What does the panel think of retro revival products like the C64 Ultimax?
ASKED BY · Douglas Carmichael · 30 SEP 2026 · ▶ 00:34:05
Retro gear can show younger people what previous generations endured, but the experience of discovery and the barriers that shaped learning cannot be replicated in today's abundant information environment.
Retro products are cool for learning and discovery, like finding a RadioShack scanner at a thrift store and using ChatGPT to troubleshoot it, but you can't recreate the original awe of discovery when resources were scarce.
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From the transcript.
Machine-transcribed, so it may contain errors. Every timestamp opens the episode at that second.
33:55Well, 12 hours later, we delivered a 43-minute show. I think that's why they call it dailies. We're going to get to a couple of our questions here in a second. By the way, that was my first hard drive right in the middle of there. That's a Corvus 11 megabyte hard drive. I think I paid a couple of thousand dollars for it. There you go.
34:19to think that my watch has a thousand times more power than that all right um so our first question on the tuesday focus question and answer system comes from douglas carmichael and douglas wonders what does the panel think of retro revival products like the c64 ultimate does anybody uh guy cochran dive in what do you think i think it's pretty cool i mean the other day i was in
34:46one of these thrift stores, and I was telling Bill this story right before the show, is I found this in Goodwill. This is a Radio Shack realistic 200 channel scanner, and it was there for $9.99. So, I plugged it in. You could see the plug there on the left side. I plugged it in, turned it on, and it turned on, but nothing but static was coming out. So, I chatty-pt'd it, and it's like,
35:12turn the squelch down. So I turned the squelch down. And then I just asked it a few more questions and pretty soon I had the weather coming out of it. And it's cool to see retro things like this, because this was about in modern day money, about a $800 device. And my dad had a handheld one. And I used to listen to the police scanners and modern day, this got me going down this path just
35:35the other weekend because I wound up buying it from the thrift store because I was fascinated with the things that you could do with it, which is pick up local stations. A lot of them now are encrypted. So they don't, like our local police department, they encrypt their stuff. So it just comes across as static. But there's the local airport I was able to pick up.
35:54And so when you think of retro, learning how to program these things was fun because ChatGPT had me, you know, entering in, there's 200 programs. So it's just a different way of programming. And then it has a nine volt battery because if you unplugged it, the memory, you know, it's volatile memory. It's not the stuff. Yeah. So it's just little things like that. When you remember, like I was talking about with the Commodore 64,
36:18plugging in those programs until we got that disk drive. When I shut that thing down, it was gone. That 64K was live. And then if you turned it off, that program that you spent an hour typing in manually was gone. So it was so cool. And we got the disk drive and I was able to save and not only that i was able to go over to a friend of a friend that worked at our school
36:40and he had just a ton of uh games and uh apps and so we just were swapping uh floppies and he was like in his 40s and i was this kid 10 years old just like can i copy your games if you didn't save your work and you had a power brownout or something like that everything just disappeared back in those days.
37:04David Brady, you raised your hand as well. Yeah, yeah, yeah. I mean, I had a C64 as well. I think that was high school years for me. I appreciate the retro gear that's coming out, if only for it showing the kids of today what we had to go through then. The only thing that you will never re-experience is that programming out of a magazine
37:32or I watch these channels on YouTube and the guys were like, oh, there was this radio station in the UK that would broadcast things over a modem and you'd record it on the modem and then write it back to, you know, so if it can give an appreciation for what it is, is cool. But I don't think we'll ever re-experience the awe of discovery
37:58like we had back then. And the same thing with music. The music discovery of today is different than when you would buy a record, if only because of what the album cover looked cool. Yeah, I agree with you 100%. You used to have to work hard to gain any kind of knowledge in this stuff because it wasn't just floating through the air everywhere.
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