Nostalgic Toxicity

While I love being neck deep in the retrocomputing hobby most of the time, there's a small slice of it I don't really talk about, one that wears heavy on many of us, I'm sure. At least those of roughly the same age/generation I am (millennials).

And that's this pain, this longing for a future that we felt like we were promised, but never got, because we somehow ended up on the bad timeline and the thing that we used to love is now being used to, effectively, kill us.

For me, my "era" was the mid-00s. That's when I started getting into computers. I also didn't exactly grow up in the best household either, all of us living on fixed income. So I made do with less, and that meant old Macs and 90s PCs that were outmoded even when they first released. But it was okay, because for the most part the internet hadn't become this heavy behemoth like it is today. AIM still ran perfectly fine on potato hardware, for example.

But PC gaming? Oh man. I had a subscription to Computer Gaming World at the time (before they had rebranded to push Games For Windows) and just seeing all this absolutely cool stuff people were doing with PCs, I wanted this. But sadly, there was no way on this earth I could ever afford any of it. Me and my crappy little Celeron PC could only eke out like 20fps in UT99, if I was lucky. If I wanted decent-performance gaming, I usually turned to consoles.

This is what I love about retrocomputing. I can go back and acquire most of the hardware teenage me would have killed to have, and experience games and software the way I wished I could have back then.

But then there's the flip. In using old OSes like Windows XP, or older OS X on the Mac side, it really feels like we lost something along the way to where we are today: Software back then had a soul. XP with its iconic Bliss wallpaper and blue/green taskbar just invited you to play around with it. OS X with the Aqua UI that Steve Jobs famously said would make you want to lick it.

Even hardware had more of a soul. The G3 iMacs. The old Alienware machines. Hell, even Dell and HP knew how to have some fun (with the XPS 700 and Blackbird 002, respectively).

But more important than all that, at the time it felt like the user experience and technology were both in lockstep with eachother. Tech developments were mostly for the quality of life of all of us, giving us more methods to communicate and talk with eachother over vast distances. It felt like technology was a net good and there were high hopes for it, rather than it being seen as a net negative like it is today.

It was exciting to be a nerd, because we got revolutionary new stuff with each passing year, and it was stuff to legitimately be excited about! SATA meaning we no longer had to deal with cranky drive interfaces. Both Windows and Mac OS moving to next-generation underpinnings that made them suck way less. The advent of multiprocessing for everyone. The launch of devices like the iPod and iPhone. I could go on and on, but the point is things were exciting, and in a good way!

Then the 2010s happened, and the soul just started leaving everything. Hardware slowly began settling into this monoculture where everything started to feel the same. Everything started becoming sterile and safe. Microsoft went above and beyond with Windows 7 (which was just dripping with aesthetic) only to strip all the soul out of it with Windows 8, which I really feel was the true start of The Reckoning.

Apple joined in not long after, with the release of iOS 7 and Mac OS Yosemite adopting the flatter look, stripping out most of the soul of their software (that arguably started with Leopard but it was offset by cool things like Time Machine).

This is also when things previously thought to be either good or okay began to turn on us. Google had a leadership change and this eventually resulted in them pretty much losing everything that made them a Big Good in the 00s. Zuckerberg was always kind of a creep but Facebook was still seen as a more mature alternative to MySpace...until Facebook began turning on us, hardcore.

In addition to the soul being sucked out of everything, this is when disposable hardware really took off: MacBooks went from being relatively serviceable to becoming entirely integrated such that if something like your RAM went bad you were now the owner of a fancy aluminum and glass brick. It wasn't like the old days where you would just repair your hardware and carry on: You suffer a small failure, whole system's a brick because fuck you, pay us.

(It could [and should] be argued this is because of good 'ol capitalism. Because back in the mid 00s there was money to be made and growth to be had just...catering to everyone's needs and making good products and generally Not Being An Asshole to your customers. But as growth slowed and saturation became a problem, these companies were expected to pull profits out of their ass and had to resort to worsening their products or experiences just to make more money. Hence making hardware that was no longer built to last or be repaired.)

I think you get the point. Mid-00s tech painted this rosy picture of a bright future where things didn't suck and everyone would live in happiness forever. The mid-10s arrived and that dream is as dead as the Zune. (And now the AI bubble is just accelerating the enshittification.)

Using this old tech is to let the 13 year old kid in my head get some sustenance and enjoy himself, even for a little bit. But the 30 year old that lives in there too just looks at it and can't help but feel that deep longing, that pain that comes from realizing that there was once a time when you had hope, when the future looked bright, sunny, and was something to look forward to.

But now most everything you used to love has now been turned against you, and only exists to exploit you rather than help you. The interests and hobbies you have are either being burned down by tariffs, or burned down by AI. It's a hard feeling to sit with, and if it's one you don't have when sitting down with old stuff, I definitely envy you. Because while I enjoy messing with this stuff, it's hard to not hear the part of me that feels we were robbed of the future we should have had. 

VCF West 2025 Post-Event Thing

If you want to see the photos, they're right over here.

This year was...a lot to say the least. I don't say that in a bad way. This year was off the hook, shattering attendance records and having throngs of people roll through almost on the level of pre-Schaumburg VCF Midwest. It was nuts in the best possible way.

This year I decided to take a break from my usual thing and do Windows PCs, opting to focus in on 98/XP/7. My main goal with the latter of those three was to really make people rethink their opinions on retro/vintage, because I've grown quite tired of people who act like anything newer than their era will never be considered cool enough to sit with the rest of us.

I did eventually dial this back though, and opted to roll with Vista for the newest of my machines.

Those parameters defined, I settled on three machines: The custom Windows 98 build, the Shuttle XPC, and later the Nvidia Vista machine. The 98 machine had gone through a number of incarnations and the plan was to send it with the 1.26GHz Tualatin P3-S, but a last minute acquisition changed that plan and I opted to bump it up to a 3.2GHz Northwood Pentium 4. Mostly because I had also acquired a GeForce FX5950 Ultra, and if I was going to be in for a penny, well, I might as well be in for a pound.

This ended up working in my favor, as not only were the new digs faster, but they were also, surprisingly, more stable. I guess Intel wasn't kidding when they taglined their boards "Integrity you can build upon".

The Shuttle also saw a last minute upgrade too, as I eBay'd a Core 2 Duo E4500 for all of $5. Shuttle's documentation said (at least according to markings on my board) that the board revision I had wouldn't support a C2D, but thankfully, it POSTed after slapping the chip in anyway. I'm pleased to report it remained perfectly stable throughout the entire show, even as another exhibitor tried to kill it (I joke) with 3DMark05.

In a twist, the Nvidia PC saw a last-minute downgrade, as I had forgotten what CPU was in it. My notes said it was a Core 2 Extreme QX6700, and I didn't think this was right. So I went through the motions to get HWMonitor installed (because the BIOS identified it as a Core 2 Quad, hence the confusion) and hey, it sure was a QX6700! 

But the poor thing was also overheating. Badly. Idle temps were sitting around 80-85c and the stock Intel heatsink was really trying its best to dump all that heat off what I didn't know was a 130W TDP chip.

Thankfully, I had just acquired the very same motherboard (EVGA nForce 680i SLI) but with a Q6700 in it, which is the same clock speed but a lower TDP (95W) so hopefully this one will run cooler (and it did).

All of this handled a little ahead of schedule, I decided to have some fun. Upgrading the 98 build to a Pentium 4/FX 5950 Ultra put it right at the perfect spec to run pre-reset Windows Longhorn, so for giggles, I decided to try exactly that: Get Longhorn installed, and see if maybe I could coax beta Aero Glass into working.

This effort was successful, and if you saw my table at VCF West, then you probably gave it a spin. Hopefully. There were a LOT of people.

To make things even more fun, a friend of mine was running a similar table to mine so we just opted to join forces and make a huge Windows Megatable out of it, with machines spanning Windows 3.1 all the way up to Windows 8. It was a ton of fun.

We also had a network up thanks to the table next to us, who was also hosting a local instance of AOL Instant Messenger. As such we had put copies of AIM on all of our machines (that could run it) and this resulted in some absolutely hilarious hijinks later. We also had networked games going, and prior to last year, not as many people used them, opting to explore the OSes (and the Zunes I had brought along for the trip).

Day One

(Load-in was kinda whatever so I'm starting from the first actual day. Also, unlike last year, thank jeebus, WE HAD WORKING AIR CONDITIONING. Last year felt like running a table in a sauna.)

 

I had to dip out earlier the previous day because I had a bit of a drive ahead of me (I didn't get a hotel room as I live about an hour away from the venue) but our table was about 90% ready to go. I showed up 30 minutes early with the intent of getting the rest of the setup done, but not even 5 minutes after I walked in the hall...

"The show is now open!"

 

Wait, what.

 

Uh, that's not good, the table next to us isn't even here yet, nor is the friendo exhibiting with me, because we all thought the show began at 10am, as listed on the site. Guess not. Woo.

 

It was at this point I made kind of a snap decision to just...eschew 98, because 98 is 1. Kinda boring, and 2. Win95 is right there and is close enough, right? So let's run Longhorn for the full show! This turned out to be the best decision because a lot of people rolled by and saw it and were very confused but also very surprised when I explained what it actually was.

 

The Zunes (which for the most part worked) also got a lot of attention, with quite a number of people asking exactly what they were. Even had a few people come  by and kinda lament where things are going these days, with music streaming getting kinda shitty and longing for a return to the days of iPods and owning your stuff. The amount of people who came by and talked with me for a while on that just warmed my heart and gave me some faith in humanity.

 

Not long after show start thankfully everyone arrived and we got AIM up and running, with a group chatroom between all the machines spun up. It very quickly became unhinged in the best possible way, because hey, when you're kinda anonymous, you just let it all go, right? Thankfully nothing like, heinous was said, it was just people being absolutely nuts, kinda like we did in the 90s. Ah, nostalgia.

 

It was also kinda fun in the moment because none of this was logged, so hey, have fun now and enjoy it while it lasts because come Saturday night, this is all going away, never to be seen again. (Well, I mean, at least our instance of it. There's still nina.chat!)

 

I also had been putting out a call for people to bring their 3DSes to get some actual, real-world StreetPass pings, and sure enough, people answered the call! I got about 10 different pings, which is more than I've ever seen.

 

Prior to VCF I also had agreed--much like last year--to do some light promotion for BlueSCSI, and as a part of that printed off a bunch of BlueSCSI logo keychains. By the end of the day I had burned through about 70% of them. I seriously did not think they'd fly off the tables that fast, but they did.  

 

Now, on this day, I decided to wear a shirt to troll a little bit: The big theme for West 2025 was Amigas, because it's the 40th anniversary of the Amiga. Personally, I've no attachment to the Amiga, and honestly go out of my way to avoid it because it feels like every interaction I've had with Amiga People has never been a good one, almost reminding me of Linux People.

 

So, appropriately, I bought Cathode Ray Dude's Amogus shirt. I fully expected to get beaten to death with an Amiga-licensed baseball bat. But no. When they came around to hand out tickets for the post-event Amiga thing, they pointed at me and said "GIVE THAT MAN A GOLD CARD".

 

I guess it was for some award ceremony thing. I hadn't intended on going to it, because again, I don't really have an interest in the Amiga. But damn it, now I've gotta see this through. Or so I thought.

 

Because after the after party, we went up to go to the event, and...nothing? It was supposed to start at 8, and it was 8:40 and there was no sign of them starting anytime soon. The Amiga/040th info said the show was expected to run 2 hours, and if they began at 9 that meant I would be here until 11, with me getting home at maybe midnight. Only to wake up at 6:45 the next morning. Yeah, as CRD himself says so often, the juice isn't worth the squeeze.

 

I still would have loved to see what the award ceremony entailed. Especially if it involved pictures.

 

Though also to be fair I was getting some weird vibes from the whole thing because it was requested to be a formal event, with formalwear. As such there were a number of people in full tuxedos and it just felt...yeah. I know they said in the event info that hey, if you can't do it you can come as you are but I felt no less out of place. (Even as a good chunk of people had also shown up in like, a shirt and jeans.) 

 

The drive home was uneventful, and I proceeded to stuff my face with a baconator and get a nice, long sleep. Well, "long" insofar as I got about 5 hours, but hey, my sleep cycles are weird and mine are about 5h long, so that counts for something, right?

 

Day Two

Little did I know today would be hell. (Not in a bad way, just immensely busy!)

 

Last year, both days were kinda the same as far as attendance was concerned, so I was expecting more of that. But what changed this year was 1. The CHM doing a hell of a lot of promotion for VCF, and 2. NBC News coming out the morning before to talk to Erik (one of the showrunners) and do a quick tour of some of the exhibits. Yeah uh, I'm sure that's going to get word out, fast. And that it did.

 

The start was slow, like last year, But once the crowds began pouring in, oh man it was constant. Throngs upon throngs of people moving through the main hall. I've never been to Midwest (but would love to) but a few people who had been said that we were damn close to Midwest-level crowding before they moved to a new venue.

 

They actually had to begin turning people away because we were that full. There was no more available parking. The building was at capacity. It was pure insanity.

 

Most notably this is when a lot of the people I had hoped to meet up with were coming through. Friends from Discord, etc. But also someone I was really looking forward to meet: The one and only polpo of PicoGUS fame! He was able to get a last minute flight to attend West and I'm glad he did. One of the nicest guys you'll meet (and I'm totally not just saying that because he threw me a free PicoGUS at the end of the show).

 

The highlights of the day were having some industry people roll by, most notably someone who worked at Microsoft, someone who worked at Kioxia on SSDs (and gave me their business card!) and someone who worked at Shuttle during the time my model was in production (and we talked for a bit about it). That's really one of the things I love about doing this every year: Meeting people who worked on the things you're exhibiting and hearing their stories.

 

And also in the case of trying to really tap into the nostalgia for the mid-00s tech landscape, talking to people who miss how things were and how it truly felt like back then technology wasn't this thing that was out to get us, but rather it was there as a net good. There were a couple of people I talked to about this at length and even as an introverted autistic these conversations give me life. Because it's so nice to just meet random people that are on the same page as you.

 

Hell, there was even an awesome lady who had brought her autistic son in and he was much the same way: Interested in this old tech because he had become disillusioned with the way newer tech is. At 12 years old! It's just one of those things that gives me faith in humanity in a time where it feels like that's becoming harder to find.

 

That's part of why I wanted to do The Aero Aesthetic (I'm sorry, I just really am not a fan of the term "frutiger aero"). I saw a lot of people on TikTok fawning over the aesthetics of the time, and I wanted to do this table as a reminder of what we lost, a reminder that tech wasn't always this net negative and maybe hey, on a different timeline we'd still be enjoying the fun stuff rather than the drab, soulless husk that modern tech has become.

 

I am eternally thankful for everyone who stopped by (even the Linux Guy who politely told me Windows sucks) and had conversations, and I really wish we could have talked more because like, again, it's nice to see people on the same page. But the crowds were nuts. That said though, the amount of attention we got was nothing short of amazing and also heartwarming and if you're reading this and you were one of those people who stopped by, even for a second, thank you. You're the reason I do this.

 

The last real fun bit of the day was the final crowd wave, when I had to step out from behind my table to reboot a machine and got physically stuck outside my table and couldn't get back in due to how thick the crowd was. That was fun.

 

Load out was mostly uneventful, but also I was wiped by the end of it and only helped get one load down to the car before my back left the chat. I'm eternally thankful to my buddy who did his table alongside mine (and another friend from Discord who was volunteering) for finishing off the load out of our table because if I had to do it solo I don't know that I would have been able to, hah.

 

2026?

Given the current climate of things I don't want to make plans too far ahead because, well, everything could change in an instant, and I'd hope that I'd be able to go next year. I know near term I do tentatively want to do VCF SoCal (as a good friend lives nearby the SoCal venue and I can crash at his place, removing a lot of the cost barrier to me going), and hopefully I can swing it. 

 

But for West 2026? Well, I wanted to do PCs again. The reception to this year's table was nothing short of amazing. But it's also Apple's 50th birthday, and I'm told there will likely be a themed event to match. 

 

As such, I think I'm going to switch back to Macs for next year, because I've got a fairly overkill G4 Cube that's been just chomping at the bit to go back to VCF...

 

I really hope next year's show is as amazing as this year's was. Because holy hell. Easily a 9.5/10 show.