To prepare for my presentations at next weekend’s Commodore Los Angeles Super Show, I’m relearning the first word processor I ever used, PaperClip for the Commodore 64. I was amazed by how many features of this over 40-year-old program I still use today. Cut, copy, and paste. Search and replace. Shortcuts for boilerplate phrases. Spell check. It even used file chunking and global documents. This was a necessity with the limited RAM and storage space at the time, but it became a useful feature with modern technology like DITA. I also find it more useful to break a novel into scenes in Scrivener than write it as a single file in Microsoft Word. The best thing about PaperClip is I didn’t have to worry about it stealing my writing to use in some corporation’s generative AI models.

Using this decades-old technology got me thinking about the difference between studying history and indulging in nostalgia.

Playing with vintage computers and software is fun. I have a great time rediscovering technology I used long ago, and it lets me relive happy moments from my past. It also has value in learning about technology that shapes our society today. I understand why the Save icon looks like an ancient floppy disk. When Apple boasted about its first in-house modem in the iPhone 16e, I remembered when a modem sat on a desk and was plugged into a phone line.

What I can’t say is 40-year-old technology is better than technology we have today.

For starters, I’m not using an actual Commodore 64. I’m using The C64 Mini I bought a couple years ago that plugs into my modern monitor and uses modern USB ports. I remember when a real Commodore computer took over my whole desk and then some. Look at my Commodore 128 setup from 1985.

Would I trade my iPhone 16 Pro Max that fits in my pocket for all that? Hell no! But would I want to go back to a simpler time when I didn’t have the concerns and aging body I have today?

It’s easy for us to romanticize the past. We want to remember only the happy moments. When we hung out with friends after a high school football game, not the cringe things we said to someone we wanted to date. When we played outside until the street lights came on, not the horrible images our parents saw on the nightly news. When we looked good in summer clothes, not the leering eyes and uncomfortable propositions.

Nostalgia plays on those impulses. It constructs a mythologized past from the fragments of happy memories. And what fills in the rest? It could be someone with some thing to sell. (“Your skin can have the glow of youth if you buy our product.”) Or worse, someone who wants to use bigotry to divide and control us. (“Your hometown was so much better before ‘those people’ moved in.”)

We can overcome nostalgia by taking an honest look at history, warts and all. When we look at the limitations, mistakes, and bad judgements of the past along with the happy memories and first steps towards progress. When we learn about the forces that shaped us and how we can use them to move ahead today.

That has been a theme through all my novels. In Amiga, Laura uses old technology to help her deal with past so she can move ahead in the present. In The Remainders, Oliver and his son Dylan must also face past abuse and heartbreak so they can reconcile and heal.

Christina’s Portrait comes from decades of dealing with a brutal murder at my high school and many other problems I encountered in my teenage years. This was a hard novel to write and an even harder novel to get published, especially in this political climate. I know I can lose friendships over this novel. It deals with hard truths about growing up in Reseda in the 1970s, not just our happy faded Kodachrome memories. But I’d be doing ourselves and our history a disservice if I didn’t face this past honestly. As the school principal in my novel says, “Perhaps it’s time for us at Reseda to face this painful past, just as we as a country are facing the difficult parts of our history.”

We’re seeing the alternative right now. We are willing to destroy everything we’ve built over the centuries and any hope for the future to cling onto a past that never was. Seeking the truth about the past helps us hold onto values we find useful, true, and good.

So whether I’m using 40-year-old technology or writing about 50-year-old events, discovering the truth about the past gives me a sense of wonder, clarity, and understanding. It sure beats merely wallowing in nostalgia. As one of my characters in Christina’s Portrait says, “History is a story we tell ourselves about ourselves. Where we came from. Why things are the way they are. What we had to overcome and what we have to learn.” We can only benefit from history when we study it honestly.