Repair shop offers trip down memory lane with decades-old tech

At The BYTE Shop in Jamaica Plain, there are several neat rows of old computers prominently on display.

They caught the eye of Peter Ashbourne and his young grandson, Teddy, during their walk one morning. Shortly after they popped in to look around, Teddy delved into a game of old-school Pac-Man on one of the machines.

Peter Ashbourne turned his attention to another computer.

"Brings back some memories," Ashbourne said. "The Apple II was the first computer I ever had."

Tim Colegrove opened The BYTE Shop, an electronics repair store, in 2021. Colegrove had been repairing computers as a side job for years and collected a lot of them. He wanted his new repair shop to double as a kind of novelty museum.

"Everybody has a different response to this space," Colegrove said. "Some people are nostalgic, they come in and they see computers that they worked on as a young person."

Before he opened his shop, Colegrove worked as a chaplain helping people with substance use disorder. He said there are moments when his past work comes in handy. Part of his work includes retrieving customers' lost files or digitizing their old home videos. Those can be precious memories that lead to deeper conversations.

"I can end up becoming a kind of like like informal confessional booth for people's lives," he said. "I mean our computers are really personal to us, right? They're almost like an extension of ourselves at this point."

Colegrove said part of his mission is to extend the life of computers. Americans throw away more than 15 billion pounds of electronic waste every year. That waste has a devastating impact on natural environments and human health.

"We don't need to upgrade every three years," he said.

Of course, Colegrove recognizes not all machines will make it. And even if he successfully gets a broken Macintosh from the 80s working again, it wont be able to do most of the tasks we expect from computers nowadays.

But those discarded old machines have found another life at The BYTE Shop. They sit as a reminder of how quickly things change, while offering us a chance to pause and reflect on what's ahead.