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I think we frequently enough romanticize tech from the "good old days," and it leads too a pretty skewed perception of what it was actually like. Remember obsessing over faster dial-up? We conveniently forget the constant dropped connections and hogging the phone line. now, everyone complains about modern software bloat and constant updates, but back then, waiting hours to download a single song or dealing with buggy shareware was just part of the experience.
Isn't there a danger in only remembering the things we liked about older tech? Yes, things were simpler in some ways, but are we truly remembering the clunkiness, the limitations, and the general hassle involved, or are we just cherry-picking the aesthetic and a few key features? We see this with vinyl records and retro gaming consoles; they're cool now, but how many people actually enjoyed cleaning a record before every play or suffering thru pixelated graphics on a tiny CRT screen back in the day?
Maybe this idealized view pushes back against the endless upgrade cycle and perceived obsolescence of modern tech.But by presenting an inaccurate representation of the past, are we setting ourselves up for disappointment if we try to recapture that "magic"? Are we really longing for the tech itself, or just a simpler time that we associate with those gadgets?