Rediscovering Retro

I grew up in the 1980s at a time when microcomputers were the new thing, and my lifelong interest in technology was really sparked by the excitement of that period. It really did feel as though anything was possible, and rate of change and innovation was far greater than it seems these days.

Over a long period of time I’ve maintained an interest in the tech from this period, and at the time I collected quite a decent amount of kit which I picked up cheap or was given by others. At that time, I was interested in anything I could get my hands on although I rapidly got bored and moved on to the next thing. By the early 1990s I had moved on largely from 8 bit to PCs and the emergence of Linux and the Internet – both very exciting – and so the collection was put away and neglected. I did get heavily into the emulation scene which emerged in the late 1990s and this seemed the perfect combination and so really there was no need for all the old hardware.

I never completely lost interest though and picked odd bits up here and there, but also went through phases where it all felt like a bit of a burden and I got rid of stuff which seemed of no interest, giving some away and selling others. Some of this I now very much regret – eg throwing out a big pile of Acorn manuals, giving away a BBC B and monitor, throwing an Acorn Atom in the bin(!) although to be fair it didn’t work and was missing half its casing. I also had an impressive Commodore PET collection – three in total, plus loads of disks, books, tapes, manuals and other peripherals – that I gave away. The trouble is that at that time (early 90s) it all seemed old fashioned and boring – after all, why try and write text based BASIC programs when you can be running full blown Unix on a 386 PC!

So that was pretty much where things remained for a long time. I had a few boxes full of stuff that I would look at sometimes, but I never really set it up or spent any time with it. I did buy things sometimes if I saw them but usually tired of them pretty quickly.

However, like many people the recent lockdown brought some significant changes. On a whim I was able to buy a Microvitec Cub monitor (as seen on 1980s BBC computer setups) for £6 off ebay:

I already had quite a lot of Acorn kit and so I got it out again to test the monitor… and all of a sudden I found I was really enjoying handling real hardware again. I was also surprised how much stuff I had that I had completely forgotten about and which really I have no idea where it came from.

So this has led me to really dig into my whole collection and I am really enjoying rediscovering what I had and also I’ve started buying more for the first time for years. Prices have gone up a lot (although I think there is something of a bubble caused by lockdown that may not last) but are still within reach.

The other thing I’ve also suddenly realised is that things which were once common and of little value – specifically CRT monitors – are now becoming rarer and are much more desirable than they once were. I never appreciated this before but there is something very authentic about using whole systems from the correct era. It just doens’t look right using LCD panels… so I’ve been buying those too!

There isn’t anything really unique about this but I am going to write some posts about my experiences, including any fixes or upgrades along the way as there are things available now that never were in the past. As usual this is partly for my own benefit and so that I can remember what I did and how I did it… but hopefully of interest to others too!