Am I the only Zoomer? I see a lot of “I remember”-type responses, so I have to wonder.
I’m in my 20s. I got into retro computing because I used older (Windows 95) computers my parents handed down to me when I was a child and things got cemented and I started looking at even older tech when I started watching YouTube videos covering retro computing.
Alright! It’s kind of similar for me, I grew up playing among old towers in our basement, and I still have a supply of retro stuff handed down to me, if I can catch it. I love seeing problems solved in different ways, or even the same way but visibly in old hardware. Today it’s all buried under the higher layers of abstraction, and the the other end of gen Z hasn’t even used a filesystem necessarily, let alone had to think about the physical layer.
I’m approaching the top of the hill.
I’m a Millennial (35 years old)
Worry not I am also a fellow Zoomer.
I always enjoyed retro technology either because I didn’t use to get the latest stuff right away or because there’s a certain charm to it that still grabs my interest.
Xennial!
First computer I used in school was an Apple IIe with a 720kb, 5.25" floppy drive.
First computer at home was a Tandy 1000. Still out in the garage, I think.
Xennial as well. My first home PC was an Epson with 640k and a 3.5 DD disk drive and a “Turbo” button on the front of the case.
I remember getting a kick out of a game that used RealSound, a piece of software for doing voice and other similarly complex sound out of the standard PC speaker (apparently it handled 6-bit PCM audio, though I wouldn’t know that at the time).
That game included a card explaining how to improve the audio out of your PC by building a cable to connect the line going to your PC speaker to an RCA cable to connect it to a stereo or boombox. The cable wasn’t great at what it did (and better designs had been devised since), but it was pretty simple (if I remember right just some RCA cable, a couple of alligator clips and a capacitor).
