupid because computer users were no longer skilled enthusiasts, and they were dangerous because they were no longer made on a Mac Classic in someone's home, but on a machine connected to a global network.

The dominant group of users were now people who didn't care about - or even actively disliked - computers. They'd just been put in front of one in order to perform a small repertoire of simple tasks - and still ran into problems. The experiment with giving everyone geeky power tools failed, because everyone didn't want to become geeky power tool users. In fairness, this is completely reasonable and not their fault: Most weren't even given a choice, a predicament that understandably doesn't foster enthusiasm. Nevertheless, the fallout of this computational explosion changed something fundamental about personal computing - something I've been chasing ever since.

***

Built-in gatekeeping for nerds is now long gone, usurped by the lowest common denominator in economies of scale. Consumerist convenience, walled gardens, corporate risk-adversity and shallow aesthetical homogenization have replaced the sprawling hobbyist collective that once made up the bulk of personal computers and their users.

I have a hard time blaming the users upon which all of this was forced. They probably, in their heart of hearts, wanted this development every bit as little as I did. But the genie is out of its bottle, and the good old days aren't coming back.

It's not that there aren't computer nerds anymore. They're just much harder to spot, since most people who own a computer nowadays care very little about their machines. This, I think, is a rarely discussed reason for why so many of us old geeks seek refuge in retro computing. Nobody in their right mind would buy a second hand Amiga today - unless they have aficion for using computers for the sake of using computers.

In that sense, home computers still serve as the same sorting mechanism as during the height of their popularity. A shibboleth of geekdom, providing no need for further questions: Buen hombre, we are alike.