My Dad loves classic cars. He goes to car shows and takes photos of beautiful chunks of metal from the 50s, 60s and 70s. Whenever we see those cars on the road he points them out like he's a spotted a rare bird out on a bush walk. Those are the cars of his youth and for the time, that was the big mainstream technology accessible to people that caused a change in society. Cities were built around cars and so were lifestyles. Cars had a large impact on how he, and many of us still, view the world we live in.
When he had time and money he purchased his own classic cars. First a Ford XY Falcon GT he restored (I think it was a Fairmont he turned into a Phase 3 replica - if you're into Aussie muscle cars, this probably makes sense to you!) then a few years later, a gorgeous 1965 Pontiac Bonneville he also did a lot of work on. They weren't his daily drivers, for that he had a series of very sensible Toyotas, but we would go for drives in the big loud cars on random weekends, for no particular purpose but to drive and enjoy the car. He long since sold the Falcon and Pontiac, presumably because cash was tight with two young kids and a mortgage, but he had his fun and I remember both those cars fondly.
I'm now around the same age he was when he purchased his XY Falcon but instead of classic cars, I purchased a classic computer - an Apple Macintosh SE/30 that was originally released in January 1989. This Mac has a Motorola 68030 CPU clocked at 15.667 MHz with a Motorola 68882 FPU and with a ROM upgrade, can run up to Mac OS 8.1, all on a 9-inch 512x342 pixel monochrome display. Ironically, the SE/30 is older (1989 vs 2025) than my Dad's XY Falcon (1970-early 90s) when he got it and about the same vintage as the Pontac (1965-1999/2000) when he owned that car too.
I was starting kindergarten at the time, so I have no nostalgic connection to this computer. I didn't even have a Mac at home until 2003. That whole era of the classic Mac totally bypassed me at home with a 486 then a Pentium running flavours of Windows. For me, this old Mac is an exploration of an era of computing that inspired the computers I do have nostalgia for, like Windows 95 and Mac OS X. Kinda like how I enjoyed the band Silverchair, then looked into what inspired them - Nirvana and Pearl Jam - then what inspired them - Dinosaur Jr, R.E.M., Sonic Youth, and so on, that's resulted in the music taste I have now.
I didn't realise it until I had the Mac in the boot of my car but my Dad got to middle age and retreated, for want of a better word, to a period of time (50s-70s) when the thing he is interested in, cars, were "good". I'm doing the same but with what interests me and what shaped my generation (80s-2000s) - computers. Ford and Pontiac were the Apple of their time. The car was to the baby boomers what the computer was to me as a millennial.
Like how we would go for random drives in an unpractical car every now and then after weeks and months in the garage tinkering, I will do the same with my Mac SE/30. I'll spend money and time restoring this classic computer just like it's a classic car. I'll plug it in every now and then, run some old applications aimlessly, just like my Dad and his cars. Most of the time the Mac will sit on a shelf as a reminder, a tribute, perhaps even a symbol of mourning to what has been lost in the name of progress, just like the classic cars that sit in so many people's garages across the world.
I haven't been this excited about a computer for a long time.
