EXCAVATEdig through the layers

July 17, 2026

I Rebuilt Old Computers and Learned My Memory Was Lying

I rebuilt ten old computer screens from scratch — the Commodore 64, Windows 95, the first iPhone. The rule that made it work: don't trust your memory of them. Your memory of an old screen is wrong in ways you won't notice until someone who was there does.

  • #computer history
  • #making things
  • #process

For Retro Computing I rebuilt old computers from scratch — 1982 to 2007, one short film each — under one strict rule: no screenshots, nothing copied, every pixel drawn again by hand. It sounds like a rule you’d set just to make the job harder. It’s the only way the films come out right.

Your memory of an old screen is a forgery

You think you remember these machines. What you actually keep is an impression — a color, a shape, a logo — and you’ve quietly lost the texture underneath: the exact weight of a button, the specific ugliness of a gradient, the tiny things you’d only clock sitting in front of the real thing again. I checked this on myself before I trusted it on anyone else, and my own memory turned out to be full of confident blanks. Build from that and you make something that feels about right and is wrong in ways you can’t name but can feel — and that near-miss is exactly what someone who was there will catch.

The fakes have a signature

Most of the work was avoiding the tells, and the biggest tell is smoothness. Old machines updated in sudden little jumps — a menu snapped open, text arrived a row at a time, the screen redrew instead of gliding. Make those transitions fluid and the spell breaks on contact, because nothing from back then ever moved that cleanly. You can get every color exactly right and still give yourself away with motion that’s too smooth. That was the part I couldn’t have guessed before doing it: the texture of how a thing moved carries more truth than the accuracy of the picture.

Being able to check it is the point

What holds it together is that every element in every film can be looked up — the colors, the fonts, the startup text, all found and verified rather than remembered. That’s the line between nostalgia that flatters you and a rebuild that respects the machine it’s copying. The specific reconstructions — the boot messages, the counters, the tape that loads too slowly to be convenient — are in the films themselves: Retro Computing. The wider library of screen looks I drew on is a field guide to app animations.

Watch the series

Here are the films from the collection, in order. Each machine is rebuilt from scratch with zero screenshots.