From floppy disks to Apple Lisa, UWM’s Retrolab rewinds time

It's definitely like being in a little interactive museum. Yeah, the mouse is not moving. Like nowadays, people are mostly divorced from that older way of operating, you know? And it's not like everybody has to go back and use a typewriter, but like the little bit of extra effort that goes into doing things in a certain sort of way. I think there's a little bit of a return from that. I could just spend my entire life here. Started out with maybe just six computers, and then campus IT guys have been very helpful, so now they know about the lab, and every time they find something old and weird in a closet, bring it over and we see if we can plug it in and get it to work. You know, none of this tech exists in the absolute, right? I mean, people went out and purchased and learned and used these technologies to do things with, whether it was playing games, writing programs, word processing, spreadsheets. So, the story of computing really is how this technology goes from this obscure thing that's in a few university labs with hand-built computers that just do numerical calculations and cost millions of dollars each, into becoming this thing that basically we use all the time to do pretty much everything. The experience of using a computer is often something that is an important part of your life, and then when that technology goes obsolete, you lose that piece, right? I mean, it's not hard to find a vinyl record player. Now, it's a lot harder to find an Apple II that's still working, you know. So, I think that experience of suddenly something that you haven't maybe even thought about for a long time, but you see something that had been significant to you in some part of your life, is an experience that a lot of people have in the lab one way or another. Yeah.