Retro-soul
The steady march of technology meets our sense of wonder.
My earliest memory of “advanced technology” entering my life is a bright yellow calculator with big black buttons—a bright-glowing screen, each number a series of equally sized green dashes magically illuminated with the simple press of a button! I remember marveling at its ability to instantaneously make complex calculations and how if you kept pressing the equal sign button, it would square the number on the screen. I’d start with 2-4-8-64-4096-1677216…on up until the screen displayed a series of dashes, the flashing letter E.
At around this same time, we acquired our first—the first ever—video game console: a large box with a large knob on each side, a single cable with coaxial output and input at the end. You had to fiddle with this a lot, tuning to the right station (I seem to remember it had to be one that received no regular TV signal), so all you’d see was a screenful of gray and white flickering light. Then, once the appropriate wiring and television adjustments had been conjured, there would appear the two white rectangular pixels of “paddles” and the square pixels of the Pong “ball.” We’d play for hours, obsessed with trying to get “spin” on the ball with a proper, deft-quick twist of the wrist.
Then came the handheld “football games”—no more than a tiny screen of red flecks of light, raised blue, red arrows, up, down, left right, kick, punt…. Your “running back” was the flashing red light, and you’d press the big arrows to attempt to steer him through all the other lights. If another light collided with it, you were “tackled.” My brother Brad and I would take turns, finding ways to play against each other, since the early versions of the game were only human versus machine.
In hindsight, these primitive early technological devices and games are laughable, and a recent Amy Sedaris Instagram post—a commercial for a handheld football game much like the one described above—stirred up these memories, Sedaris’s penchant for all things kitschy reminding me just how strange it was to be so impressed and even obsessed with such silly things.
Not too long after or concurrent with these small technological wonders coming into my life, the school librarian acquired a “personal computer,” a large, greyish metal box, on which sat a small monitor about the size of a mid-sized tube television. He fed it two, 5 1/4 inch floppy disks each into its own drive—one the operating system, the other the software—and we watched as it hummed and sputtered, and finally a “C:” appeared on screen, consisting of those same rectangular lights as those on my calculator. It was now up to the user to enter the correct DOS command to awaken whatever software lay dormant in disk drive 2, stirring the executable file there into action. I recently came across a printout from that machine. It is a series of Xs and Os made on a dot matrix printer, that when turned sideways render a remarkably accurate caricature of my old friend, Mitch, whose head was quite round and thus easy to emulate in this way.
In college, my buddy Lee discovered the one computer in the deep recesses of the science building (if I remember correctly), students could use if it were free. I found a way to write papers on it, though my profs weren’t fond of the faint dot matrix printouts or the thin grey continuous-feed paper I had to cut into pages by hand. Lee also discovered that we could play one strange and to us utterly remarkable game on it, “Colossal Cave Adventure.” [You can still play it HERE]...It began with these words appearing on the screen: “You are standing at the end of a road before a small brick building. Around you is a forest. A small stream flows out of the building and down a gully.” After writing a series of commands and being told “I don’t know that word,” I finally just typed “building” and on the screen appeared: “You are inside a building, a well house for a large spring. There are some keys on the ground There is a shiny brass lamp nearby. There is food here. There is a bottle of water here.” Eventually, you find yourself engaged in innumerable discoveries, conflicts, friendships, betrayals…fighting angry dwarfs, dragons, wizards, acquiring all manner of magical devices…..all without a single graphical image. Lee and I spent far too much time plumbing the depths of the Colossal Cave, even mapping out on paper a particularly infuriating maze where you had to get the precise “right,” “left,” “straight” combo or end up back in the same place.
Throughout my late high school and college years, on into graduate school and early teaching positions, technology became an ever more constant presence (and often distraction) in my life (in all of our lives), with AI just the latest shiny new thing, in many ways no more astounding to me than that first plastic calculator.
Tech’s deep fake video and CGI abilities can make those early Star Wars effects (documented so well HERE), seem like mere cave art. Just like Dick Tracy’s famous video watch, or those early Star Treks, I can magically see and talk with my daughter in high definition, she in her high-rise apartment in Chicago, me sitting in my cabin at the edge of the millions of acres of Adirondack wilderness in upstate New York.…
And yet, my students were amazed when I brought my beloved Olympia manual typewriter in for them to play with a few years ago, fighting to have a turn at pressing hard on those mechanical keys in exactly the same way I remember students hovering around our librarian, Mr. Davenport, vying for a turn to play on that unfamiliar, wondrous thing—the personal computer.
And yet, vinyl record sales are at a 20 year high and climbing, so many fascinated with listening to just one artist at a time again, to hearing songs appear in the order the artist intended them, needing to tend to keeping grooves clean, to flip the thing after just a few songs have played or listen to the skipping staticky growl when the needle has come to the end of the grooves. Vinyl, in fact, is now made much better than it used to be, thicker, in an array of colors even, and artists are putting fewer songs on a side to help retain all of the album’s analog richness of sound.
And yet, my oldest son recently sought out and found—then flew to Virginia to purchase and retrieve—a pristine, 1974 bright orange Volvo 142—pre-power steering, 4-speed, stick on the floor. It is slow and nearly impossible to parallel park unless you have Popeye-sized forearms, a rattling sputtering tank of a vehicle as unlike most cars on the road these days as you can imagine. When he roars in with its rumbling exhaust and one fluid or another potentially leaking from its small, chortling four-cylinder engine…many admire and ogle at it, drawn to it like Kubrick’s apes to a monolith. And it is a thing of beauty.
As technology whirrs on ever faster forward, things retro seem to have become new again. When seen close up, held, interacted with, investigated—like my old, Olympia with its multitude of springs and levers and mechanical complexities—we are astounded again at the human capacity to create. Where quartz watches very nearly ended the era of the mechanical watch complications in the 70s and 80s, mechanical watches are once again held in the highest esteem. We again marvel that somehow their meticulously designed gears and springs and myriad of intricately machined gizmos allow them to accurately (enough) parse the complex, minute delineations of time. The more complicated complications will even chart the dates and days of the week, the phases of the moon…. Even though the best of the best of mechanical watches, say a seven-figure Patek Phillipe, is no match in terms of the pure accuracy of the cheapest dime-store quartz watch, we seem to be saying that all the precision and flawlessness in terms of measuring time is less impressive than the more tangible, analog intricacies of a well-made mechanical timepiece.
When my Volvo-owning son (who is also obsessed with mechanical watches) first drove in my electric car, he claimed, “it has no soul.” While I can clearly see the need for electric cars playing a significant role in helping save our dying planet (and I have tried to play my part, even for years driving old Mercedes and VWs I ran on straight biodiesel), I also get what he was saying.
I once marveled at that small, yellow, plastic, seemingly magical thing with its glowing green numbers, the whirring metal grey boxes with their own, larger screens and far greater capabilities…and I still marvel at the things my “smart” phone can do, but I’m heartened that so many now are turning back to older, pre-digital, analog, soulful, “retro” human inventions even as the steady march of human invention feels increasingly colder, less human, without soul.
If you’ve been enjoying my writing, please consider doing any/all of the following:
Help me grow my audience by Sharing this post or my main site with a few people you think might enjoy it as well.
Upgrade your subscription to paid. For only $.14/day, you can help me continue to devote the many hours I do each week to writing, editing and promoting this page.
JourneyCasts is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.
You can also help a lot by making a one-time contribution at any time by “buying me a coffee” (or two). And certainly a good amount of real coffee has gone into the making of JourneyCasts.
As always, I encourage you to leave a comment.
Be sure to check out my podcast, “Hemingway, Word for Word.”
I never had Pong but we did have a ZX Spectrum that I used to code from a magazine we bought at the newsagent. Basic stuff but marvellous at the time. I read somewhere on Substack (maybe Digital Native) that Gen-Z are incredibly nostalgic for an analogue time they’ve never known, so it makes sense that vinyl is making a comeback and ‘real’ cars. Your son’s Volvo is indeed a thing of beauty. It gives me some degree of hope for humanity that we crave for the simple and beautiful still.
Loved this one, Arnie.