Why we like retro

Last Updated on March 26, 2024 by Dave Farquhar

Why do we like retro? The question comes up from time to time on forums and podcasts and discussion groups. I think there is more than one answer, but none of them are terribly complicated. In this blog post, I’ll explore retro’s appeal.

Nostalgia as a reason we like retro

The first and most obvious reason is nostalgia. It brings back memories of a simpler, more innocent time. Sometimes there are fond memories associated with that nostalgia, and sometimes not so much. But even when the memories aren’t all positive, it can be a chance to take care of unfinished business if nothing else.

I think there are a couple of subcategories to the nostalgia factor.

Simpler games

In the late 1990s, I went and saw a stand up comedian with a group of friends. I think it was Buzz Sutherland. The main thing I remember about that night is the comedian asking the audience how many of us could play Playstation or Nintendo 64 games really well. A few people raised their hands, waved, or cheered, and the comedian told them to puyt their hands down and then motioned to the rest of the crowd and said he was talking to us. Yes, that included me.

He told a story about playing a video game with his nephew and losing every time and not being able to figure out the controls. And then he said, “Here you go punk! We’re going to play another game. Get a load of my Atari. Let’s see what you do with one button!”

We all laughed. The story loses a lot without his animated gestures and facial expressions and over-the-top tone. But it was funny because it was relatable.

Whether it’s funny that that N64 and Playstation are now also retro, I’ll leave to you. But I will also bet that nephew who grew up playing Playstation 1 is better at PS1 games than they are at PS5 games.

It seems like games get more complicated as time goes on, although there has been something of a resurgence in simpler, retro-style games on newer consoles. The retro look has regained at least a little bit of coolness.

There’s something to be said for a simple but fun game that has four or five controls so you can learn the game in a couple of minutes, but not master it for a very long time.

Understandable machines

To me, the cool thing about an 8-bit computer is you can gain a very thorough understanding of it. You will probably specialize in some aspect of it, but it is entirely possible to know how to program it in assembly language, directly manipulating the hardware, and managing memory and registers and the stack yourself.

I did that on a C-64. I never programmed anything newer than the C-64 at that level, but the concepts still carry over even today.

And I remember, in my 20s, being frustrated that very few of my co-workers knew how a computer works. The most blatant example was when we built our first VMware server. The manager in charge of the project purchased a server with one gigabyte of RAM. I built the system up, and came back to her and asked her which eight machines she wanted me to virtualize. She handed me a list of 64 machines. I said the server didn’t have enough memory for that. With a gig of RAM, I could virtualize eight servers that each had 128 megabytes of RAM, and if we wanted to push things, we might be able to do nine, but I couldn’t make any promises how well it would perform.

She didn’t listen to a word I said. Her face was beet red, and she was pulling up VMware’s website. She pointed at something at the screen. Look there, she said. The she read aloud, “Capable of operating up to 64 virtual machines.”

Millennials and zoomers certainly know their way around computers much better than she ever did. But I’ve heard the argument that Gen X programmers program better than younger programmers because they understand things like stacks and registers and that CPUs have finite numbers of them and consider that, at least subconsciously, when they write code.

For whatever it’s worth, I have noticed that I code very differently from people significantly younger than me. I’m not comfortable asserting my code is better, but it reveals a different mindset. And I can see how under the right circumstances, that mindset could be an advantage.

I find thinking within the limitations of an 8-bit computer sometimes helps me to solve a problem that I struggle with if I start with the mindset of having unlimited computing resources available to me. If nothing else, it helps me to figure out where to start.

History as a reason we like retro

Sometimes we are interested in things simply for the history. Maybe we witnessed that history, and maybe we didn’t. So we may be interested in learning, preserving, or recreating the history, even if it wasn’t something we experienced firsthand back when it was happening.

This is why some people keep minicomputers or midrange Unix or Windows NT servers and operate them. Running those types of systems was somebody’s job 30 years ago, not their hobby. But it’s interesting and enjoyable today because of the history.

That’s part of the reason I rebuilt an IBM 5170 a few years ago. I’ve owned the case nearly 30 years, but the first thing I did when I got it was empty it out and put 1990s components in it. Reacquiring genuine IBM parts to rebuild it felt like a form of atonement. But I also remember seeing a 5170 at a college in 1987 or 1988. It was decked out with a color monitor, probably EGA, and a mouse. For all I know, they may have even run Windows 2.0 on the thing.

It was no longer a top of the line machine when I saw it in 1988, but it was still a much nicer computer than anybody I knew owned at the time. Recreating that setup and figuring out what I would have wanted to do with it was a lot of fun.

And besides all that, the history of the people behind the lesser-known 80s computer brands is fascinating. Near the top of the alphabet, APF sold a computer designed by an African American electrical engineer who grew up in the projects in Brooklyn. Near the end of the alphabet, Vector Graphic, cofounded by two women, was doing elegant, beautiful industrial design years before anyone else concerned themselves with it. Somewhere in the middle is Eagle Computer and its tragic story of a CEO who died on the day of his company’s IPO.

Retro as a throwback to a more exciting time

The 30th anniversary of the release of Doom, the landmark first person shooter, provided an opportunity for retrospection. A number of people on social media pointed out how computers changed much more dramatically between 1983 and 1993 than they did from 1993 to 2023.

There’s no arguing that. There’s also no arguing the pace of change has been slowing down. The change from 1993 to 2003 was bigger than the change from 2003 to 2013. And the computer from 2013 can still run Windows 10. It’s slower than a modern computer, but the differences are so slight that Microsoft had to put artificial limitations to keep people from running Windows 11 on those machines. Sometime around 2013, computers stopped naturally obsoleting themselves.

In 1983, the idea of a 3D video game in full color playing at a frame rate above 15 frames per second seemed like science fiction. And if you turn the clock back to 1973, the idea of a computer that fit on your desk was completely new. The microprocessor so was a brand new technology in 1973. And in 1963, 30 years before Doom, the idea of a computer that fit on your desk was science fiction. A computer the size of a desk was much more feasible.

That’s the big difference between then and now. The pace of change was dramatically faster. There was a new technological breakthrough every couple of years. It wasn’t like everything became obsolete overnight, but using a 3-year-old computer in the 90s was a much more miserable experience than using a 10-year-old computer today. When Thomas Pabst, the founder of Tom’s Hardware Guide, asks if computers have gotten boring, I don’t blame him for asking the question. The innovations don’t come down the line at nearly the pace they did in the 90s.

What about you?

For you, the answer may be more than one of those things. Or maybe it’s something entirely different. I didn’t even mention the monetary aspect. If retro is something that interests you, the reasons tend to be personal. Even the definition of retro is pretty personal. I have to remind myself that we’re closer now to January 1, 2054 than we are to January 1, 1994, and closer to January 1, 2045 than we are to January 1, 2001. To my kids, Windows 7 is very much retro, even though someone my age probably doesn’t consider it such. But they’ll both be old enough to vote in the 2028 presidential election. They’re old enough to have that opinion now.

Thank you

Thank you for reading this far. I write about four times a week, typically about DIY, old and new computers, 80s nostalgia, and vintage electric trains. If you enjoy this type of content, you can follow me on Pinterest or Facebook, or subscribe to my RSS feed. And if you don’t mind doing me a favor, if you enjoyed one of my blog posts, would you share it with a friend? Shares over social media, hangouts like Discord or Slack, discussion groups, news aggregators, or even old-fashioned e-mail are the most effective way for me to reach new readers. Thanks again.