From the basement to the festival: The enduring allure of vintage computers
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27 Feb 2025 02:49:55 am.
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</DIVicture>The Commodore PET 2001 was the world’s first personal computer, debuting at CES 1977. Starting at $795 (over $4,000 today), it was powered by a MOS 6502 microprocessor and could be configured with up to 32KB of RAM.
When Levi Maaia’s mother, a school teacher, brought home theApple IIGSin the late ‘80s, to say it made a lasting impact is an understatement.
He and his family used the computer far beyond its recommended lifespan, even afterApplestopped making it. But that didn’t stop Maaia from using the IIGS.
“We upgraded it, added hard drives — just tried to do what we could to hold on to it a little bit longer,” Maaia says.
However, by 1994, technology had advanced too far to continue using the PC. The family packed up the IIGS and put it in the basement, where it stayed for 30 years — until Maaia visited his parents after the pandemic.
“My mom said, ‘Do you want that Apple IIGS downstairs? What are you going to do with it?’ And I said, ‘No, no, Idefinitelywant it. Idefinitelywant it.”
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VCF exhibitor Levia Maaia brought the Apple IIGS from his childhood to the show. At the time (1986), this PC featured the best graphics and sound of the entire Apple II family. However, review publications had mixed opinions about it. Compute! considered the IIGS a serious competitor to the Commodore Amiga and the Atari ST, while BYTE thought its aging architecture would only encourage software developers to improve programs initially written for the Apple II.
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Perhaps by some miracle of the silicon gods, the PC made the trip back to Maaia’s home on the West Coast from his family’s home on the East Coast in one piece. From that moment of nostalgia, his fascination with vintage PCs was reborn.
“I call my exhibit at the show Levi’s Retro Bridge because it's sort of a bridge between the past and the present. What most interests me about these computers is that people are still interested in them 35, 40 years later.”
The “show” is theSoCal Vintage Computer Festival, held this month in Orange, California, about two miles from Angel Stadium, where the Los Angeles Angels play baseball.
If you didn’t know better, you might have thought the festival was a massive garage sale held in a hotel conference center. Grade school-aged kids were intensely focused on playing 90s-era educational PC games — the same ones I played when I was their age.
The beige walls couldn’t contain the excited chatter of hundreds of attendees, who bent over to peer at an electronic relic or played with a custom-made game emulator.
Cables and adapters snaked their way across neatly aligned cloth-covered folding tables, bulbous CRT TVs were stacked on top of one another like bricks, and ‘70s- and '80s-era computers I had never heard of were lined up on neatly arranged tables.
What emerged during conversations with Maaia and other exhibitors at the two-year-old festival was a sense of calm amid the fast-moving technology developments of right now.
“My mom said, ‘Do you want that Apple IIGS downstairs? What are you going to do with it?’ And I said, ‘No, no, I definitely want it. I definitely want it.”
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Jason Moore exhibited his “Franken” Amiga 500 at VCF, using components acquired from several countries. The PC uses a Raspberry Pi and a PiStorm CPU accelerator to emulate the original Motorola 68000 CPU but transmits data directly through the other hardware components. (The transparent case and LEDs are obviously not original.) The Amiga 500’s multitasking graphics capabilities made it the most popular Amiga home computer in 1987 — especially among gamers.
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Many of the vintage PCs I sawat the show were not in working condition when their owners first acquired them.
Jason Moore, who has been collecting old PCs for 25 years, put it to me this way: “To really love this hobby, you have to kind of get into repair,” said Moore. “A lot of the components are failing. The chips are failing. I had a lot of systems that were not functioning.”
Moore, who spends his days as department chair, and professor of computational biomedicine at Cedars-Sinai, had to teach himself how to repair the old PCs and electronics he found himself amassing.
"People thought it was junk at that point."
He bought an oscilloscope to diagnose issues and learned how to solder to bring those machines back to life. His love of computers began in the seventh grade when his parents bought him his first computer — an Atari 400. “I absolutely loved it,” Moore tells us. It was the catalyst for what became his lifelong love for the Atari.
Back then, systems and software from the late 20th century were inexpensive at thrift stores and flea markets, and Moore’s new hobby had a low barrier to entry. “People thought it was junk at that point,” he says. Since 2000, his collection has grown to include Amiga, Commodore, Apple, Radio Shack TRS-80s, and Texas Instruments machines.
It’s people like Moorewho do this kind of work for the love of it that help museum curators like Anna Atkeson do their job.
As the executive director of thePaul Gray Personal Computing Museumat Claremont Graduate University in California, Atkeson was at VCF exhibiting part of the museum’s collection and getting the word out about its mission of getting the public to see and contemplate how computers affect our lives.
Atkeson originally wanted to pursue a career creating art for video games but was interested in vintage computers from a vintage games perspective. Midway through college, she switched her focus to museum studies, intending to work in art or history museums. Ultimately, she found herself working at the Paul Gray PCM.
I'm not super well-versed in computer history right now, but this is kind of awesome.
“I was like, okay, you know what? I'm not super well-versed in computer history right now, but this is kind of awesome. So I'm gonna do it,” said Atkeson.
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Anna Atkenson (right), executive director of the Paul Gray Personal Computing Museum, with the museum’s intern, Sophie Lin (left), at their exhibit booth. The museum’s founder, Paul Gray, taught at Claremont Graduate University from 1983 to 2001, where he established the Center for Information Systems and Technology. Gray was fascinated with how personal computing impacted people’s lives. After Gray retired, he donated his collection of PCs, which he had amassed during his tenure at the university, to the museum.
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At 30 years old, she is not only super well-versed in vintage computer history but also more well-versed than I am as a 37-year-old tech journalist whose first PC was a ‘90s IBM PS ValuePoint.
Atkeson’s first computer was a laptop, and she admitted that before starting her job at the museum, she only intellectually understood that there was a time when people did not take their computers everywhere with them. But when she saw one of the first portable computers ever made (a 26-pound, suitcase-shaped PC) for the first time, the historical significance of her laptop and how revolutionary it was for society hit home.
Compared to vintage computers, today’s modern PCs are much more like appliances. You don’t have to know how they work to use them. This is a stark contrast to the computers of decades ago, illustrated so clearly by the machines on display at the festival
“You can control, with programming, exactly what the hardware is doing,” says Moore about computers from 40 years ago. “Today, when you program in Python or any high-level programming language, there are several layers of abstraction between the code that you write and what the hardware is actually doing.”
“I can open up an Atari, point and say, ‘this does this, and this does this, and here's how it works, here's how it all works together.’ That's harder to do with modern computers because so much of that is integrated into a single chip,” says Moore.
Maaia also tells me about a realization he’s made: Using older technology shows that the people who designed vintage software understood theentiresystem.
Atkeson, the teacher and museum director, noticed this difference, too. In her digital art class, the students who grew up with Chromebooks and modern MacBooks didn’t fully understand the concept of a file tree because they relied on the search function.
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“Knowing how the machines we use work is important but at the same time, user-friendliness is important,” says Atkeson. “The graphics user interface was revolutionary because it made computing accessible to so many people. You didn't have to learn to have to learn to interact through a command line.”
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Out of her entire IBM and ThinkPad collection, VCF Exhibitor Katarina Melki’s favorite is the Palm Top PC 110. Released exclusively in Japan in 1995, the cheapest model was configured with an Intel 486SX CPU, 4MB of flash memory instead of a hard disk drive, and a stylus-compatible LCD display. It also came preinstalled with the Japanese version of PC DOS 7.0. While the PC 110 was generally well-received, it was criticized for its too-small keyboard.
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Now,AIis making it even easier to interact with computers — but it's also making it easier to take modern computing technology for granted.
While there may be no immediate answers about our technological future at the Vintage Computer Festival, there was an abundance of opportunity to consider how we can shape it — by learning about how we got here in the first place.
Events like VCF and people like Moore, Maaia, and Atkeson show that tech literacy comes in many forms and can be understood by anyone regardless of background or focus of study. That kind of interdisciplinary use — and how we use it — is what will shape our future.
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