Hot Sauce and Dot-Matrix Printers

The Perfect Litmus Test for Nostalgia

There’s a line in Will Smith’s hit “Summertime” that goes, “and as I think back, makes me wonder how / the smell from a grill could spark up nostalgia.” For the record Will Smith was never that cool, but he makes a good point in regards to nostalgia.

I’m a peddler of nostalgia. I’ve written books about old computers and arcades, record podcasts full of old stories and memories, share pictures of thrift store finds on Instagram, and, occasionally, write about nostalgic things on Substack.

There are many ways to experience nostalgia. There’s no shortage of people writing and podcasting about retro things, and I gobble that stuff up. But my favorite type of “nostalgic experience” are those wonderful surprises that happen spontaneously when I see, hear, or smell something that instantly whisks my mind away.

Once, while cleaning out my old office at work, I found an old hot sauce packet from Taco Bell. Like, a really old one with the old branding, old enough that I didn’t want to use it but I ended up keeping it anyway. If you wonder what being nostalgic is really like, it’s getting excited over condiments long past their expiration date. For the record there is a market for old sauce packets on eBay. The fact that I know that says something about me and if you already knew that, it says something about you, too.

Have you ever been watching Ridiculousness or Fail Army (or any of those types of “YouTube clip shows”), seen someone get hurt, and felt it in your own gut? Every time I see a skateboarder slam into the concrete face first or a teen taking a direct shot to the nuts, I get this feeling in my stomach like I’ve just fallen, too. It’s the same feeling I used to get when looking over the second store railing at the mall, down into the food court. And that’s how I felt when I found that old packet of hot sauce in my desk drawer.

A friend of mine once told me he wasn’t sure if he was a nostalgic person or not. I should ask him if he’s every gotten a little teary-eyed after finding an old hot sauce packet.

Or hearing an old dot-matrix printer.

Last weekend I attended a gathering known as the International Retro Computer Expo in Hurricane, West Virginia. I drove 1,000 miles from Oklahoma City to spend the weekend hanging out in a room full of likeminded individuals. People from all over the country (and a few from other countries) came together in a random convention hall in a town with a population of roughly 7,000 people.

People brought all sorts of old computers to show off and play with. There was a free table full of items free for the taking, an auction, multiple live shows and Q&A sessions, a high score contest, and lots of other things to see and do.

If you’re GenX like me, something you played with as a kid was in this room connected to a television or monitor. There was an Atari 2600, an Intellivision, multiple Commodore 64 and Amiga computers, as well as lots of more exotic things. This was not a room full of people who vaguely remember these things. These are people who still use these things.

Friends of mine have asked me if I thought they would have fun at an event like this, and I think this photo is a pretty good litmus test.

This is an old Commodore computer hooked up to a dot-matrix printer. I believe in this picture it’s hooked up to geoPaint but at one point it was also running Print Shop, the old program we used back in the 1980s to print out birthday cards, signs, and banners with our names on them.

People at the show were allowed to make their own creatins and print them out. For much of the weekend, this sound echoed throughout the room.

If the sound of that printer is grating or annoying, well, maybe that wasn’t the place for you last weekend. But for about forty of us who came from all over the world to hang out and geek out, that sound was music to our ears.

It was music to our souls.

That’s what nostalgia feels like.