Nostalgia Buffer Overflow

I’ve spent years talking myself out of buying a “vintage” Macintosh or trying to upgrade my old one, each time thinking I’ve put the compulsion to rest for good, only to have it reawakened a few weeks or months later, the second I see a compact Mac in the background of a YouTube video, or I see a screenshot of an old ICOM game.

A couple of weeks ago, I finally decided to stop the lambs from screaming, and I bought a Macintosh SE from a collector on Craigslist. I spent more than was recommended by people online,1 but it included the original keyboard, mouse, manuals, and box, and it appears to be in excellent condition, so I’m satisfied.

It’s pretty easy to find tons of software for vintage Macs — more than I ever would’ve been able to get in the late 1980s — but actually getting it from the internet onto an actual computer means using a device like the BlueSCSI. I ordered an external one and received it about a week later, and it was so straightforward to use that within a few hours, I’d already ruined it.

That’s just me being over-dramatic. I’d just made it so that the BlueSCSI keeps booting into Dark Castle, which was designed to run from a floppy, meaning it never returns control back to the Finder. So I had a dedicated Dark Castle machine, which honestly wouldn’t be so bad, except that I at least want to be able to run HyperCard as well.

It’s not that complicated to fix, but it does mean re-installing the Basilisk II emulator on my MacBook Pro to fix up my SD card. And running the emulator on a modern computer, with gigabytes of ram instead of 1MB, and a high-speed connection to the internet, and a processor that’s so fast it makes everything open and run instantaneously, is a stark reminder of how much computers have improved since the late 1980s.

And it’s actually made me reassess what kind of nerd I am, and exactly how much. The Mac SE I bought only has 1MB of RAM, meaning it can barely run System 6 comfortably2, and can’t run System 7 at all. I ordered an upgrade to 4MB over ebay3, which seemed like a no-brainer, but now has me more than a little anxious about trying to install it.

There’s no shortage online of instructions on how to open up a classic compact Mac, and they all come with warnings about how dangerous it is to work around a CRT. I’ve spent enough time working with PC motherboards that I believe it’d be easy enough for me to do, but there is something that would be even easier for me to do, and that’s not bother with the memory upgrade at all. It already feels like with a machine this old, I’m playing Russian roulette every time I turn it on, just daring the hard drive to finally fail, the power supply to go out, and the computer to demand I leave it to its well-deserved eternal rest.

What kind of computer nerd is reluctant to open up a machine and do a simple memory upgrade? I’m starting to think I’ve spent the last several decades in denial about what kind of computer nerd I actually am.

My sordid history of being too attached to computers started when I begged my parents for a Commodore 64 back in middle school. They got me one4, I spent an entirely unhealthy amount of time on it, and then pestered them into upgrading me to a Commodore 128. Those were the machines on which I learned to type and learned to program, first in BASIC and then in 6502 Assembly, which would later become the basis of my whole career.

Not that different from a billion other computer nerds. But when I really think about it, the thing that compelled me to get a computer wasn’t a love of electronics, or a desire to tinker with code, or learn the intricacies of how a personal computer worked. It was simply because I’d been at a friend’s house and saw them using their Vic-20, and it blew my mind that they could make things appear on the television.

After a couple of years using the 128, I started hearing about the Macintosh, which sounded like magic but was much, much too expensive for us to afford. I’d buy issues of MacUser or MacWorld as my Teen Crush magazines, entranced by the idea of a graphical user interface, looking at the most mundane screenshots of business applications and thinking someday….

The summer after I graduated high school, I was sitting at home being typically lazy when my parents came home and asked me to get the groceries from the back of the car. I resented having to do anything, so I’m sure I threw a little fit before I got up and went out to the car. I opened the trunk only to find a huge box saying it contained a Mac Plus. I looked back up at the house and could see my parents looking out the window, smiling more than I’d seen in years. It was wonderful.

I loved that Mac Plus, even though it was already showing issues with constant disk swapping, not having enough memory to run upgrades of System 6 comfortably, and eventually, spontaneously rebooting and losing work. My main memories of it were first seeing video games as a communal experience instead of a solitary one, and starting to make games in HyperCard. I never had a “real” compiler for it, because they were way, way too expensive for me to afford. Besides, why would you bother using C or Pascal when HyperCard was free and so easy to use?

After only a little over a year, I “upgraded” to an Amiga 500. Just in terms of technical specs, the Amiga was a huge improvement over the Mac Plus. And I did end up using the Amiga throughout college, much longer than I did the Mac. It was marketed as a creative machine, but it was completely practical for college work as well. And it was my first real exposure to creative software like Deluxe Paint, and significantly, my first exposure to LucasArts games with the demo for The Secret of Monkey Island.

But for whatever reason5, I never had the same attachment to the Amiga as I did to the Mac Plus, or even my old Commodores. (I’m actually a little envious whenever I see people online who are deeply connected to Amiga nostalgia, because it seems fun). Apple clearly appreciates what a stranglehold the classic Mac has on people like me, and you can bet that I chomped on the classic Mac wallpaper the second I installed Sequoia, and there’s no doubt that it helped push me over the edge into finally buying an SE.

Which I’m afraid to upgrade. And I don’t really enjoy using as much as the emulator, which doesn’t require much tinkering or setup, since the people who love doing that kind of thing have already done all the work for me.

So now I’m having a late-in-life plot-twist revelation that I’ve been misidentifying as a computer nerd my whole life, when I’m actually more of a TV nerd. Whenever I’ve really gotten excited about the potential of personal computers, it’s been almost entirely related to making video games. And games only for their potential as a storytelling medium.

In case the observation doesn’t seem to warrant so much rambling navel-gazing: it probably doesn’t. But it still explains a lot. I’ve often felt like the people who really excel at my day job — software engineering, more often than not — seem to have an interest in hacking and tinkering and build processes for their own sake, while I’ve always just seen it more as a means to an end. I usually treat this as something that I need to just hunker down and improve on, instead of accepting that it’s something I’m just not particularly interested in. It’s something that I tend to be pretty good at, from experience, instead of something I’m intrinsically passionate about.

Which means I can probably now (after a few decades as a professional programmer) unclench a bit and give myself a little grace for not getting excited about digging into makefiles, poring over stack traces, or getting out a multimeter and soldering iron just for the sake of getting an old machine running. I’d rather concentrate on the stuff I’m better at.

So the Mac SE will likely become something I enjoy more looking at than actually using. Maybe it’ll gracefully retire into the background of my office, where it’ll appear in photos and videos and eventually inspire in the next person an irresistible compulsion to buy an old computer they have no idea how to maintain.

1
Although honestly, the “never spend more than $50” advice seems unrealistic based on everything I’ve been seeing for years. I’ve never seen a listing for a functional one including mouse and keyboard for under $150.

2
Hence all the disk swapping I had to do on my Mac Plus back in 1988

3
Which, hilariously, cost as much as 16GB in modern RAM

4
I have the worst memory, but somehow I can still vividly recall going to K-Mart and picking out the box from the shelves in the back of the store

5
It’s shallow but entirely possible that it’s because I always hated the Amiga Workbench

1 Although honestly, the “never spend more than $50” advice seems unrealistic based on everything I’ve been seeing for years. I’ve never seen a listing for a functional one including mouse and keyboard for under $150.

2 Hence all the disk swapping I had to do on my Mac Plus back in 1988

3 Which, hilariously, cost as much as 16GB in modern RAM

4 I have the worst memory, but somehow I can still vividly recall going to K-Mart and picking out the box from the shelves in the back of the store

5 It’s shallow but entirely possible that it’s because I always hated the Amiga Workbench