Ten Years of Vintage Computer Room: From Hardware Collector to Media Archaeology

The project began in January 2016, when the author reposted a translated article, 'In Search of the Origins of ARM: A Brief History of Acorn Computers,' from Hi!PDA Discovery to his Zhihu column. The column was not originally conceived as a nostalgic museum, the article says, but as a minimum viable product to test whether retro computing could become a viable business or content start-up in China. The author says the experiment ran into China's particular community ecology and commercial reality and eventually pushed him in an unexpected direction.

Vintage Computer Room had a predecessor. In 2012–2013, the author ran PDA Museum on Renren, uploading photographs of dozens of personal digital assistants from his collection. The article places the practice within two hardware-photography traditions. One is Evan Amos's open, public-archive approach, later embodied in the Vanamo Online Game Museum and The Game Console book. The other is the domestic collector culture represented by Hardware Fengyun (yjfy.com), which used photography to assert ownership, scarcity and a ranking-oriented collector identity.

In the author's account, younger collectors born in the 1990s and 2000s have challenged that older model. Instead of rating and ranking hardware, they treat old machines as materials for personal expression, subcultural symbols, an aesthetic resistance to homogenized consumer electronics, or Y2K- and dreamcore-inflected experiences. Comparing this with older 'spec fetishism,' and with his experiences in overseas retro-computing communities, led him to ask how obsolete computing devices should be approached.

Living in Canada for six years at the time, the author saw China's 2016 'mass entrepreneurship and innovation' climate and the popularity of lean startup methods as context. He noticed a crowdfunding wave around retro computing and retro games on Kickstarter and was inspired by smzdm.com's transformation from a niche digital forum into a major e-commerce traffic entry point. He chose a column to test traffic and Chinese community acceptance.

In the summer of 2016, the column had its first hit series, about the Living Computers Museum in Seattle. The museum's live approach reshaped his view of what a computer museum should display. Vintage mainframes, personal computers and peripherals were powered and maintained in working condition, and visitors could type on keyboards or remotely log in to decades-old machines. Static, unpowered exhibits, he concluded, were closer to meaningless silicon and plastic. This directly led him to abandon hoarding physical artifacts and explore software emulators, FPGA emulators, floppy-drive emulators and 3D-printed replacement parts for live demonstration.

In planning content, the author compared two publications. Offline magazine, with its California ideology and humanities background, showed strong demand for deep technology-culture content but was too metaphysical and lacked technical operability. Openbook, led by Shenzhen makers, emphasized open source, hands-on work, hardware configuration and practical operation but lacked a broader cultural and humanistic perspective. A successful retro-computing project, he argues, must balance the two, with hands-on practice as bone and cultural criticism as flesh. Finland's Skrolli magazine, whose English edition he received in summer 2016 after backing it on Indiegogo, became another reference and pushed the column toward computer history, retro computing, Demoscene and hardware hacking, with a preference for chiptune, retro games and Demoscene.

In 2017, he attended Demoscene and chiptune events in New York, Montreal, Boston, Vancouver and Pittsburgh, including Synchrony, @party, Øverfløw #000 and Demosplash at Carnegie Mellon University. The article says he may have been the first Chinese person to enter the Demoscene clearly knowing what it was and what to watch. At VICE China's invitation, he wrote 'The Legacy of 8-bit Brats' and 'A Simple History of Computer Demos,' which became the starting point for a later course, Introduction to Demoscene.

During those trips he visited exhibitions that he describes as personally transformative: Dreamlands: Immersive Cinema and Art, 1905–2016 at the Whitney; Warhol and the Amiga at the Andy Warhol Museum; and Designing the Computational Image/Imagining Computational Design at Carnegie Mellon. At the last, he encountered the history of computer graphics and tried early tools such as Sketchpad and creative-coding tools including Processing/p5.js. He writes that no one had told him computing could move beyond being an auxiliary tool in art to become the medium or core of a work.

At @party, a lecture by MIT scholar Nick Montfort on generative writing and the Commodore 64's 10 PRINT program introduced him to Platform Studies, the framework associated with Montfort and Ian Bogost. The lesson, he writes, was that old computers should be studied not only for their appearance and specifications but as platforms whose hardware and software environments constrain and shape digital culture and artistic expression. This gave him a sense of legitimacy: researching old computers could be serious academic work. It also connected two parts of his life, his humanities education and his programming career, which he calls an unfair advantage.

The retrospective moves into 2018 with the birth of the Computer Museum in the Web. After the 2017 exhibitions, the author concluded that retro computers could be shown as content assets through temporary, traveling or thematic exhibitions in galleries, museums and universities, without necessarily needing a fixed venue. In early 2018, he noticed Digital Revolution: Digital Barbican at Beijing WF Central, an exhibition related to old computers and held in a non-permanent space, whose Digital Archaeology section focused on the history of digital art.