Will computers inspire nostalgia?

Is it possible to be nostalgic about a computer?

Will the generation that first encountered them in the workplace or at home feel anything like the sentiment you’ll encounter at the annual Tri-State Gas Engine and Tractor Show?

If you spend any time at the show — and I’ve spent hundreds of hours over the years — you quickly recognize that the folks who collect and restore old engines and tractors do so because those machines are touchstones that remind them of an earlier era.

Back before rural electrification, back when R, E, M, and C were just random letters in the alphabet, small gasoline engines were vital to rural life. They powered pumps. They powered generators. They even powered washing machines.

When the lights were turned on in the country, it wasn’t long before those engines were obsolete. Decades later they were brought back to life by a generation that recognized their importance and valued them for the role they played in American life.

Will anything comparable happen with computers?

I’m skeptical.

I still remember the first full page ad I ever saw for a home computer — an Apple, of course — on the back of a youth-oriented magazine. It immediately struck me as both cool and ridiculous. It was exciting from a technological standpoint. But who in the world would ever have any use for a computer at home? Right? What nonsense.

Of course, I have written those words on — by my best estimate — the fifth (or maybe sixth) home computer we have owned. And that doesn’t count laptops, smart phones or e-readers.

Like many American families, our first was a Tandy, part of the RadioShack line of consumer electronics. And it was truly fun.

Sure, it was a little slow and it didn’t do much. But we loved it.

There was a “space exploration” game that mostly involved moving the cursor around on the screen to collect “minerals” and other goodies. 

And there was a game called “Typing Tutor,” which could dramatically increase your typing skill by dropping letters from the top of the screen like bombs. Type the letter and the bomb disappeared. Be too slow and part of the “city” at the bottom of the screen would be destroyed.

Of course, that came after computers had arrived at work.

The newspaper’s first plunge into the Jetson-like world of floppy discs and C-prompts came in the late 1970s. The late, great Dick Arnold and I drove out to St. Louis for a newspaper trade show to try to get a handle on this new technology.

To save money, we didn’t stay in Saint Louis but in a gritty, rundown motel in Granite City, Illinois, on the east side of the river. But we made it to the trade show.

Once there, Dick — who had been a linotype operator and had witnessed the demise of the linotype — was even more out of his depth than I was.

At the first booth, a salesman was pitching his wares and bragged that his company’s terminals — not really computers but simply terminals connected to what was then called a “front-end system” — had 16K of memory.

Today, in a world of gigabytes of memory, that seems laughable.

But at the time, it was another language.

Dick’s comment was that he knew Cincinnati’s Hudepohl beer advertised itself as “14K,” but he had no idea what the guy was talking about.

By the late 1980s, we were on our second or third version of computers at the office. But it was still primitive by today’s standards.

In 1987, when George Reitenour made his first run in the Great American Race in his 1936 Studebaker dubbed “Spirit of Jay County,” I tagged along to cover the coast to coast road rally for vintage vehicles.

To do that, I took along a Tandy TRS-80. (Or it might have been a TRS-100 or 200, but my memory is fuzzy on that point.)

At the end of each day, having interviewed folks, gathered results and shot tons of photos, I’d write my story on this tiny, volatile, pre-laptop laptop. Then I would download my work back to Indiana via telephone at the breathtakingly low speed of 38 baud (about 60 words a minute). To do that, I would have to connect the Tandy to a pair of “acoustic couplers,” a concoction of foam rubber and wires that fit over the handset of a telephone. Sometimes it worked. Sometimes it didn’t. Sometimes it was simply easier to dictate my story over the phone.

So, the question remains, will today’s engine and tractor shows be accompanied at some time by shows of old Tandys and Apple Classics with seminars on what the heck to do when you encounter a C-prompt on a PC?

I’m skeptical. But then again, there are folks who believed the engine and tractor show would never get off the ground, so who knows?