TALKING TECH

Three interactions with retro tech make it clear that the past ain’t what it used to be

Duncan Bell realises, when it comes to nostalgia, you can’t go home again

If that was the golden past, give me the Coronavirus-ridden present any day

Usually in this column – and my day-to-day life

– I cover a diverse range of topics. There’s moaning about modern technology and moaning about how tech things ain’t like they used to be. Well, this time out, I am completely ‘flipping the script’, as we say in the hip-hop community, to moan about old tech.

As anyone who’s ever been to a school reunion or watched the TV channel Dave will know, nothing destroys nostalgia quite so quickly as actually encountering the thing you are nostalgic about. This month I have had no fewer than three interactions with the kind of ‘classic’ tech that people like to coo about in bad online lists. And let me tell you, people: if that was the golden past, give me the Coronavirusridden present any day.

Actually, as a side note, that virus, although it’s been terrible for those affected, has also had some minor positive effects. Fears about travelling and congregating in large numbers in one place have put a temporary halt to two of my most disliked tech things: trade shows, and launches where a series of executive nerds in dad jeans read about a new phone off an autocue.

Everyone loves retro gaming,

I am told. So when I was clearing out the spare room and discovered a PlayStation 3 and a pile of games, I assumed a glittering road to riches lay before me. Mint condition, 320GB hard drive, an array of 25 fine titles from GTA IV to Metal Gear Solid: Guns of the Patriots; who could resist that?

Imagine my disappointment then, when I looked up online what I could expect to earn from them. Some of them were listed as being worth one penny. As if to taunt me, some of them still had the price labels showing what I paid for them, and it was generally in the region of £20 to £40 – and I usually bought second hand!

Red hot CEX

I popped into the local branch of a well-known buyer of ‘pre-loved’ gaming tech and asked if they’d be interested in my mint condition, 320GB PS3… and the woman laughed. Sure, she looked away, but I could see she was chortling.

To be fair, when I set up the PS3 and tried to play a few of those games, I could see why. I think the fact that PS4 is not backwards compatible and that many of those games are part of franchises that put out a slightly better version of the same thing has also completely killed their second-hand value. But mainly it’s the fact that the graphics are a bit crap, and the gameplay kind of ponderous.

In a completely unrelated development, I recently acquired a VHS player. And when I say ‘acquired’ I mean ‘stole from my elderly grandmother’. Well, where else are you going to get a VCR from? Bizarrely, I’d recently bought a film that, for various reasons, was only available on VHS. No, it isn’t pornographic, thank you.

This is where the cold, harsh reality of retro technology became really apparent. If you bought a phone now for £50 that shot video that looked like VHS, it would be laughed off the face of the planet. Although admittedly, millennials might enjoy a VHS filter that made their videos look amazingly shitty, in a deliciously ironic fashion.

I put on my long-sought VHS purchase with great excitement. I loved watching videos cassettes when I was a kid. But after watching the colours all blow out or mute, while tracking interference caused backgrounds to become a nightmarishly strobing hellscape, with a soundtrack that compressed into a storm of hissing treble, I resolved never to do that again.

Even that paled into minor inconvenience when compared to setting up a record player the following week. No wonder the ‘vinyl revival’ is largely led by kids who buy records to stick on their walls, or rich, old guys who pay someone else to set it up. Give me Tidal any day. My conclusion? The past is over. And it ain’t coming back. Not in my house, anyways.