Why Are We Fascinated With Retro Tech?

Why Are We Fascinated With Retro Tech?

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Today I'm answering the question, of why retro  tech devices make us feel so alive? And what   this truly reveals about our relationship  with the modern phones we carry? I want to   explore with you some of the hidden beauty  contained in older devices. Because maybe   there's something we've lost. And maybe it was  deeper and more important than we ever realized. When I look at this phone, I see something  beautiful. By most standards, it's a rather   plain utilitarian design. Perhaps even slightly  militaristic. This is the Ericsson GH688,   released in 1996. So why do I love this phone  so much? Well, it was my first ever GSM phone.   And I really like its minimalistic design. I love  how it feels in the hand. It's solid and it has  

some real weight to it. In part because it's built  with a solid metal midframe. Which you can see as   a band that goes all around the outside edges. At  the time most phones tended to be more plasticky.   Ericason also included other features, like a  built-in clock and alarms functions even Nokia   lacked back then. This was among the best phones  available before Nokia's rise in the late '90s.  

So why do I love going back and exploring these  older devices? I like seeing what these things   were capable of, feeling their tactile interfaces,  seeing close up how they operated. But more than   that, I enjoy uncovering hidden aspects, finding  the unexpected, test modes, firmware hacks and   software modding. And capabilities they were  never expected to reach. I love pushing them   beyond their original designs. Let's take a look  at another piece of retro tech, the Palm IIIc  

released in 2000. This is the first ever model  of Palm to come with a colour display. It's also   the first Palm model to come in an all black  design. This PDA was built for function. Like   the Ericsson phone, I appreciate its understated  look. This was given to me by a friend. It came  

with no charger and no stylus, just the main  unit. So I have no idea if it actually works.   I'm keen to get this powering on, because I've  heard some good things in the comments about the   LCD on this model. I have to see this with my own  eyes. OK, let's take this apart and have a look. From the label on the back it looks like this was  used in a business environment. There's just four  

Phillips head screws holding this together. Making  taking this apart no problem. Almost like it was   built to be repairable. Carefully unclipping  the casing, Uh this is a little bit tricky. There we go! And there's the  insides. The first thing to  

notice is that big warning high voltage sticker.   The high voltage is for powering the cold cathode  fluorescent tube used for backlighting the LCD. Under the sticker is a large coil and a connector  for the high voltage. You really don't want to be   touching any of this when the backlight is  operating. It could really give you quite a   nasty shock. These tube-based backlights were more  common in the 1990s on devices with color LCDs.   Such as portable TVs and portable game consoles.  There was even one phone that had a fluorescent  

tube backlight, the Nokia 9210. The only phone to  have ever used one. Which I explored in a previous   video. The main board has a few chips on it. And  I can't seem to see the main CPU though. So this   must be a double-sided board with more chips on  the other side. I'm going to avoid taking this   apart further, because my main aim here is to  get this working and tested. I was however able  

to find an image online of the other side of the  main board. There we can see the Dragon Ball CPU,   and a RAM chip, and a flash chip. I want to  get that battery out and check its condition. It looks like it's a fairly standard lithium ion  battery. This probably hasn't seen any charge in  

it for at least 20 years. I did a quick test  and it seems to be completely open circuit,   making this unreoverable. So to fix this I'm going  to remove the battery circuit from the top of the   battery and replace just the dead cell. I'm using  this Creative branded battery that I rescued from  

a broken MP3 player a few months ago. This  is much smaller than the original lithium   ion that came in the Palm. So I'm not  expecting the battery life to be great   with this. But it should be more than enough  for testing. OK, time to plug the battery in  

and see what we get. OK there we go. The Palm  is starting up and the backlight looks good.   I'm being very careful not to touch anything while  the back is off to avoid a shock. The touchcreen   is working and everything looks good. OK let's get  this reassembled so I can do some proper checking.   Even someone with the most minimal technical  skills can replace this battery. I would call   this a user replaceable battery and in general a  user repairable friendly design. Back together and  

only a few pieces of the brittle plastic housing  have come off. Bits of one of the screw thread   inserts and what looks like one of the clips.  Overall this has been a good result. Now I want   to load some apps onto here. But there's no card  slot for easy program install. And I didn't get   a dock with this. But there's an easier way to  transfer software onto this Palm. And that's by  

sending apps from another Palm using the infrared  port. To do this I'll be using my Palm m515 which   does have an SD card slot. I just need to point  these two Palms at each other to align their   infrared ports. Now simply activate the beam  function and select the apps to be transferred   over. Transfer speed over infrared is kind of  slow. I'm getting maybe 10 kilobytes per second.   But most of the larger apps are small enough to  only take about 10 to 20 seconds to transfer.   The first app I'm transferring over is of course  one of my favorite coulor Palm games Bejeweled.

And here is Bejeweled. The aim is to swap gems  around to get three in a row either horizontally   or vertically. And I must say this looks awesome  on this LCD. Especially when compared to the m515,   which is a later model by 2 years. This is because  the m515 has a transflective LCD, it can be used   with either the backlight on or off. But since  the Palm IIIc has a backlight only display,   the colours are much more vibrant, and there's  much more contrast in the image. Though at only   160x 160 pixels, this LCD is quite pixelated.  Especially when looking up close. But for all  

the early Palm software, it's perfect. This is  now my favorite Palm device to play original   Bejeweled on. I also really like the harsh square  wave clicks that the gems make as they move. This really adds to the experience.   This Palm is running 8 bit colour, for a maximum  of only 256 possible colours. So not full color,   but still I really like the look of this display.  The CPU is clocked at 20 MHz, which is fine for   basic PDA functions. But for some of the games  and demos that I want to try, I want to run this  

CPU a bit faster. I'm using the FastCPU program  to overclock. With this I'm able to get the CPU   speed up to 32 MegaHertz. But there seems to be a  lot of graphical glitches running at this speed.   So with a bit of testing I'm able to get a stable  27 MHz overclock. This is still a respectable 35%   speed increase and certainly helps with some  of the games I'm running such as Zap 2000.

I've featured this game many times  before in Palm videos and this   is easily one of the best Palm games  available. It looks great on this LCD. When compared to all of the grayscale palm  models that were available at the time,   this would have really turned some heads.  And of course I had to try the game Master   Thief - Phoenix Rising. This is a Doomlike  3D first person shooter. I've tried this   game before on grayscale Palms. This is  my first time seeing it in colour though,  

and even at only 27 MHz the frame  rate is really quite impressive. Overall this is a really nice device. And like the  Ericsson phone from earlier, this Palm also has a   somewhat utilitarian feel to it. I've chosen  the devices in this video because they share   some characteristics with our more modern phones.  This Palm with its app icons and its touchscreen   is highly reminiscent of how our modern phones  turned out. But also notice the aesthetics of  

an almost black rectangle design. This device  was hinting at the monolithic future to come. The archetype of the monolith as a piece  of advanced technology had been present in   our collective psyche since the 1969 film  2001: A Space Odyssey. The monolith stood   tall in my subconscious when growing up.  Even though I had not yet been born when   the original film came out. I didn't exactly  understand what it was, but I knew about it.  

I've since seen the film and I still  don't exactly understand what it is,   or what it represents. One theory is that it's  some sort of consciousness expanding technology. I think it's no accident that one of  the very first advertisements that   Apple made for the first iPhone, compared  it directly to the monolith. By using the   scene from the 1969 film where the monolith  is first being revealed in the year 2001.   "It seems to have some sort of a touchscreen  interface." "Is it an iPod Captain?" "No,  

it's something much much more and it's going to  change everything." Licensing these images could   not have been cheap for Apple. I believe there  is something highly significant happening here.   Jony Ive, one of the main designers of the  iPhone, in a later interview describes his   desire to design a phone that looks like a single  sheet of glass. He was obviously describing the   monolith archetype deep in his subconscious.  This idea came slightly closer in 2010 with   the release of the iPhone 4. With its front  and back matching glass and its flatter sides,   iPhones were edging ever closer to that ultimate  monolithic design. But with Apple's obsession with  

curves and rounded design, they couldn't quite  get there. I think the first phone to come truly   close to the ultimate monolithic design is the  Sony Xperia Z. First announced in January 2013. Here is my original Xperia Z. I really love  this phone and its design choices. And it's   not just because I'm a Sony fanboy. Its corners  are so sharp and square. There is glass on the   back and front of course. But even the sides,  top and bottom have glass sections all around  

them. This is the ultimate in utilitarian design  right here. This was the first true monolithic   phone. My personal monolith had finally arrived.  Only punctuated by this large round silver power   button on the side. This button really stands  out and attracts attention to itself. A single  

last remnant of our tactile past. They were  giving us one last tactile button to push.   And I certainly felt that pressing this  was like activating our monolithic future.   This was all happening 12 years ago. Which for  me now classifies the Xperia Z as a piece of   retro technology. Which seems like an odd thing  to say for something that's new enough to have  

been reviewed on MKBHD. "But you really have to  pay attention to the goods and the bads, and pick   what you like about it and what you don't like  about it." Something I didn't know at the time I   was using this as my main phone is that there's  a hidden secret inbuilt FM radio transmitter.   Sony did include an FM radio receiver, but a  transmitter? Of course I now have to try this out.   To get this working a rooted Xperia Z is required.  Fortunately my Xperia Z is not just rooted,   but I had unlocked the bootloader and I installed  a custom ROM called Meow ROM. Which is based on  

Android 4.4. It's also still running my original  custom launcher with all my apps still intact.   To get the FM transmitter working I've installed  an app called Spirit Transmit by Mike Reed. To   test this I also need a receiving device. For  this I'm using my second Xperia Z. It's in  

great condition and I picked this up a few  years ago for next to nothing. This one is   running Sony's stock firmware based on Android  5.1.1 and it has Sony's FM radio app built in.   But for completeness I'm going to run Spirit  FM also by Mike Reed. To do this I did have   to root Android on this phone. This app can  also activate FM radio functions on phones  

that didn't come with their own radio  app. But have that function hidden in   their hardware. Mike Reed was able to write  software that directly communicated with the   Qualcomm chipsets inside some Android phones,  and enable them to use their hidden FM features.   Thank you Mike and rest in peace. With both phones  running their respective apps, I can now confirm  

that the FM transmitter does indeed work. And  I can send music from one phone to the other. A couple of years ago I made a video about FM  radios inside phones. If I'd known about the   Xperia Z, I probably would have used these in that  video. Though I'm noticing that the signal range   and the audio quality seems lower than I expected.  However this should still be enough to test some   Android software that I've been wanting to try  out called ANDFLMSG. This software can convert  

text and even files into sound. Which can then be  transmitted over radio. And running some tests and   I can confirm that this software works well with  the Spirit radio apps. The audio stream is going   straight out the FM transmitter and being received  and decoded by the other phone correctly. But with   the range of this FM transmitter being so low, I  can only get these phones a few meters from each   other before the signal becomes too weak. The  other way to send signals between these phones   at this range is just to use the sound from the  speaker to the microphone in the other phone.

But this is subject to errors from ambient  noise and can get quite tiresome to listen   to during experimentation. Despite the Xperia Z  having many flaws, which it certainly does have,   such as the annoying waterresistant port covers  that eventually wear out and refuse to close   properly, this phone remains in my personal hall  of fame as one of the greatest phones of all time. With devices like the Palm IIIc or even the  Xperia Z, the interface was once ours. It was raw,   open and full of possibility. We were allowed  to tinker, to break, and to fix. To mod and   to customize. We were allowed to see the seams.  Modern phones don't want us to see their seams.  

Our modern monoliths are indeed beautiful objects.  They captivate, they mesmerize and they enchant us   with their magic. But they no longer free us or  expand our consciousness the way our technology   used to. Wim Wender's film, Until the End of the  World, imagined a device that could record and   replay your dreams. A portable handheld screen  that consumed your attention, and gave you back   your own subconscious. In the film people  became addicted to staring at their screens. That film came out in 1991. By the time we reached  the Xperia Z, the dream machine was already in our  

pockets. "My heart is dead!" So what does this  mean for us here today? Look at your phone. Is   it still the consciousness expanding technology  of the 2000s? Does it represent the promise of   freedom we were once told it would become back  then. Today we are delivered an algorithmic   feed on a device that's sealed, controlled. We no  longer choose most of what we see each day. Phones  

today represent obedience. An interface that  manipulates rather than empowers. I have one more   piece of retro technology that I want to show you  today. This time it's a piece of psychotechnology   from the early 1990s. This is a piece of media  called How to Operate Your Brain by Tim Leary.  

It's designed to snap us out of the trance of  being mesmerized by our own dreams. "To think   for yourself, you must learn how to repro" It was  originally distributed on VHS in the 1990s. This   might just be the perfect antidote to modern  phones. Not because it rejects technology. But   because it demands that we take conscious control  of it. "Relax, surf the waves of chaos and learn   how to redesign your own realities." I've linked  the full 30 minute experience of this piece of  

retro media in the description below. Exploring  retro tech represents a time when pressing   a button meant something. When you could take  something apart, understand it, modify it, own it.   These old devices, they're not  just nostalgia. They're evidence  

that another kind of relationship with  technology is possible. And can be again. "Whomever controls what your eyes  are seeing, controls your mind"

2025-05-18 21:07

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