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Chris Hardie For Agri-View

Technology is a monster that fascinates some and terrifies others. It can quietly creep into our lives like a slithering creature when we least expect it – or come straight at us and hit us in the face like a sledgehammer.

Some of us run toward technology, obtaining the latest generation of smart phone or the newest gadgets. Others run away from technology, preferring actual customer service from a human being rather than an artificial-intelligence-operated bot. Those folks still have landline phones, and appliances with actual dials and buttons rather than digital display boards.

The onslaught of technology is certainly nonstop, but apparently there is a longing for those simpler technology days with retro video games and now retro computers.

According to the website T3.com, the iconic Commodore 64 from the 1980s is making a comeback. A new owner is bringing back the top-selling home computer of all time. It had 64 kilobytes – KB – of Random Access Memory or RAM, which was a lot for the time.

The new version will look like the old one, but will include more RAM. For comparison-sake, the iPhone 16 has 8 Gigabits of RAM, which is 1 million KB. People may want to feel warm and fuzzy about retro, but trying to run some current programs on an old Commodore would be like trying to light the Superdome with a single candle.

The wonders of technology first hit home with me in the early 1970s when two things occurred in our family home. The first was the purchase of a color television set. Until then, my family had a black and white 13-inch TV purchased at Montgomery Wards. It was placed on a small bookcase in our family room and had a plastic dark filter over the top of the screen. The purpose of that was unknown to me – maybe for protection. That screen was awfully tiny when you were sitting in a bean-bag chair 10 feet away. We would watch the two channels that could be brought into reception – ghosts and fuzz were the norm – from the rabbit-ear antennas that were wrapped with tin foil. The best reception was when someone stood next to the TV and held the antenna.

Enter the world of color. My folks didn’t splurge for the 21-plus-inch console TV screen that was contained in a wooden chunk of furniture that weighed 300 pounds. Those were far too expensive. But they did purchase a 19-inch Zenith.

I’ll never forget the first time I saw “Gunsmoke” in color, with Matt Dillon dressed in his signature mauve-colored shirt and his tan vest and cowboy hat silhouetted against a blue sky. Soon Dad invested in a rooftop antenna and the world of UHF channels with shows like “Happy Days” and “Monday Night Football” entered my life.

The second technological wonder was about 1975 when Dad purchased a Texas Instruments scientific calculator. The ability of the calculator to emulate a slide rule fascinated my engineer father. My brother and I were fascinated by what naughty words we could create by punching in numbers on the red LED screen that turned into letters when you held it upside-down.

My teenage-technology was focused on stereo systems, but I learned about the nascent computer industry in high school when I wrote code on a Radio Shack Tandy computer with a cassette-tape memory.

It was cool.

Back in 1982.

I’m not going to rush out and buy a new computer because it looks like an old computer. I have enough obsolete ink-jet printers and a few old computers to help keep me warm and fuzzy if I have a hankering for the old days.

Heck, I could fire up my Windows 95 computer, load Netscape and watch it take forever to load – just like the old days when it worked with my 14.4 bit modem.

I wonder if it will work better if I wrap it in tin foil.

This is an original article written for Agri-View, a Lee Enterprises agricultural publication based in Madison, Wisconsin. Visit AgriView.com for more information.