March 6, 2025
This one spiraled out of control, I can't lie. Don't read into it too much.
Sometimes if I'm bored, I like to hop on a random webring and browse until the randomizer gives me repeat websites.
The other day, I did this and found a little blog post that got me thinking. Read that first, it's real short.
Occasionally I am overcome with nostalgia for cool things, things that maybe I remember from being much younger and sometimes things that happened long before I was born. I would never go so far as to claim that I was born in the wrong generation---I am Gen Z, like it or not, and this is where I belong---but I wonder how different I might have been.
What if, all else being equal, I were attending college in 2011 instead of 2025, and I went to maker faires and robotics meetups with my fat ThinkPad running Windows 7 and an ancient version of Arduino for a robot using early assembled-from-kit Adafruit parts? Something about this concept gives me that butterflies feeling, not sadness but not happiness at the same time. That me, the one on the cutting edge of makerdom, would still be me, but it would be a me I will never know.
What if my memories of using Windows XP and Windows 7 in elementary school are just a dream? Why does it feel that way more often than not? Why do I tie so much significance to a computer operating system?
In maybe third grade, I was sent to a different classroom to do some kind of assignment while other kids in the class took a standardized test or something. (Important context: my school had mixed-grade classes, and I was on the younger end of my classes for a couple years). When I was in elementary school, my dad gave me a horrible 2008 unibody MacBook that was extraordinarily slow and which fueled a genuine computer addiction---not to Minecraft videos or games in general, but to installing ancient versions of software, learning Perl for some godforsaken reason (I remember nothing and I'm proud of it), and mostly just wasting time on the computer while also not being expressly unproductive. I got that computer from my dad because he knew that I am the way that I am about technology, so while I do regret the many times it got taken away because I wanted to install Netscape Navigator on Mac OS X Snow Leopard instead of playing outside, I don't regret how having a computer from that young shaped me.
In that school, I for some reason couldn't get on the enterprise wifi system they used. When I was sent away to the other classroom, I got put at a computer desk with one of the fat Dell desktops the school used to own, the ones that ran Windows XP, and the same model as the one in my classroom that I had set the background wallpaper to Autumn on:
from https://www.reddit.com/r/windowsxp/comments/s2i9ta/finally_windows_xps_autumn_wallpaper_in_full_res/
Well, I needed to download Strawberry Perl (the Mac OS version of Perl at the time, and maybe still now---I remember that much, unfortunately) instead of doing my schoolwork, so I unplugged the Ethernet cable from the fat desktop and plugged it into my MacBook. If memory serves, I then forgot to plug it back into the desktop and got myself in a bunch of trouble. This was another time the MacBook got taken away from me, at least for a little bit.
Oddly, I don't feel any particular nostalgia for Mac OS. I know my dad and I dual-booted the MacBook with Ubuntu (16.04, I think, was the first version I ever used) a couple years after I started using the computer. I suspect a couple screenshots of the Unity desktop environment would send the memories rushing back, but I'm not about to go looking for those.
Having Linux on that computer meant that I was fairly proficient in the command line by fourth or fifth grade. That's normal, right? I have a very distinct memory of coming home from trick-or-treating on some Halloween and using GNOME Terminal or maybe the Unity terminal to do something (god knows what, probably an update). I have an equally strong memory from a couple years ago of working on my Bad Apple port for the Macintosh Plus I got to borrow from a high school teacher on Halloween, and getting up to answer the door and hand out candy whenever the doorbell rang.
I never had that many friends in all of my public school career, for reasons that I still struggle to grasp. I sometimes wonder if the nostalgia I feel today for computers I once used is really an attempt to reconcile the feeling I know I had long, long ago, that I was always a bit out of place. I had a niche, sure, but it wasn't exactly right. For god's sake, I feel that it wasn't until college (several months ago) that I found friends who I truly mesh with, people who want to see me as much as I want to see them, people who are different from me and yet all too similar.
I did find people like me in high school. I don't want to sound like some kind of sob story yarn-weaver "oh woe is me the autismmmm nobody likes me" because that's not true and never has been.
I think that we all have a place in this world, and that we all have to find it for ourselves. The only reason I am who I am today is because of what I've done in the past. I often consider the possibility of going back in time and changing my actions, but I always come to the same conclusion: if I did that, sending the proverbial D-mail, I wouldn't be who I am today, and I'm proud of who I am. I think that nostalgia is the same way: maybe we feel nostalgic because we imagine things that could have happened in alternate realities, where we made different choices, so we lust for the times when we made those choices without considering that we may have had reasons, unconscious or conscious, at the time we decided.
We are only capable of changing the future. The present is only the means by which the future comes into being. Choose what is right for you, then choose again when it stops being right. The nostalgia you feel should make you recall how much you've lived, and remind you that you still have so much more life to live. If you feel nostalgia for something you've never experienced, go experience it. Maybe you're looking for something new while thinking you want something old. Maybe what's old is new again and what's new is just boring.
And with that, I want to reinforce one more thing. The only result of something can be education without invalidating that thing. Maybe those years in elementary school you spent learning Android development went nowhere. Maybe that time spent on a Game Gear flash cartridge because you dreamed of making it big with a low-cost flashcart ended up being nothing. Maybe that time trying to port Sonic to the HP 48 was a genuine waste of time. If you learned something, it was worth it. If you feel nostalgia for those times, then maybe you weren't done learning, maybe there's still creativity in your mind to be exhausted. Go forth, and create amazing things, and when you fail, remember why you failed, but remember too that failure does not equate to insignificance.