the image above is not a serious attempt, i gave up at several points (visibly,) it's just meant to contextualize this a bit
thinking about my replychost / LadyLandshark's replychost about preserving old computers, the problem that one inevitably runs into after descending past the tip of the iceberg is always the same: you are probably not trying to LARP a 1986 businessman.
I actually wanted to do this when I started youtubing. I wanted to make videos where I used machines as intended. I wanted to finally do something different than what everyone else does.
It's always frustrating to see a youtube video or reddit post or whatever about an old PC. Someone fires up a 486 with Windows 95, gets to the desktop, and... does what? Opens all the apps and goes "Yep There They Are." it's the same demo, every time. it's always the same apps, and you don't want to use them.
Maybe you want to need to use them. That's fine. Nostalgia, borrowed or firsthand, is nothing to be ashamed of. but at some point you gotta go "what am I actually doing here?" and I feel like a lot of people never really ask themselves, "am I done with this 1991 Mac I picked up four years ago? am I done with Macs entirely?" most people with a 1991 Mac turn it on once in a while and, I wager, just kind of let it sit at the desktop for a bit, maybe open some folders, but eventually just turn it off.
maybe you'll play a videogame, but there really aren't that many, and they aren't very deep. a few people can get replayability out of them but i'd guess most can't. certainly, it's not enough to justify keeping the whole machine around.
much like how mainframes existed in order to print invoices, 95% of what PCs were used for before the 2000s was office software. what you're supposed to do for an authentic Mac experience is to open Appleworks and make a spreadsheet. but you don't want to do that.
oh, you might open it and dink around with the cell borders, but are you going to find data and type it in? are you going to write formulas? i have never seen anyone do this, and even with my own earnest attempts to get myself to do it For The Vine as it were, I couldn't muster the effort.
I want to show people "here's what using this machine looked like, here's what the actual lived experience would have been," but god, the difference between the thought and the reality is just... exhausting. the reality is that the machine was built as a tool, and tools don't really do much of interest in themselves. the interesting thing is the output. but when the output is a tax return, it's hard to want to create it or view it, and it takes so long.
it's not interesting to put bogus data into a spreadsheet, or to type gibberish into a word processor. the only really meaningful way to interact with this stuff would be to LARP it - to actually do your taxes on a 1991 mac. but that intrudes into your life - it would be like trying to repair your car with tools from 1860. not long in, you're going to be sobbing and begging for a socket wrench. it's interesting to think about the objective badness of past eras; it's not fun or practical to inject that badness into your modern life, with its very real problems.
the reality is that doing your taxes on a 1991 Mac was about a hundred times slower. you couldn't copy and paste all your bill payment receipts out of your email because nobody was emailing receipts back then, and you couldn't IM your girlfriend and ask her to find your W2, scan it, and send it to you.
it would be ludicrous to slow down the process of solving your real, actual problems like this. even if you park your modern laptop next to your old machine to fill in those gaps, you're still going to be copying over all this data manually and looking at a lower resolution display on which you can see less info. you're just going to make your life worse, and no amount of huffing vibes is going to make that worthwhile. and to wit - nobody does this.
the financial software is Just Like Now, But Much Worse. the graphics software is Just Like Now, But Worse. there's nothing to see, or experience. This bad version of photoshop has The Old Window Borders, sure, but those don't make any difference once you've actually started working. Assuming, of course, that you have a use for the app in question at all. If you aren't an artist, then you can't even do anything with Photoshop but scribble, and I can tell you from experience: that's the same in everything, no matter how old.
A word processor is really the only thing that isn't an egregious waste of your time (as long as you're on a graphical system - WordPerfect is a hellish piece of shit) but that's because word processing hasn't changed in over 30 years, which just makes it even more pointless
assuming you can stand the keyboard you'll be forced to use, and assuming you don't mind having to get your finished file off the machine via floppy... you're not doing what you're doing any differently than you'd do it now. it's just on a lower resolution screen, with fewer keyboard shortcuts, etc.
and, of course, there's no way to make a retrocomputing demo more interesting this way. you wouldn't want to record this for the public to watch. assuming you wanted the public to see the whole process of writing or spreadsheeting, who would watch that? it just looks like work. it is work.
Personal computers prior to the late 90s were only built to solve a handful of problems, and they all tried to solve them the exact same way we do now, just stopping at the limits of technology. Likewise, a crescent wrench from 1930 might be made of different alloy than one from 2022, but it still just turns bolts. You have to go really far back to find one that's interesting at all to look at, one that's actually shaped differently, but even then, it's just going to turn a bolt, and the only interesting aspect will be that it sucks. "Yep, here I am, putting it on a bolt. Alright, I turned it. My hand hurts."
This all gets worse the further down the iceberg you go. This is just for the 1991 Mac. The 8086 PC is really hard to do anything remotely interesting with. The Unix workstation is mind numbing. the mainframe doesn't do anything at all.
it's a bummer, and I wish I knew a solution. like, this is just me being sad and disillusioned. sorry if you were looking for a point
I realized a few months ago what appeals to me about using old computers and operating systems:
Doing stuff I couldn't do the first time around.
I have a G4 Cube whose hard drive I replaced with an SSD. It has literally zero moving parts (not counting the broken DVD drive). I upgraded it to 1 GB of RAM, so that when I launch a program on Mac OS 9 and try to do something and the app says “not enough memory”, I can simply quit it and add a zero to its memory allocation and launch it again.
The Mac SE/30 is another good example. It's theoretically possible to put up to 128 MB of RAM in it. Back in the day, that much RAM for a Mac cost four if not five figures. You need an OS extension to make it able to see that much RAM. Is it useful for anything? Maybe; the intersection of “needs more than 8 MB of RAM” and “can be done on a 68030” is not large. But it can be fun to explore it.
(Indeed, some Mac models are more desirable than others for precisely this reason. There are not a lot of things you could do with an original LC that you couldn't do better or faster, or at least as well, with some other Mac.)
Games I couldn't afford or couldn't run or my parents wouldn't let me buy. Many of which, whether or not I already have or could procure a legit copy today, I can find fallen from the back of one of several virtual trucks. If I did more retrocomputing on real hardware, I might play with some accessories I might have coveted back in the day but couldn't get back then.
Sometimes you do run into issues of “the modern version of this is better”. Like, is there any scanner I could plug into the SCSI port on an SE/30 that would be even comparable to a modern-day flatbed? Seems unlikely. (The software situation alone has improved by leaps and bounds in the intervening 34 years.) The Cube has USB, but it's USB 1.1, the slow one, good for a keyboard and mouse and the external speakers and not much else.
In those things I find space to dream. I think of how cool it would've been if the G4 Cube had lasted long enough to have a USB 2.0 model. For some models, some enthusiasts turn this sort of potential into real products, like the SCSI2SD that lets you use SD cards as Mac hard drives, or the VidHD video card for the Apple IIgs that has an HDMI output.
This is why some of my favorite videos from @cathoderaydude's YouTube channel are the ones that show off the accessories and features that maximized some product's utility. Like the recent one about the IBM 5140 laptop that stacks all the accessory modules onto it and turns it into the titular “Longest Laptop Ever”.
Retrocomputing can be the fulfillment of opportunities missed, an exercise in bridging the old and the new, and an exploration of potential that never did get realized but still could be.
oh this is well said, we think this is a lot of what it is for us as well
