UW-Milwaukee’s Retrolab brings decades of computing history to life

On the fourth floor of the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee’s Holton Hall, in the attic of the university’s history department, floppy disks still work. Vintage personal computers from the late 1970s sit side-by-side with machines running Windows from the early 2000s. 

UW-Milwaukee’s Retrocomputing Laboratory, also known as the Retrolab, is a space where students can learn about the history of computers by using vintage machines themselves. The lab contains more than two dozen fully-functional computer and video game systems spanning decades. It is one of only four labs of its type in the United States.

Thomas Haigh is a professor and chair of the history department at UW-Milwaukee. He created the lab several years ago from a combination of eBay purchases, faculty hand-me-downs, community donations and his private collection over decades. 

He told WPR’s “Wisconsin Today” he put the computers together into one room in an effort to help students better understand how much computers have advanced in a relatively short amount of time.

“I realized that if I put together a lab with — initially, I had maybe eight computers — as a cross-section of the development from the Apple II through to the early 2000s, that they’d be able to experience what it was like to use the computers in a way that they’d never be able to have if they were just reading about them,” Haigh said.

Haigh said the relatively rapid advancement of computing technologies sets the field apart from advancements in other aspects of modern life.

“There hasn’t been an enormous amount of change in, say, the kitchen equipment that you use. The houses we live in have not changed very much at all in the last 50 years … streets, airplanes. It’s very incremental,” Haigh said. “But because the tech stuff has changed so fast, it’s extremely easy to go through your life without coming across an old IBM PC or an Apple II, because that stuff just gets pushed into closets and attics and then usually gets discarded.”

Haigh said the 1990s was the decade that saw the biggest leaps forward in computing technology with the mass adoption of email, the internet and more powerful computers with advanced operating systems and hardware that could play cutting-edge 3D video games for the time.

“I think tech was moving a lot quicker back then,” Haigh said. “Computers would be obsolete in a year or two. Everyone would want to upgrade to the latest thing and find somebody else to take their old computer. Now, most of the stuff we do have is going to work just fine on a phone that’s three years old or a laptop that’s 5 years old.”

UW-Milwaukee undergraduate history student Wyatt Thies helps out at the lab, having recently spent hours unsuccessfully attempting to repair two vintage ZIP drives. He told WPR working with some of the technology in the lab reminds him of his uncle’s fascination with computers decades ago.

“When he was in high school, computers first became accessible, and he did a lot of programming,” Thies said. “When I…walk in this lab, I kind of feel like I can see him messing around with the old Apple II or like some of the stuff that I’m doing now — trying to learn about the past — he did in the present in his time.”

Thies described working with these vintage computers as a “thoughtful” process that textbooks don’t do justice.

“Being able to experience it in a moment — being able to play like the original Tetris on the Atari, things like that — it’s very, very satisfying,” Thies said. “And a lab like this is probably the only easy way to live those moments.”