A wave of painful nostalgia just hit me hard. I have a few old IBM machines that do not work anymore. When I got them – the usual way: people tossed them because they were outdated old junk – many of them were still operational. That was about 20 years ago. Over time they failed. Especially the MFM HDDs are anything but reliable. It might be possible to recap the boards or even get replacement versions for the PSUs, but there is probably no way to revive that feeling of listening to a Seagate ST-225 hard drive in action.
You Keep Every Piece Of Trash → You’re a Pathological Hoarder!
No, I’m not keeping trash. I definitely don’t keep empty yogurt cups, broken pens or 1000 empty and dirty cardboard boxes. I keep the few good memories and positive parts of my long gone youth.
No one looks at you with disapproval if you hoard thousands of digital (or even physical) photos. That’s how—as the majority has decided—you’re supposed to keep memories.
But if you store more than a little bit of paper, you’ll feel that condescending, patronizing attitude: “Anything you haven’t used in a year, you can safely throw away! It saves space, keeps things tidy, and makes you feel good.”
No, it doesn’t! I’d be destroying a part of myself.
Even in non-functional condition those IBM machines are a part of (computer-) history. They are worth keeping for the sake of being museum pieces. But for me they are even more. When I look at and touch these things, the memories come flooding back. A bittersweet wave of memories washes over me.
A broken computer might be considered just a piece of junk. I don’t have any feelings for a machine (unlike people who now believe they’re in a romantic relationship with a chatbot). I have feelings for the time and the memories represented by these (broken) computers.
When these devices gave up the ghost, it symbolized the end of their era. An irreversible loss. Just thinking about it, this sparks in me the unfulfillable desire to turn back the wheel of time.
Just as it is impossible to travel back in time and escape the Orwellian dystopia that has come to pass, so too can no emulator or virtual machine replicate the sensation of a running ST-225. Hissing, humming, and beeping. A tiny light blinking in time with the seek operations.
Physical Space?
Yes, of course I run into problems with my storage room. What has been crammed onto this single shelf would actually need to fill an entire room to be displayed properly. But I can’t do that, because I don’t have another empty room it. And this isn’t the only shelf like this… (open images in new tab for full size)
Memes
Idiots never tire of posting memes whose content suggests an IQ lower than room temperature. That is a general problem.
As an example fitting this blog entry, I’ll mention the kind that makes fun of physical media. The core message goes something like this: “Today (or at least in a few years), young people won’t even know what a CD or DVD is.” Wrapped in a lazy drawn (or even AI generated) comic or just a quoted text attributed to a small child.
That’s so outrageously stupid! Anyone who posts something like that is, in my opinion, so dumb that pigs would bite them in disagreement and anger!
Expressing disagreement with that narrative triggers even more condescending answers. I could – not kidding – post an example in the form of a screenshot, but I omit it because it is embarrassing for them (or at least it should be embarrassing, I doubt they would ever question their attitude). Reducing complex issues to lazy punchlines doesn’t work.
Educational gaps, failing to teach children history, is a failure of society (not of the children! Before some idiots accuse me of being hostile towards the young generation – such an incident happened before). No matter if electronics and computers, historic ways of building a house (frame house for example), horse drawn carriages or the way ancient Romans build something like water pipes (working without pumps!) – old things might be obsolete and replaced by something better (debatable at times). That doesn’t mean old things should be eradicated from collective memory and from education.
This kind of meme conveys contempt—contempt for intelligence, education, and knowledge, and thus contempt for future generations.