Do you know which you can, right now, for free, go to Archive.org, the wonderful online library of all things, and upload in your web browser an old, dilapidated computer emulator—a box of DOS from 1991, a black and white Mac, a blue and black Apple II — and running yore’s WordPerfect, booting up old HyperCard stacks, or using 1979’s VisiCalc as God intended?
Maybe this doesn’t sound magical to you. Equal. Moore’s Law took us from 250 billion CPUs active per year on early Macs to a potential trillion clock cycles on a good gaming PC, up 4,000,000X. Any conscious person can reasonably ask, What? Why use a shiny new calculator to run old spreadsheets? And I may nod and shrug, but inside I’m an emotional matte plastic iMac. Because, I think, the important thing is to compete.
You can learn history by read a book and visit the museum; You can even walk on a battlefield. But you can’t understand software from screenshots any more than you can understand music from album reviews, baseball from box scores, or Rome while watching gladiator movies, just like you can enjoy movies. fighter. When you start a virtual instance of a Macintosh from 30 years ago, you share the life experiences of millions of ancient people. You can see how they spend their meager CPU budget filling low resolution screens.
You learn their priorities. They start out with batch processing, running programs as pieces of code, but as soon as the CPU lets them, they make them live, interactive. Even if it’s just green numbers on the screen, à la VisiCalc. As soon as they could, early adopters switched to post-text, visual — pointing at things with the mouse, Spartan virtue abandoned to Athenian excess. Then, to Moore’s eagerness, we dedicate new CPU cycles to color or network or audio, progressing from beeping to playing CD to MP3.
Simulation reminds me to ask myself whether the computer experience always getting better. I’m writing this on Google Docs so the little round avatar the editor can look at and make sure I don’t miss my deadline once, but I’ll prefer to write it in WordPerfect 5.1 for DOS, which is the best word processor ever — a blank screen illuminated only by letters and numbers, providing enough bold and italic to keep everything gets interesting. I remember the WP51 the way a non-nerd might remember a classic Mustang. You can just take that thing out and go, man.
But it’s not just a trip to the museum to enrich yourself. Emulation forces me to retreat to the basics — remember, for most people, computers are tools, not lifestyles. Whenever I buy a computer, one of the first things I do is set up my software emulation environments, which currently involve about a terabyte of old disk images and different operating systems. . Keeping history close helps me accept the horrible fact that everything novel in our industry was actually invented by a bunch of Californians sitting in beanbag chairs during the Carter administration. What seems permanent today is just as ephemeral as Twitter’s Fleets. GAFA becomes FAANG becomes MAMAA. There will be new acronyms soon.
Recently, I did the jump from software-based simulation to specialized hardware. I bought a small black metal box, about the size of three packs of playing cards, that contained what was called a field-programmable gate array — a shapeshifter that had the characteristics of other devices. It is purely for emulating classic machines, including Commodores Amiga and 64, Atari STs, 486s and various gaming platforms, which for most people is the main event (Neo Geos, Game Boys, Atari). Lynx, all the way back Space war! on PDP-1).
The box is called MiSTer. It’s not a consumer product but a folk-made reference platform: If you buy these parts and assemble them, then download some free software and plug in an HDMI card, it’s will become an old machine. For this privilege, one has to pay around $600. That gives me the same pleasure as I imagine people who like expensive headphones or collectible vintage vinyl feel — the feeling of something living. than real. The cores simulate everything, all the little glitches, weirdness and timing that make up a chip, making the mouse move as you remember it. Watching old code run on modern big, crisp screens is superreal. Like a Madeleine Proustian, but made by Cinnabon.
