Computers have fascinated me since early childhood. My first games were Test Drive (the 1987 DOS one) and Space Invaders, and more than 35 years later the fascination has not worn off. A kid playing a 16-colour game gets determined to learn how it works, becomes a programmer, and one day works on real projects — and that day could just as well be today. We have machines on our desks that were almost unimaginable even in the early 2000s; a Mac Studio runs large language models at home.
And yet I keep writing about “retro” hardware. Much of it was dream hardware not that long ago — roughly halfway between DOS gaming in 1987 and now. My belief is that treasures can be found in a dumpster, literally. The OptiPlex 990 from my vlog is a cheap PC today; in 2010 I bought a one-generation-older i5 760 as new, paired it with a GTX 460, and played every game of that time on it. Such a PC is not cheap because we learned to manufacture it like a pencil — we are not there yet. It is cheap because people and companies subsidise it by buying new and throwing away the old.
Was that progress, or were most of us just led to believe it was? When the first Core 2 Duo came out I splurged on 2 GB of DDR2 and felt there was no use for such a ridiculous amount — a game, a browser with a few tabs and an Eclipse IDE with a Java project all ran at once. Today Windows 11 on my work laptop takes 10 GB just to reach the desktop, and a chat app needs 2 GB of RAM to do a voice call we could already do in 2006. Paying again and again for bigger and better, only to feed the resources to inefficient, telemetry-ridden software, is not the kind of progress I signed up for.
I’m an IT professional; this site is a work of passion, not a CV. New posts appear here first and are reposted elsewhere (dev.to, LinkedIn) afterwards; the videos live on my YouTube channel, with a companion page for each episode under Vlog.