Don't get me wrong I like old tech, but just for what it is. Text based, simple, fast etc...but I don't like wallowing in a warm, fuzzy feeling about how it was.
I mean I personally do recall 5.25" disks. I liked their look and feel as a kid. Fine. But making a big deal out of it feels retrograde...
It's not negative. It's an interesting sentiment, but one I think is based on a misperception or mischaracterisation, if you'll permit me;
Nostalgia is about experience and feelings. It often has idealising elements, attempting to restore something bound to a specific past time or culture that can never actually be revisited. Wallowing in a warm, fuzzy feeling" as you describe it, is depressive.
That's not what's going on in tech.
Tech people are experiencing disgust, frustration, anger, hopelessness and a whole range of sentiments hostile to current tech which is objectively broken in a number of ways. And justifiably so. We have wandered off the path, not just the path of "excitement and fun" but right off the path of utility into the long grass of bloated, brittle, precarious, unfathomable and unmaintainable complexity under the yoke of exploitation and false efficiency.
The desire to move "backwards" is a desire to fix things.
Many of the qualities of earlier tech can, and should be revisited.
We're in a cul-de-sac and unable to progress precisely because we label earlier technologies as "necessarily inferior". It is an arrogance and parochialism of false progress to do so. That mind-set always sees any sort of back-tracking as negative regression, or "anti-progressive". But sometimes the way forward is back. Remembering where you've been, is central to any successful algorithm that's navigating a maze (which is what technology is).
Projects like Gemini and distributed "New Web" based on overlay networks are not regressive. They are very contemporary attempts to distil the best elements of the 90s internet culture and re-orient development from there, but with the hindsight of knowing how not to do things.
> Don't get me wrong I like old tech, but just for what it is. Text based, simple, fast etc...
All of those qualities are also possible with new tech. And they make the new tech even better. And as energy and environment bite, we'll start to see them as positive qualities to move toward... in other words our definition (direction) of progress will evolve.
I started as a web designer as images were being added to browsers and you could change the default grey background colour. Things are a bit different now...