Retro Computing

[Kame-Sen'nin]

My nostalgia for the bygone days of anime fandom is closely paired with nostalgia for those early days of the internet. I remember reading through fansite after fansite, looking through vast galleries of animated GIFs, and finding more information about anime than I had ever been able to find before.

Because of this, I'm a fan of the retro computing scene as well. While I can't recreate the excitement that I had back then, I can still enjoy those animated GIFs, screen caps from VHS tapes, and episode summaries in a similar fashion. I can even browse Anime Past and The Aging Otaku Lounge from an Amiga AWeb browser! It really makes the digital archive pop!

Here are some screenshots of how Anime Past and The Aging Otaku Lounge look when browsing from the Amiga AWeb browser. Click to view the full-size versions. Full disclosure: these screenshots were made using the Amiga Forever emulation package, not on original hardware.





Are there any other members of the lounge who are fans of retro computing?

[usamimi]

Awww, that's actually kind of awesome looking!

I have a soft spot for "old" computers/technology. I dunno if it's because I've been around enough to see a lot of it evolve and change or what, but it does give me flash backs to old computer classes, and my first poking-arounds on the internet way back when. Ah, memories <3

[Kame-Sen'nin]

Awww, that's actually kind of awesome looking!

I have a soft spot for "old" computers/technology. I dunno if it's because I've been around enough to see a lot of it evolve and change or what, but it does give me flash backs to old computer classes, and my first poking-arounds on the internet way back when. Ah, memories <3

I'm glad to know that I'm not the only one who feels nostalgia for those days!

[greg]

I'm glad to see a topic on this! We actually had one about a year and a half ago, but it got deleted (long story).

Sometime in the mid-90s, I got roped into the Asian/Pacific Islanders Association (APIA) club in college. (I ended up becoming president by default, against my will and through a process of stupid politics, and I had no business being the president, but that's a very long story). Anyhow, so we had a picnic at a park one fine Saturday and there was one guy who attended who was a HUGE Amiga fan. He told me of how he was able to get his Amiga connected to the Internet. He said that there was a very large community of Amiga fans on the Net who were pushing for the reinvention of Commodore computers and such. He was seriously hoping for a new line of Amiga computers to be made. I thought he was crazy of course, but I admired his obsession and zeal for something relatively forgotten.

So do you have an actual Amiga that still works?

My first computer was a DOS 286 AT computer that my dad bought during the summer of 1989, which had 12 megabytes of ram and an 8 or 10 megabyte hard drive. That summer, I bought a joystick and Arkanoid 2. I had a subscription to Video Games & Computer Entertainment, as well as PC Magazine. A couple of years later I bought a soundcard. It was a Thunderboard, which was a cheap alternative to a Soundblaster card. The company who made it were cooking the books and were using projected sales as actual sales or something like that. They were caught with an audit and suddenly disappeared.

An Internet subscription to a local ISP in the Phoenix, AZ area was a Christmas gift in 1994. The default software came with Netscape version 1.0, and its logo was nothing more than a pulsating capital N. Then along came version 2, and wow! Background images! Animated gifs! Plus the logo in the corner had that swell meteor shower animation when pages were loading.



I never did download Mosaic, so I never had the chance to use that. I guess I could find those old software programs on XP and install them just for fun. There's a website called OldVersion or something like that. I still use an old WS FTP program from the old days. I wonder if I shouldn't? I'm not fond of huge changes. I never once used Internet Explorer, and stuck with Netscape until I switched to Fire Fox.

This reminds me... I need to buy a Zip drive somewhere. I have old stuff I can share on this forum on those old Zip disks of mine. I had an internal Zip 250 in my computer case, but it was IDE and I had to yank it out when I replaced the motherboard and everything. I shipped my computer to Japan and it would no longer work when I tried hooking it up!

[Kame-Sen'nin]

I'm glad to see a topic on this! We actually had one about a year and a half ago, but it got deleted (long story).

Sometime in the mid-90s, I got roped into the Asian/Pacific Islanders Association (APIA) club in college. (I ended up becoming president by default, against my will and through a process of stupid politics, and I had no business being the president, but that's a very long story). Anyhow, so we had a picnic at a park one fine Saturday and there was one guy who attended who was a HUGE Amiga fan. He told me of how he was able to get his Amiga connected to the Internet. He said that there was a very large community of Amiga fans on the Net who were pushing for the reinvention of Commodore computers and such. He was seriously hoping for a new line of Amiga computers to be made. I thought he was crazy of course, but I admired his obsession and zeal for something relatively forgotten.

So do you have an actual Amiga that still works?

Believe it or not, they actually made a new line of computers and updated the Amiga Operating System significantly! In particular, the AmigaOne X1000 looks like a fantastic piece of hardware for dedicated Amiga fans (it is certainly pricey though).

Unfortunately, I don't have an actual Amiga at the moment I'm considering picking one up, but I'm not sure which system I'd prefer these days-a 16-bit Amiga, a 32-bit Amiga, or a new system running AmigaOS 4.1...although it wouldn't shock me if I ended up getting one of each!

My first computer was a DOS 286 AT computer that my dad bought during the summer of 1989, which had 12 megabytes of ram and an 8 or 10 megabyte hard drive. That summer, I bought a joystick and Arkanoid 2. I had a subscription to Video Games & Computer Entertainment, as well as PC Magazine. A couple of years later I bought a soundcard. It was a Thunderboard, which was a cheap alternative to a Soundblaster card. The company who made it were cooking the books and were using projected sales as actual sales or something like that. They were caught with an audit and suddenly disappeared.

An Internet subscription to a local ISP in the Phoenix, AZ area was a Christmas gift in 1994. The default software came with Netscape version 1.0, and its logo was nothing more than a pulsating capital N. Then along came version 2, and wow! Background images! Animated gifs! Plus the logo in the corner had that swell meteor shower animation when pages were loading.

I never did download Mosaic, so I never had the chance to use that. I guess I could find those old software programs on XP and install them just for fun. There's a website called OldVersion or something like that. I still use an old WS FTP program from the old days. I wonder if I shouldn't? I'm not fond of huge changes. I never once used Internet Explorer, and stuck with Netscape until I switched to Fire Fox.

It's great to hear your memories of those early days of the internet Greg! I'll also confess to enjoying that Netscape meteor shower animation. Netscape was a great browser, and I was glad to see Firefox rise from its ashes. I was never a Mosaic browser user, but it might be worth looking into if you're curious.

This reminds me... I need to buy a Zip drive somewhere. I have old stuff I can share on this forum on those old Zip disks of mine. I had an internal Zip 250 in my computer case, but it was IDE and I had to yank it out when I replaced the motherboard and everything. I shipped my computer to Japan and it would no longer work when I tried hooking it up!

I'm sure we'd all love to see what you have on those Zip disks! I sometimes wonder just how many lost files are stored in stacks of Zip disks that may never get archived...so much data was saved to Zip disks, and so many sites from those days are gone forever.

[greg]

I used to have a bunch of old anime .gif and .jpg files that were backed onto a whole bunch of 3.5 floppy disks, and I think I copied the ones I liked best onto at least one zip drive. I also have all of the taglines I had used with the SLiMeR program I used to download threads off FidoNet and AnimeNet Echoes. That's what I really miss! I had some other random stuff like the rec.arts.anime and Bubblegum Crisis FAQs, but those can be easily found online to this day. I used to use my USB zip disk 250 drive quite a lot, and at one point my entire homepage used to fit on one disk. Then the drive crashed (which was very rare, since Zip disks were real workhorses) and I lost everything and had to download what I had from my FTP server. I didn't lose much, but there was some files-in-progress that I unfortunately lost. I don't know why, but I really dig the "plugging stuff into other stuff" way of doing things like connecting a Zip Drive via USB, or docking a Sega Genesis console to a Sega CD unit, or docking a Super Wild Card into a SNES.

I really enjoyed DOS-based programs, and I only ever loaded up Windows 3.1 to use the Internet. My computer would boot to a DOS prompt andI would go from there. Things were simpler back then, yet at the same time they were so much more complex. Installing a sound card on your computer meant having to set IRQ settings, and using a mouse meant that you needed to use the default COM ports. All sorts of jumpers needed to be set, main hard drives needed to be set to master and secondary drives were slaves, and those butt-ugly IDE cables that took up so much space inside of a computer were nasty! SATA makes everything so much easier, as do modern day motherboards that have built-in sound and network interface cards.

Boy, that new Amiga sure looks awesome! For over $2,000, I guess it could be more expensive. It would be fun to get one. I'm not familiar with the Amiga OS though, but I really enjoy tinkering around with and using new OSes. I installed Fedora on an old laptop and enjoyed learning some Linux commands with it, but then our home was burglarized and my 10-year-old doorstop of a laptop was stolen.

In a somewhat related tangent, I find it amusing how Apple's OS is now basically built on top of Linux. I just do not like the look and feel of Apple computers. They look rather sexy and all that, but I've never cared for the interface.

Back in the late '80s, you'd get an IBM clone for business, an Atari ST for music, a MacIntosh for publishing and graphic design, or an Amiga for multimedia and graphics processing. The Amiga played a big part for local cable companies and fansubbers, for sure. Heck, the Amiga is what brought us the special effects of Terminator 2 and at least the first season of Babylon 5!

[Heero]

面白い!
My first computer was an Atari 800, cut my teeth learning BASIC on that thing and trying to build text based RPGs. I vaguely remember thinking the web would never be more than a novelty because it was so slow. (HA) Netscape was a great browser, it's a little sad that that brand didn't survive. It's interesting how much more COMMUNAL BBSes and later even the internet was back in the heyday. I may be romanticizing it in a way, but it seems like back in the early to mid 90s with webpages and IRC, you either actually knew at least some of the people involved or MET and really got to know new people. I think that's one thing we've really lost, and things like facebook have made online .. "relationships"(?) much more superficial. Now it's just a "thumbs up" or "link a goofy image" rather than real conversation or communication.

[davemerrill]

Our family's first computer was the result of a compromise between my brother, who wanted a computer, and me, who wanted a Colecovision. So we got a Coleco ADAM. As a computer it was every bit as bad as its reputation, but it did come with a printer, so writing papers for school got a lot easier. Also, I got to play Coleco games.

At some point we bought an Apple IIe from a friend of mine. It was years past being new, and I can't remember if I ever got any programs to run on it, but it did come with an Amdek monitor that is still working to this day.

My brother bought an Amiga in... 1987? 1988? and it got used for nothing practical. I used the drawing program a little, generated some test patterns to put on the front of the anime club's video tapes.

The family finally entered the PC age with a 386 that got used for college papers, BBS's, AOL, GEnie, and darn near everything else we could make it do until it developed the click of death. I can't remember the name of the desktop-publishing program I used, but I put the first 10 Let's Anime zines together with that PC, as well as countless APA tribs, letters, flyers, all kinds of print design.

I've been using PCs ever since, but everywhere I've worked has been a balance of Apple and PC devices. I never quite understood the 'either-or' mentality.

When we were putting our UFO/conspiracy/hacker convention "Phenomicon" together in 1990, we somehow were introduced to a local guy who was a total Amiga partisan. Boy, did he want to talk about the Amiga. He held a meeting with us so he could show us all the neat stuff the Amiga could do, and never once did he get around to describing how exactly this device was going to make our convention run more smoothly or be more entertaining.

[greg]

Netscape was a great browser, it's a little sad that that brand didn't survive.

The Netscape name was forever ruined once AOL got their stupid hands on it. It was no longer just a browser... it had to come with an e-mail program, a WYSIWYG HTML page maker, AIM, and finally the browser. True Netscape has survived though, but under the name of Firefox. After Firefox came out, I switched from Netscape to it and have been happy ever since.

When I was an elementary school student in the '80s, the computer lab was a bunch of Atari 800 computers. The kinds with cartridges as well as 5.25" floppies. Later came Apple II computers, which were way better. Later came Apple IIGS computers, which were my all-time favorite Apple computers. MacIntoshes existed back then, but they were all black and white screens and good for mainly just desktop publishing. I once saw an Apple IIGS computer with an internal hard drive and Apple's OS installed on it and man, that was beautiful! It was even running Arkanoid II on it. Later when I was a high school student in the '90s, I took a BASIC programming class and a couple of PASCAL classes, and those classes were all on the IIGS.

I used to play around with Amiga computers in Software Etc at the mall, which was just the back section of the Waldenbooks. Software Etc eventually became its own store elsewhere in the mall.

[Heero]

Netscape was a great browser, it's a little sad that that brand didn't survive.

The Netscape name was forever ruined once AOL got their stupid hands on it. It was no longer just a browser... it had to come with an e-mail program, a WYSIWYG HTML page maker, AIM, and finally the browser. True Netscape has survived though, but under the name of Firefox. After Firefox came out, I switched from Netscape to it and have been happy ever since.

Firefox has had it's issues of late for me. It's gotten kind of bloated and the version just before the current one (I think) had a bunch of memory leaks. That pushed me to switch to chrome and I've been happy with it so far. But then, I also (like you) really liked Firefox for a while, so I guess we'll see.