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There's a dumb instinct to say "that's obsolete" because everything we experience says that we would personally lose the ability to function with a computer fro

There's a dumb instinct to say "that's obsolete" because everything we experience says that we would personally lose the ability to function with a computer from 20 years ago. But it's more than powerful enough to wander around Mars for a while with specialized software. It's not like it's running electron apps.

chmod775 6y ago
If I can get a Linux distro to boot into a shell on it, I can do work on it. It'll probably be nicer than vim over ssh still. The first version of the rPI was pretty close in specs to computers from that time and it works fine - though the G3 mac shipped with way less RAM by default. The first gen rPI on my desk even boots into a usable desktop. There's a lot of bloat in modern software, such as browsers, but most is in the form of code/features that are rarely used. Maybe someday we'll see electron versions that can be stripped to stuff you actually need.
- h2odragon 6y ago
  OMG i dont want to run SHH over a link with a 20min+ latency. and especially i dont want to run an editor on that link.
  - yjftsjthsd-h 6y ago
    > i dont want to run SHH over a link with a 20min+ latency. and especially i dont want to run an editor on that link. Yeah, you'd probably want mosh;)
Espressosaurus 6y ago
It's not obsolete if it's running the apps that you need. I've done embedded work on MCUs with less horsepower than you probably have in your headphones. Sure it's not going to run windows 10, but it'll reliably control that device until the mechanical parts wear down. Same applies here, where the advantage of huge transistors means much greater resistance to cosmic rays, and a 20 year old design means all the bugs and quirks are well understood. The latest and greatest is nice, but not always the right choice for the problem at hand when you have the option of custom firmware and you aren't connected to a hostile internet.
- com2kid 6y ago
  > I've done embedded work on MCUs with less horsepower than you probably have in your headphones. MCUs are awesome. Given a 100mhz single core M3, half a meg of SRAM, some serious fun can be head. (honestly 512K SRAM would be insane, but doable now days) People don't realize that with a purpose built runtime and well crafted code, 100mhz is a LOT of power. Modern OSes, complicated software stacks, preemptive multi-tasking, and the need for flexible general purpose usage, eat up a huge percent (I'd say well over ~70%) of the usable computing capacity in the devices we deal with every day. Now I write web services that spend more CPU and RAM decoding JSON than entire runtimes I helped design. Go figure. Of course productivity is a bit higher, having to design and code the most optimal binary serialization formats for every single task takes a lot of time and effort, but wow is the end result fast and memory efficient!
  - Espressosaurus 6y ago
    Half a meg of SRAM is typical for the ASICs I've worked with, so...not as insane as you might thing. Working with a 50 MHz ASIC on an old process with 256K of SRAM shared between two different companies and codebases, now that was fun.
  - elihu 6y ago
    > Modern OSes, complicated software stacks, preemptive multi-tasking, and the need for flexible general purpose usage, eat up a huge percent (I'd say well over ~70%) of the usable computing capacity in the devices we deal with every day. I think a big part of it is security. Having to isolate address spaces is expensive. (Sometimes I like to imagine being able to run a unikernel OS where applications are written in something like safe Rust, everything runs in the same address space, and the OS delegates enforcing memory separation to a trusted compiler. So, things like writing to disk or the network are just regular function calls with no context switch overhead. In this model, unsafe code is treated sort of the way we treat kernel code or setuid binaries in Linux: regular users aren't allowed to run arbitrary unsafe code. With Spectre, I don't know if this sort of approach is still feasible on modern processors, or if it's possible for a compiler to guarantee that the compiled code is not susceptible to any known side-channel attacks.)
heavyset_go 6y ago
I keep some old computers running as a hobby, and you'd be surprised at how well they still run if you stick Linux on them.
- sandworm101 6y ago
  I have a new computer and you'd be suppressed how well they run if you stick linux on them too.
- drewzero1 6y ago
  I am also an old computer hobbyist, with an apparent emphasis on Macs between '90 and '05. I used to try to get them up to the highest spec and newest software they could support, but found that they feel so much more usable when running either their original release OS or something in the middle. I have used Mac OS 9 and OSX 10.4 on my '99 iMac DV (PPC 750/G3, 400MHz), and they feel worlds apart to use. Same with my Performa 6116CD (PPC 601, 60MHz) on System 7 vs. OS 8. (Of course, the rules are totally different with BSD and Linux, where you generally want the newest software that supports the architecture and it works great as long as you choose your packages wisely.)
Florin_Andrei 6y ago
It's only obsolete if it doesn't have the features you need. Which, in this case, include radiation resistance, which is much harder, if not impossible, to achieve with modern chips with very tiny transistors. Large transistors can much more easily shrug it off. The old chip is not just "good enough". It's the only thing that works.
deleted 6y ago
[deleted]

chmod775 6y ago

If I can get a Linux distro to boot into a shell on it, I can do work on it. It'll probably be nicer than vim over ssh still. The first version of the rPI was pretty close in specs to computers from that time and it works fine - though the G3 mac shipped with way less RAM by default. The first gen rPI on my desk even boots into a usable desktop. There's a lot of bloat in modern software, such as browsers, but most is in the form of code/features that are rarely used. Maybe someday we'll see electron versions that can be stripped to stuff you actually need.

h2odragon 6y ago
OMG i dont want to run SHH over a link with a 20min+ latency. and especially i dont want to run an editor on that link.
- yjftsjthsd-h 6y ago
  > i dont want to run SHH over a link with a 20min+ latency. and especially i dont want to run an editor on that link. Yeah, you'd probably want mosh;)

Espressosaurus 6y ago

It's not obsolete if it's running the apps that you need. I've done embedded work on MCUs with less horsepower than you probably have in your headphones. Sure it's not going to run windows 10, but it'll reliably control that device until the mechanical parts wear down. Same applies here, where the advantage of huge transistors means much greater resistance to cosmic rays, and a 20 year old design means all the bugs and quirks are well understood. The latest and greatest is nice, but not always the right choice for the problem at hand when you have the option of custom firmware and you aren't connected to a hostile internet.

com2kid 6y ago
> I've done embedded work on MCUs with less horsepower than you probably have in your headphones. MCUs are awesome. Given a 100mhz single core M3, half a meg of SRAM, some serious fun can be head. (honestly 512K SRAM would be insane, but doable now days) People don't realize that with a purpose built runtime and well crafted code, 100mhz is a LOT of power. Modern OSes, complicated software stacks, preemptive multi-tasking, and the need for flexible general purpose usage, eat up a huge percent (I'd say well over ~70%) of the usable computing capacity in the devices we deal with every day. Now I write web services that spend more CPU and RAM decoding JSON than entire runtimes I helped design. Go figure. Of course productivity is a bit higher, having to design and code the most optimal binary serialization formats for every single task takes a lot of time and effort, but wow is the end result fast and memory efficient!
- Espressosaurus 6y ago
  Half a meg of SRAM is typical for the ASICs I've worked with, so...not as insane as you might thing. Working with a 50 MHz ASIC on an old process with 256K of SRAM shared between two different companies and codebases, now that was fun.
- elihu 6y ago
  > Modern OSes, complicated software stacks, preemptive multi-tasking, and the need for flexible general purpose usage, eat up a huge percent (I'd say well over ~70%) of the usable computing capacity in the devices we deal with every day. I think a big part of it is security. Having to isolate address spaces is expensive. (Sometimes I like to imagine being able to run a unikernel OS where applications are written in something like safe Rust, everything runs in the same address space, and the OS delegates enforcing memory separation to a trusted compiler. So, things like writing to disk or the network are just regular function calls with no context switch overhead. In this model, unsafe code is treated sort of the way we treat kernel code or setuid binaries in Linux: regular users aren't allowed to run arbitrary unsafe code. With Spectre, I don't know if this sort of approach is still feasible on modern processors, or if it's possible for a compiler to guarantee that the compiled code is not susceptible to any known side-channel attacks.)

heavyset_go 6y ago

I keep some old computers running as a hobby, and you'd be surprised at how well they still run if you stick Linux on them.

sandworm101 6y ago
I have a new computer and you'd be suppressed how well they run if you stick linux on them too.
drewzero1 6y ago
I am also an old computer hobbyist, with an apparent emphasis on Macs between '90 and '05. I used to try to get them up to the highest spec and newest software they could support, but found that they feel so much more usable when running either their original release OS or something in the middle. I have used Mac OS 9 and OSX 10.4 on my '99 iMac DV (PPC 750/G3, 400MHz), and they feel worlds apart to use. Same with my Performa 6116CD (PPC 601, 60MHz) on System 7 vs. OS 8. (Of course, the rules are totally different with BSD and Linux, where you generally want the newest software that supports the architecture and it works great as long as you choose your packages wisely.)

Florin_Andrei 6y ago

It's only obsolete if it doesn't have the features you need. Which, in this case, include radiation resistance, which is much harder, if not impossible, to achieve with modern chips with very tiny transistors. Large transistors can much more easily shrug it off. The old chip is not just "good enough". It's the only thing that works.

deleted 6y ago

[deleted]