Random musings: 80s hardware, cyberdecks

I miss the personality that old tech from the 80s had. Almost all modern computing hardware lacks it.

Old computer hardware was also diverse. Today, if I need to buy a piece of gear I go online and order it from some big megacompany, or (in an emergency) I trek over to the local BestBuy and buy it there. Most independent computer shops are long gone.

Things were different in the 80s. Each shop you wandered into carried unique gear - no two stores had the same inventory. Different brands, different accessories, different software. If you lived near a big city like Toronto, you could spend a whole Saturday going from shop to shop and never seeing the same thing twice.

And every bit of tech had its own personality. You had your big manufacturers like Atari, Commodore and IBM. The Amigas, Atari STs, Commodore 64s and IBM PCs - each was its own island of user interface design and technical capability. Then there were the really oddball machines - the Texas Instruments TI-99 4/A, the ZX Spectrum or the Coleco Adam with its high-speed cassette drives and daisy wheel printer. Hell, even the IBM clones were each unique in their cloneliness where some engineer looked at IBM’s designs and said “what if?”.

I wish our gear today had that uniqueness. But it doesn’t. Probably the last really unique computer that had the potential to be mass produced was the BeBox. I had one of those once. I regret selling it.

I could collect more retro hardware, and I probably will. But I also want modern gear that evokes a sense of those bygone days. So I think I’m going to have to design and build it myself.

Want to come along for the ride?