Ruben's Retro Corner

Intro

Welcome to Ruben's Retro Corner! This site is, first and foremost, a journey into abject nostalgia. I grew up in the 1990s, meaning the world of GeoCities, Tripod, Angelfire, animated GIFs, Netscape Navigator, and screeching dialup modems. Web 1.0 had many foibles: it was slow, it was expensive to host a lot of things, and it was slow (did I say that already?). But as I said at the start of the page, it was ours. Attention was something people gave you for making something fun, not something we fracked to extract all possible value.

While I consider this site to be the spiritual successor to my childhood GeoCities page (to the point where many of the assets were derived from it), today it serves to document another aspect of digital nostalgia: my burgeoning and ill-advised retrocomputer collection. I've always been interested in the history of personal computing, and while I was born too late to have lived through Commodore's heyday (for example), that doesn't mean I can't learn from the past and have a lot of fun in the process. I don't think it's a stretch to say I've learned more about computer science and electronics from tinkering with, repairing, and playing on these machines than I ever did in formal education.

While that was the original goal, the site has since taken on a larger purpose for me. I maintain it the same way I did those original GeoCities sites in 1999: with a plain text editor and a lot of copy pasta. There are no templates, no content management systems, no intermediate markup languages, no databases, and certainly no planning. I write plain HTML 3.2, and live within its limitations. It feels like the assembly language of the Web: everything has to be written intentionally and with purpose. Granted, this makes certain things frustrating... but it's also so wonderfully simple. I can also write it on any of the 32-bit machines on this page, and maybe even the 16-bit ones too.

Most of all, making this site has put me in touch again with that optimistic child I once was, and once used to know. I can't tell you how rewarding that's been. Except, I guess I just did.

Thank you for checking out this silly corner of the Web.

Cheers,
Ruben <3

Apple

Back when they were Apple Computer. Remember that?

Atari

Jack Tramel-era Atari is fascinating. The world's first colour GUI, thanks to Digital Research!

Commodore

Computers "for the masses, not for the classes".

Pasokon

The computers I grew up on, or would have!

UNIX

These were the ultimate grails from my childhood!

Motherboards

These are mostly used on the bench to save space. I need a better storage solution though.

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Site by Ruben Schade. First version 1998. Last updated 2026-02-12.