Computer necromancer vs Knitting

At the dinner today, I told my wife that I today had listened to a very interesting podcast about computer power supply units (PSU) with one of the world’s foremost experts on the topic. I might not be as painfully self-aware as James “Here’s an interesting fact about screwdrivers, for people who are interested in screwdrivers” May, but apparently enough to not be surprised by her bursting into laughter, with her mouth full of food. That kind of laughter you struggle to keep inside, because of the messy consequences. It is probably one of the nerdiest things she has encountered. Ever. Isn’t the internet lovely, that you can find such very high quality content on ANY topic within ANY micro-niche?

I have always had a thing for retro computers. I have found it hard to throw away old “garbage” and instead often stored it in a shed somewhere, should I ever encounter a desire to do a trip down memory lane. Or start a small museum. Jokes aside, it’s not that bad. You won’t see me on hoarder TV anytime soon. Anyways, it turns out that by now, some of the stuff I had in my garbage pile has become extremely valuable. People sell old graphics cards and motherboards on eBay for insane prices. I suspect the price hike started during the “plague” and the following semiconductor crisis. New computers became so expensive that perhaps a lot of people decided to get into retro PCs and build some old system instead which was dirt cheap. Well, not anymore. Certain components can cost several thousands of SEK, and it must be purely driven by nostalgia and the fact that the scarcity has reached a point that there just isn’t that many parts left. Most of it has ended up in a landfill, and as scarcity increase, prices skyrocket. We’re past that point now.

The price hike wasn’t really a big deal for me, because I could easily find most of the components I needed in my “garbage pile”. And last year I sprung into action and began building – or perhaps reviving - an old system of mine. During the holidays I got to work on an old Sony laptop that was dead. A couple of hours later I had managed to install an MSata drive in a 44 pin IDE converter and install an operating system on it. It was alive again! One thing about the retro community is that it is so alive and active. There are great amounts of information available nowadays and what I find most impressive is that within the Linux community, they still develop and support 32 bit operating systems based on Debian that are super lightweight. They can be run on a 300 MHz Cpu. I chose a distro called Q4OS which installed without a hiccup on my ancient machine. Security updates and everything, ready for 2023! The only problem is that there is a small difference between “run” and “run well” … Unfortunately, my old machine was so slow that I could hardly open a word processor and write a blog post on it. I guess it is more like a proof of concept. But the journey was a lot of fun, and I learned a couple of things along the way. However, with a time-correct operating system, this machine will probably fly now. But connecting to the internet might be a somewhat bad idea with the latest security update over a decade ago. Now my next project is to install Windows 98. I could do it blindfolded 20 years ago, but now I have forgot the procedure, which is a lot more unforgiving than today. And that makes it 10X more fun. It is a problem with a well-defined solution and instant feedback. What’s not to like about that? I did some practice on a virtual machine a while ago to brush off my mental dust.

I suppose this little hobby of mine, might sound like a fantastic waste of time and completely unusable for any real productivity work. Today’s systems are lightyears better. Much of the above is true, except for the waste of time part. Recently, I asked my wife about what is the difference between knitting and restoring retro PC’s. At first, she didn’t get my point. Restoring retro PCs is pointless, because you cannot do anything with them. A knitted sweater on the other hand, you can use, and one could therefore argue that the key difference is the usability aspect. I disagree with that. You cannot justify knitting on the usability aspect. Sure enough, you can use the sweater when you are done, but when you factor in the time spent creating it, the whole concept becomes ridiculous and stupid. You can buy a lot of sweaters instead for the analogous value of the time spent and do something much more productive instead. But that’s not the point here, not at all. With the knitted sweater, the usability is perhaps 1% and 99% is the journey. When I restore old PCs, I learn exactly how the computer works, for example by listening to long conversations about power supplies and how much current can be delivered on each rail. When I am done with the system, I will probably not use it much, but during the journey I was in a state of flow, completely immersed in the problem-solving. Why is it any different than solving a puzzle, playing sudoku, solving crosswords or anything else for that matter? That’s why restoring old PCs is quite similar to knitting.

The moral of the story is that you shouldn’t feel bad about spending some time in a flow state, even if the outcome isn’t usable. And another thing, a couple of weeks ago this strange hobby of mine allowed us to use an old acoustics program that had reached end-of-life status and been killed off by Microsoft, although the app is still quite usable to us. Now it is running in a virtual retro machine, forever frozen in time and disconnected from the internet. And me and my colleagues can happily keep using it, thanks to the computer necromancer that resides within me.