I have a core memory of sitting in the computer room at my house, plucking at the strings of my guitar while waiting, always waiting, for the internet to finish downloading whatever I was looking at.
Gradually, over the course of a year or so, I could suddenly play the guitar.
Not amazingly, mind you, but well enough that I could play with the church choir. I understood the basics because I had simply... learned them. Ironically, I learned partly from a guitar lesson program I downloaded from a BBS.
There was a point when I would have complained endlessly about how slow the internet was. I hated waiting for the BBS line to stop being busy so I could get online and play my round of Legend of the Red Dragon or TradeWars 2002. I remember being freaking frustrated by some Roberta Williams-inspired bit of moon logic in a King's Quest game, knowing there was something exciting on the other side of the puzzle if I could only figure it out.
At the time, I wanted everything to be faster.
Now, I would trade much of the instant, streaming gratification of the modern age for that frustration in a heartbeat.
Today, I start working on my computer and, the moment there is a delay, I do not pick up my guitar. I instinctively reach for the quickest available dopamine hit: Facebook, X, YouTube Shorts or whatever else is sitting one click away.
Do not get me wrong. I enjoy the dopamine hit. I enjoy it the way an alcoholic enjoys a shot of tequila or a junkie enjoys the next high. I do it because these platforms are designed to be addictive, and for a few seconds they make me feel vaguely good.
Yet, in the bigger picture, I can tell that we lost something.
Computers were once tools that enhanced parts of our lives. Now they have become one of the central forces around which our lives are organized. They scratch nearly every itch, usually instantaneously, and they have become very good at creating new itches whenever we run out.
So, what am I saying?
I would love to stop and go back, but I do not see how I can. My job requires me to be on social media and to work with the latest, fastest technology. There is no "Amish 1990s computer nerd" world I can return to, even if I desperately want one.
I want a world where I can play Alpha Centauri, King's Quest or Civilization IV, but where the computer does not immediately offer a thousand faster and more stimulating alternatives. I want technology that feels useful and exciting without consuming every empty space in my life.
That is part of why I want RetroAB. It is not only about preserving old computers or remembering how clever we were for making things work with 640 KB of memory. It is about remembering what computers felt like when they were still somewhere we went, rather than something we carried everywhere.
Before computers did everything
Computers did not used to do everything.
They did not go everywhere with me. They did not buzz in my pocket every time someone wanted my attention. They did not provide an infinite supply of content I could scroll through for hours while drinking a martini and becoming increasingly dissociated from reality.
A puzzle in a game could not be trivially solved with a quick Google search. Multiplayer games were not immediately available at all hours of the day. Whether I could play depended partly on whether I was lucky enough to get into the BBS before someone else tied up its one phone line.
My first computer at home was an IBM XT. We had games I still remember fondly: Alley Cat, Frogger, Jump Joe, The King of Chicago and Decathlon.
Man, I remember sitting there for hours, cheering my sister Peggy on as she hammered the 1 and 2 keys, trying to beat the records in Decathlon. We were determined to win that gold medal. We never did, but we tried so darn hard.
Peggy and Tammy became good at those events, but never quite good enough across all ten of them to beat the computer players. It did not matter. It was fun. The graphics were crap, but I honestly do not think I have ever loved another sports game as much.
Then there was the stuff I played by myself.
WordPerfect was practically a game. I would spend hours writing stories in that word processor. They were nonsense stories about junior detectives, space battles and whatever else was rattling around in my head. I wrote poetry that would probably bring tears to a grown man's eyes because it was so terrible.
But I wrote it because I could, and it was awesome.
There was also Print Shop, which I played with endlessly. I printed long black-and-white banners on our IBM ProPrinter for my bedroom, birthdays, Christmas, Mother's Day or whatever other occasion seemed to require several feet of perforated paper.
I would colour them with pencil crayons and felt markers. I can still hear the dot-matrix printer pounding out those banners, one line at a time, and the memory makes me smile.
Technically, I can still print banners today. I can print several separate pages, cut off the margins and try to glue them together without making the whole thing look awful.
It is nothing, and I mean nothing, like the wonder of watching a dot-matrix printer slowly produce one enormous continuous banner.
The manual was part of the machine
GW-BASIC was there too, and I played with it endlessly.
I could not understand why BASIC programs I copied out of magazines or books from school did not always work. I did not yet understand that Apple BASIC, Commodore BASIC and GW-BASIC were different things. I was around seven years old. Do not judge me.
Still, I kept going.
I went through the IBM BASIC manual, typing in examples without always understanding what they did. At some point, I encountered something very much like:
SHELL "FORMAT C:"
I shit you not, I remember it being presented as an example.
Seven-year-old, wildly overconfident Kelly saw the message:
Proceed with Format (Y/N)?
I thought, "Why not?"
Then I typed Y.
My dad was not pleased with me.
I did not type another SHELL command for many, many years, but I learned something.
There is not much like that now. Yes, my children have learned a great deal about programming, but there is less of that visceral sense that the computer and the rest of the world are clearly separate objects.
Back then, you read the manual. When you were confused, you could not immediately look up the answer online. You needed another manual, a different book or a more knowledgeable human being. Sometimes you simply experimented until something happened.
The same was true of games. I remember reading the manuals for King's Quest IV and Police Quest III repeatedly, searching for clues that might help me solve whatever bit of moon logic had me stuck. The manual was not just documentation. It was part of the experience.
Games, programs and computers arrived with visible limits. You could often see where the software ended and where your own understanding had to begin.
Modern systems are vastly more powerful, but most of their complexity has disappeared behind polished interfaces, cloud services, automated updates and accounts connected to other accounts. The complexity did not go away. It moved somewhere the user could no longer see it.
Going online was an event
I have been on the internet since 1993.
Yes, I was eleven years old.
My dad was pretty awesome, and we had OS/2 Warp. With it came access to an IBM.net internet connection. I remember the first time I dialled the local Edmonton number, listened to the modem scream its mysterious incantation, got online and then...
Watched a coffee pot in Cambridge, England to see whether it had coffee in it.
Yes, that was pretty much the absolute height of what was possible.
And it was glorious.
There was so much potential, and I could see it. I spent hours connected, trying to discover what was online and what any of it could do.
It was not instantaneous. It was not a sequence of dopamine hits engineered by hundreds of psychologists, sociologists and behavioural researchers. It was just technology and possibility, and I loved it.
This was before Facebook, Google and Amazon. It was even before GeoCities, for those who remember that, and before Windows 95. There were newsgroups, random websites, FTP servers and collections of information created by people who simply thought something was interesting enough to put online.
Anything new I discovered was exciting in a way I find difficult to explain now.
Ironically, it was only after getting onto the internet that I really discovered BBSes and how wonderful they could be. They had door games, downloadable files, message boards and strange little communities hidden in every corner.
Some were boring and pointless. Others were gloriously fascinating.
Finding something strange or interesting was not difficult. The network had not yet been polished into a collection of corporate platforms, advertisements, sponsored results and nearly identical websites chasing the same search terms.
Now, SEO specialists and corporate wonks have made it increasingly difficult to find anything that has not been polished into the shiniest possible turd.
Back then, going online also had a visible beginning and end.
You dialled a number. The modem made its noise. The telephone became unavailable. Someone in the house eventually yelled that they needed to use the phone. Then you disconnected.
The network was a place you visited. It was not an atmosphere surrounding everything you did.
Life still existed outside the computer
The ironic thing is that I was the nerdiest of nerds and the geekiest of geeks.
My bedroom was a monument to Star Trek. I made spreadsheets about the most random things imaginable because, somehow, that was fun to me. I could spend hours on the computer without ever questioning whether it was a sensible use of my time.
Yet, even then, I remember life existing outside the machine.
I could disconnect, not just technically, but fully.
Even through my early university years, I could go to a club without a cellphone and have a good time. I did not need to check my watch, respond to messages or take photographs for Instagram. I could simply go somewhere and exist.
For a while, I tried to continue living without a cellphone. Within a year, a friend literally gave me one of his old phones because my lack of a phone was causing him so much difficulty. He could not reach me, and apparently that had become unacceptable.
That was the beginning of the thing I now hate.
I know I contributed to it in my own small way during the early days of smartphones. I saw the possibilities. I wanted the internet everywhere. I wanted instant communication and access to everything.
We got it.
Now it feels almost impossible to disconnect because our lives require these devices. If you disappear for too long, you discover one of two things:
- Nobody notices, and you slowly end up with no social life.
- Everybody notices, and they become frustrated that you are being a Luddite.
Both possibilities suck.
This is true in nearly every part of modern life, and it becomes even harder when you run a technology business. I need to be connected. My clients need to reach me. My team needs answers. Social media is part of our marketing, and the bills do not get paid because I am having a spiritually rewarding afternoon playing Space Quest.
The problem is not merely that I lack discipline. The entire world has organized itself around the expectation that everybody is always reachable, always informed and always able to respond.
A person can choose to slow down, but the world does not slow down with him.
What do I really want?
Here is the ironic thing: I use LLMs and AI constantly now.
Just as I loved the old computers, I love the new technology and its ability to help me create more. I find this stuff genuinely exciting. I want to understand it, build with it and explore what it can do.
While writing this article, an LLM suggested that I conclude with this:
I do not really want the downloads to take twenty minutes again. I do not miss busy signals, corrupted disks or losing an afternoon because I forgot the right command. What I miss is that the computer once left part of my life alone. It did not know how to occupy every pause, answer every question or turn every moment of boredom into another opportunity for consumption. Sometimes it made me wait, and while I waited, I learned to play the guitar.
That is thoughtful, balanced and probably the sensible conclusion.
It is also an absolute lie.
I really do want the downloads to take twenty minutes again.
For everyone.
I miss the busy signals, and I want my phone thrown into the lake.
I want enough space to spend an afternoon searching for the right command without feeling the pressure of my competitors, clients and the entire world demanding that I use LLMs, Google or whatever else comes down the pipeline next. I would like to learn something slowly without wondering whether somebody else is using a faster tool to produce ten times as much and leave me behind.
I want off the Red Queen's treadmill our society has climbed onto.
Computers should be tools, not the sun around which the rest of our lives revolve. Their limitations once left room for other things. Now the absence of limits has allowed technology to spread into nearly every part of human life, even when its presence makes that life feel smaller.
Maybe I am crazy. Maybe I am overly nostalgic.
The best way I can explain it is with the slogan my dad's company used:
There is time to do it right.
There was a point in my life when it legitimately felt as though there was time to do things right.
Computers gave us another tool, like a hammer, wrench or saw. They helped us do the work. They had not yet become the work, the entertainment, the social gathering, the marketplace, the newspaper, the telephone and the place where nearly all of life was expected to happen.
That is what I miss, and that is ultimately what I want from RetroAB.
I do not expect to resurrect the 1990s, and I am not pretending the old technology was objectively better. Much of it was slow, expensive, fragile and incredibly frustrating. Still, there was something healthy about a machine that had an off switch and a network connection that made a horrible noise before it worked.
Maybe one day I will have enough wealth, or perhaps simply enough faith in God, to throw my phone into the lake and never feel it buzz in my pocket again.
Then I can go inside, load up Space Quest, disconnect completely from the rest of the world and just... enjoy computers without having to become one.