The Retro Room
Some people enjoy vacations — going to exotic locations, seeing and doing things unavailable to them during their everyday lives. Some may dedicate a space in their home to create their perfect leisure environment, complete with state-of-the-art high tech equipment as in the so-called “man cave”. I have never cared for much travel and I’ve always been, despite my background, a relatively late adopter of technology. But our new basement is partitioned, giving us an embarrassment of available “rooms” to dedicate to any purpose. I plan to make one of these a place for vacations in time, a temporary refuge from the spoiling effects of Giga-this and HD-that.
My “retro room” will be a Twenty-One club — only media and technology old enough to drink will be admitted. Vinyl records, cassettes, early CD’s, VHS tapes; all of them no more recent than 1988. Perhaps I’ll accept the fake I.D. of a DVD player, if it bribes me with the type of classic TV shows and movies I watched on rainy, snowy weekends. The bookshelves will be overstuffed with fragrant paperbacks, some of them older than I am, in keeping with my lifelong habit of used books. I’ll decorate the walls with old album covers and the lobby cards of 1950’s B-movies — black lagoon creatures and 50-foot women — all the things neglected in this era of emo-folk-rock and all-night infomercial marathons.
Not that I will forget computer technology! The centerpiece of my collection will be my Commodore 128-D, a variation on the same computer I used at the time. With RAM and floppy disc storage measured in kilobytes, it won’t play DVD’s or MP3’s but neither will it present banner ads or smuggle spyware. For my own amusement I may process words, base a little data and spread a few sheets as I did in the late eighties, not feeling at all deprived that I’m not allocating 100+ megabytes of memory to resident Internet security suites.
All of this must sound like an excess of nostalgia, even sentimentality. You’re damn right. Others are welcome to their Aspen or Paris, their Blu-ray and 7.1 surround sound. For me, my curmudgeonly Retro Room will be my vacation and my “man cave”, a little bit happy and a little bit sad. And what is a curmudgeon, if not a bitter Romantic?
NOTE: See the Retro Room in progress at this later post.
This is hilarious. But to really round things out, you’ll need some 8-tracks. I nominate John Denver’s Greatest Hits. One of my parents’ favourites for road trips.
Janet Ursel
August 30, 2009 at 5:47 pm
Hi Janet,
I think John Denver’s Greatest was everyone’s parent’s favorite! I’ve always been more of a Neil Diamond guy — he’s like Elvis, Sinatra and Bob Dylan pureed in a blender.
But I digress. I had quite an 8-track collection alongside my vinyl in the late seventies, but curmudgeon or not bad technology is still bad technology in any millenium.
Edward Trumbo
August 30, 2009 at 8:27 pm
LOL!
I am proud to say I never owned an 8-track machine or cassette.
) I resisted assimilation.
Janet Ursel
August 30, 2009 at 8:48 pm
I would have gone straight from LP to CD myself, but I never found a vinyl-playing boombox that didn’t skip when we carried it down city sidewalks.
Edward Trumbo
August 30, 2009 at 9:28 pm
That’s a great idea! I don’t think I could deal with the televisions from the 80’s though. And the Commodore? Ugh, that was my first computer…that could be kinda fun. You can learn some obsolete programming skills.
Yo Prinzel
August 30, 2009 at 10:27 pm
Hi Yo,
Thanks to the digital transition, I can’t quite replicate the exact environment I had in 1987 — a Magnavox TV tuner connected to a Commodore 1702’s composite video input, while my Commodore 128 fed 80-column video to an Amdek amber monochrome screen. These days, my second TV is still a Commodore monitor connected to an analog cable feed through a VCR…
Oh crap, I’ve just buried the needle on my own Nerd-o-meter.
Edward Trumbo
August 30, 2009 at 10:46 pm
Did the Commodore’s take the 5″ floppies? I think they did. We still have some of those lying around here. Funny, I didn’t see an Atari on your list…
Yo Prinzel
August 31, 2009 at 12:39 pm
Atari?
Burn the witch!!!
Yes, the Commodore 8-bit computers used 5.25″ floppies. The drive matched to the 64 was the 1541, and it took single-sided double-density floppies with a capacity of 170k. Remember cutting notches in the opposite side of the jacket to use the reverse side of the disk?
Saved a little money that way.
When the 128 came out, they released the 1571 floppy drive that could use both sides natively and read a bunch of other disk formats besides. I remember they sold a high-density floppy drive that could store a whole megabyte at once, but only mad dogs and BBS SysOps paid the premium price for those.
Even later than that Commodore finally came out with a 3.5″ 800k floppy drive, useful mostly as a data drive.
Edward Trumbo
August 31, 2009 at 1:56 pm
Your retro room sounds like fun! You need a soda fountain to go with it.
Jewel/Pink Ink
September 2, 2009 at 10:16 am
Hi Jewel,
Capital idea! I’ll look into it.
Edward Trumbo
September 2, 2009 at 11:12 am