Why Are We Fascinated With Retro Tech?
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
