An Anti-Menagerie

Collecting old things and getting rid of them

Retrocomputing is walking a fine line between discovering new uses and forgotten parts of old hardware and a kind of self-indulgent nostalgia, where acquisition and collection become the primary focus of the hobby. Even being aware of this distinction, I fall into that second category more often than I’d like to admit.

Two weeks ago, I gave away an eMac. This is a gorgeous Apple all-in-one produced mainly for the education market circa the mid-2ks, a contemporary to the iMac with the white base and chrome monitor arm. I got mine cheap from a Facebook Marketplace listing a few years back, before I really got caught up in repairing these things; a rare variant, the last that’s capable of booting into the Classic, pre OS X operating system. In the years since, it’s had a few issues (all of them minor), the latest of which involved the CRT intermittently losing the ability to display reds and oranges, leaving it to display a UI that looked almost like it was underwater. From what friends (and strangers on Twitter) told me, it wasn’t too difficult of a repair.

never talk to me or my son ever again

But what was the point of keeping it around? I started making an inventory of the Macs I have and why I need them. The Mac SE I got from an ex when I was 21, the G3 laptop a friend gave me a few months ago, a separate G3 I had restored with a working battery and flash-based hard drive, a Macintosh IIsi that I rescued from an auto repair shop, monitor coated in engine grease, and finally, the broken eMac. Then, the whys. The SE was perfect for black-and-white, System 6 software. The IIsi had one of the more capable 68k processors, and was good for all the stuff that would struggle on OS 9 and PowerPCs, plus it could run a somewhat-obscure variant of Unix called A/UX (more on that in a later post, probably). But what about the others? All of them were more modern PowerPC machines. All of them ran the same version of MacOS. And there were three of them.

I hadn’t fired up the eMac in a few months; it was sitting there on a desk, serving as a backdrop for Zoom calls. And while it was always fun to answer questions about it from coworkers, having a machine like that as a backdrop felt wrong somehow? The last few years, as I’ve gotten more into old computers, posting about them on Twitter has led to more replies like “I’m so jealous,” “I used to have one just like that, wish I hadn’t given it away,” and “how do you find these things?” The truth is, old computers are garbage to most people, so they’re fairly easy to come by if you know where to look. And inexpensive interests often lead to hoarding, especially as the value of these things appreciate with nostalgia.

Every so often, someone on r/vintageapple posts their collection, including four Color Classics, three Quadras, five G3 iBook clamshells (every color), and every variant of the G4 tower (Graphite, Quicksilver, and MDD). It always makes me wonder: what’s even the point? It’s one thing to have a lot of different machines for different uses, but quite another to just horde things that creative people might use for your own peace of mind in knowing you possess it. It’s a particularly capitalist pathology too. Adults who collected baseball cards as kids would ask a ten year old me if the Pokemon cards I played with were valuable. I just wanted to use my holographic Venusaur in a game with a friend, all the magazines I’d read told me it was worth $45. It’s an easy thing to internalize this mindset, and I didn’t like the idea that my developing interest in something old and scarce would inevitably be an expression of it.

So, in the end, keeping around a Mac, even a cool-looking one, just didn’t feel good. I posted on Twitter that I was giving it away to whoever wants it, and a few of the same people who were always liking my tweets about the machine were then asking me if they could have it. In the end, it went to one of them, and I hope I get to see what they make with it. Even if I don’t, and if they just get to click around an operating system that’s twenty years out of date, it’s still better than it being a beautiful backdrop on a Zoom call.

I kept the G3 iBook; here’s me writing this post on it

If I still fetishize these old machines a tiny bit, I hope you don’t blame me: they’re fun, they look cool, and using them just feels different from using the computers I spend all day with for work. But one thing I expect my friends to remind me is that these things are for using, for creativity, for things that aren’t so vulgar as possession alone. And hopefully, as I get deeper into this hobby and better at repairs, rather than more computers to show off, I’ll have more of them to give away.

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A few (unrelated) updates:

New Session Issue 2 is accepting submissions! The deadline is Dec. 1, but in reality, we’ll be accepting submissions until the 10th.

Are you interested in retrocomputing? Do you live in or around Oakland, California? I’ve been hosting a regular hangout at my house, happing roughly every month. The last focused on drawing applications, the next will focus on music (trackers, MIDI interfaces, weird synths on Commodore 64s and 1990s IBM PCs), probably sometime in early January. If this sounds interesting to you, let me know (email me at dondeesten@gmail.com) and I’ll send you an invite!

<3

Cara