Ever hanker for a game of Paradroid on a Commodore 64? Wonder whatever happened to your treasured Atari 800 console from childhood? Thought what would life be like if you'd held on to that Dick Smith System 80?
Canberra mates Randall Crook and Jason Weber love nothing better than tracking down retro computers and games and bringing them back to life, 40 years or more after they were first released.
The old-school computers - boxy, heavy and unwieldly against their sleek modern counterparts - are more than just discarded technology to them. They are touchstones to their youth, the heady days of the early to late 1980s when home computers and gaming consoles were starting to appear in the suburbs.
"Let's be honest, it's just good old-fashioned nostalgia, it really is," Jason, 43, said.
And the pair want to share that passion with the public, joining forces to stage the first Canberra Retro Computer Fair in Tuggeranong on Saturday. And everyone is welcome to the fair at the Gordon Community Centre, which will be buzzing to those "sweet SID sounds".
Jason, an IT manager at the University of Canberra, regularly posts videos filmed in his work shed in Tuggers, showing the painstaking effort it takes to bring an old computer back to life.
"Randall's into how the machines work, operating systems, getting them to talk to other systems, things like that," he said.
"My interest in it is the gaming side of it because that's what I saw growing up as a kid. There's been a massive explosion in not just vintage computing but vintage gaming. It's hot at the moment."
"Because so many people grew up in the 80s and it's made a major mark on their lives," Randall, 56, said.
"They just want to go back and relive some of that nostalgia."
Randall, an old-school Unix administrator , said he wasn't interested in just any old technology. He has to love it, like the Amiga 500 he owned in 1986 that actually felt like a computer, with all its possibilities, or the old classic Macs he "drooled over in the '80s - it only took 40-odd years before I could afford to buy one".
"I only collect computers that actually mean something to me," he said. "Like the Amiga 500. It's not just for the value."
And as adults, it was also about chasing down a childhood dream.
"What I enjoy about it is going and discovering the computers I didn't have or missed out on or whatever," Jason said. "Computers that friends had or family had or we had at school and going back as an adult and discovering, and from new, those computers."
Jason said, with a laugh, that this weekend's fair was also "a bit of showing off" of their restoration skills.
"We put a lot of effort into getting these old computers working," Randall agreed.
- The Canberra Retro Computer Fair will be held at the Gordon Community Centre, 110 Lewis Luxton Avenue, Gordon, on Saturday from 12.30pm to 4.30pm. Entry is a gold coin donation.
