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Vintage technology and why some people still use it
- rbanffy 6y agoI was thinking about it the other day. We got a C64 Maxi (a full-sized C64 emulator) and my 8yo daughter loves some of the C64 games and was exploring a little bit the BASIC environment and realizing she can make a machine do her bidding by telling it what to do. I feel that screen time on it is far less worrying than on YouTube or Roblox.
- prionassembly 6y agoI thought Roblox was a Minecraft-like with building aspects to it?
- sokoloff 6y agoIt's an open game similar in some ways to Minecraft, but the amount of pre-canned games means it's more likely for a kid to lazily consume rather than work towards creating. (In a way that's slightly worse than Minecraft, IMO.)
- chaostheory 6y agoIt does. While it is more powerful than Minecraft's creation side (and your child programming in Lua has an entrepreneurial motivation for Roblox bucks which translates to real dollars), the downside is that it feels more separate from Minecraft's creative side, which is baked into the gameplay itself
- jandrese 6y agoRoblox games tend to be stuffed full of microtransactions, which is really annoying as a parent because kids eat that stuff up.
- mhh__ 6y agoIts hard to explain, but minecraft is more like an oliver postgate program like Bagpuss or the Clangers compared to one of the newer kids animated TV shows were stuff is exploding all the time.
- michaelbrave 6y agoMinecraft is a single game with the option of mods. Roblox is like a game marketplace with an engine where kids can make their own stuff and play each other's stuff (also microtransactions and the option for the kids to make money from said microtransactions).
- Aldipower 6y agoSimilar thing here. I even got a real C64C with games on floppies. My young daughter loves Giana Sisters, like me back in the days. Now a got another one. But with the fire button on port II defective. I repaired it on my own by replacing the according chip. What a great feeling. And the living retro scene is helping a lot! C64 forever!
- gdubs 6y agoSteve Woz in his biography talks about the uniqueness of his era, where you could know every single aspect of the machine you were working on — and how that let you squeeze every last drop out of it, often through really creative ways.
- foobar33333 6y agoThats still quite possible. Buy yourself an arduino board and the chip manual and you can know just about everything about it. Some slightly more sophisticated boards can even do video output and run modern programming languages while still not having an OS or complex firmware. If anything its even easier now because its dirt cheap and there are hundreds of hours of tutorials available for free. And the arduino tools have removed a lot of the pointless complexity like telling your compiler what clock speed and revision your chip is.
- rbanffy 6y ago> Buy yourself an arduino board and Not quite. You are programming the Arduino, but you are using a vastly more complicated computer to do it. There is a lot of beauty in the simplicity of having a machine simpler than an Arduino and be able to, using nothing but it, get an interesting result.
- foobar33333 6y agoI'm not sure it matters really other than nostalgia value. Its doubtfully more educational. And in any case, there are hobby kits where you can build a basic computer and program itself using the computer. Its all still around, only cheaper and more available. Its just not the _only_ option we have now.
- uncledave 6y agoI have quite a lot of vintage test and radio equipment. It’s cheap, completely dangerous and unreliable and fun to fix. I couldn’t be happier playing with it.
- the_only_law 6y agoI have a lot of retro telecom equipment (mostly WAN line analyzers tbf) and I guess you could call a lot of it cheap, but a lot of it is curiously expensive too.
- uncledave 6y agoVery cool. There’s some of that curiously expensive stuff in here too. My oscilloscope and plug-ins cost about $70k new. I paid $200 for it :). It’s amazing that stuff I couldn’t afford I can now
- WalterBright 6y agoI found my analog oscilloscope at a pawn shop for $40.
- mhh__ 6y agoI'm always jealous of Americans, you just don't get scopes in the skip here (UK).
- uncledave 6y agoUK here. Mostly cancelled this year but best place to get scopes are radio rallies https://rsgb.org/main/news/rallies/ https://rsgb.org/main/news/rallies/
- pm215 6y agoI think that's about what I paid for my analogue storage scope (it works by long-persistence phosphor on the tube, it's very neat though obviously not very practical these days; has a handful of valves in it as well as the CRT proper).
- css 6y agoVintage technology is often far more repairable than modern. My turntable and all the equipment I use with it included schematics and booklets with information about how they operate. Even cars used to be like this, but that has mostly been lost in the interest of operational simplicity. Almost all of my old household appliances included schematics, but new stuff only includes operational instructions. It makes me sad we have lost this culture of tinkering.
- johnzim 6y agoPlus we can rely on survivor bias! The stuff that’s still working was clearly built very well. The stuff that wasn’t isn’t working. “flight proven”
- varispeed 6y agoThis is because you cannot copyright schematics (you can only as a painting - connections between components can't be copyrighted, except if something was very unique you could get a patent). So the instant someone produced a successful device, a clone was being made. It was more difficult when products used microcontrollers etc, but some companies in China would just copy the original firmware, and maybe change here and there.
- AdmiralGinge 6y agoMy main sound system is a Leak Delta 70 from the early 1970s. It was an absolute joy to work on and bring back to life, especially the turntable which is a rebadged Lenco with a wonderful drive system I'd never seen before. It uses an idler wheel (which is still the original, it hasn't perished like they often do in cheaper ones) on a cone-shaped rotor. The speed selector is a slide with little protrusions at 16, 33, 45, and 78 rpm which slides the idler wheel along the cone-shaped rotor. That means you can choose any speed between the common ones giving you pitch control way before that was common. Despite being nearly half a century old and an uncommon design it was literally an afternoon to get it up and running again after it'd spent over a decade in my neighbour's garage. Ridiculously well made bit of kit.
- foobar33333 6y agoOn the other hand, I now have less things. I don't own a turntable anymore and no product replaced it. My phone has replaced tens of products which would have been dedicated devices before. Now I have one unrepairable phone that I replace every 4 years but thats probably less waste than buying things individually.
- madaxe_again 6y agoIt’s really hard to see an MP3 player from 2010 as “vintage technology in use” when there are PDP-11s still in use in nuclear power plants. Hell, I seem to recall there’s some plumbing company in the US that still uses a 1940s IBM electromechanical tabulator for their accounts.
- neuralRiot 6y ago>there’s some plumbing company in the US that still uses a 1940s IBM. Maybe not to that extreme but you’d be surprised how many industrial machines still running on early OSes and even with CRT monitors. If it’s not broken don’t fix it.
- nonford150 6y agoAlmost all of the equipment I've bought for SMT assembly is still Windows NT driven. I've got 2 Juki pick and place machines running Japanese DOS - built like a tank and never had issues.
- Nextgrid 6y agoThe worst part is that NT will keep running forever and is significantly more reliable than today’s Windows 10.
- taylodl 6y agoIf it works and fits your needs then why not continue using it?
- grishka 6y agoImagine the world if most software developers were thinking like that in regard to their technology choices. That would've been a good world. A world where software uses hardware to its full potential.
- bayindirh 6y agoI agree. After seeing demoscene and high performance computing, I refuse to accept "hardware is cheap, network is reliable" mentality, and using the latest and coolest stuff. Even a small amount of extra effort in the correct places makes a lot of difference. I still use Eclipse, btw.
- rhn_mk1 6y agoOn the other hand, if software makers kept using the same software, we'd still be programming in assembly, and play games in DOS :)
- grishka 6y agoI meant more like using tools appropriate for the job. Hint: JavaScript and friends isn't anywhere near an appropriate technology choice for a desktop app. Assembly is inconvenient, unforgiving, and tied to a particular CPU architecture. Object-oriented paradigm is well-suited and stood the test of time for making GUIs for example. And I don't mean stop inventing new things — I mean stop using stuff without understanding how it works under the hood. Stop embracing that kind of thinking and lowering the barrier to entry by wrapping everything into layers upon layers of "simple" abstractions and making it obscenely inefficient in the process. Stop "moving fast and breaking things". Stop making everyone think that software sucks, that that's its default state. I hate this "developer time is more expensive than machine time" saying. And there's no "premature optimization". Performance isn't a feature you can add at a later date whenever you feel like it — it's a function of the overall design of your product. Also, I can't help but feel like most of programming these days happens for the sake of the process itself, and the resulting product is more of an unintended side effect. > and play games in DOS Not necessarily a bad thing tbh.
- schnevets 6y agoWhen lockdown-related stresses got to me, I found a lot of comfort in my old Nintendo DS Lite. I never saw the appeal of retro game collecting, but that combination of comfortable design, good battery life, and gentle screen display was exactly what I needed to ignore the doom scrolling and stresses triggered my more modern technology. I have been tempted to get an emulator console, but they all have brighter, higher resolution screens and shorter battery lives, so I don't actually know if I'll get in the same "flow". Maybe I'll reassess after I finish this stack of JRPGs (which may take a decade). Once everything became "connected" (around 2010), obsolescence became inevitable. That Psion5 or Zen Stone can remain timeless because they will never sync a contact list or download a patch. The owners know what they do, and seem confident that they will not fail.
- illwrks 6y agoI picked up a WiiU in 2018 but never really gave it much attention until lockdown. Wii Sports was a good bit of entertainment at times with my family, but I spent many nights playing Mario kart online with strangers, or playing Zelda Breath of the Wild and a few others. Being in lockdown is frustrating but the opportunity to explore a digital world and engage with other people online is a good distraction.
- T-hawk 6y agoI've been doing what you describe with emulator consoles during the lockdown as well. I got the NES and SNES classic versions, and they do indeed have that same effect for me. I use them on a TV with no other computer or cable hookups, and it's perfectly comfortable to get into the flow of the game with no doom-scrolling temptations or other distractions.
- alasdair_ 6y agoIf you want a fun emulator project, try building a RetroPie arcade. I just finished one with my son for about $150, including the raspberry pie, the joysticks and buttons Amazon for $35), the wood for the enclosure and a super cheap screen and speakers. I’ve found so many fun arcade games that I never had a chance to play in a real arcade as well as galaga and other classics. Highly recommend!
- cosmotic 6y agoHow can a lossy compressed minidisc be "cleaner" than a lossless CD or similarly lossy but higher bitrate and more efficiently compressed digital file?
- jandrese 6y agoIt was mastered from a higher quality source? There could also be errors in the CD mastering, like setting the gain too high and chopping off the top of the song just to make the whole thing "louder". The digital files may have been taken from the CD since nobody can be bothered to go back and find the masters anymore.
- TacticalCoder 6y ago> The digital files may have been taken from the CD since nobody can be bothered to go back and find the masters anymore. All my music collection is FLAC files, bit-perfectly ripped from my CD collection. So, sure, they're digital files, compressed, but lossless. It is, for all practical purposes, just as good as a CD (as long as my external DAC is as good as the CD players' built-in DAC). The original CD may have been badly engineered but that's another topic. 3 000 CDs fits in more or less 1 TB in lossless (but compressed) CD quality (just to give an idea of how tiny it is using modern storage standards). Some people only use FLAC as archives but these files are so tiny in this day and age that I don't bother converting the FLAC to mp3s: I sent directly the bitperfectly ripped FLAC files to my DAC / stereo setup.
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- TheOtherHobbes 6y agoFLACs are better than CD quality. CDs in a player always have errors. The errors are covered up by a couple of stages of error correction. One is a transparent CRC, the other drops the effective bit depth down to 12 or so bits. The Block Error Rate (BLER) on CDs can be surprisingly high. So a CD in a player is always slightly compromised. When you rip a CD with a good ripper the drive does multiple passes over problem areas until the results are consistent. The final file is bit perfect, except on very damaged CDs.
- bangonkeyboard 6y agoI maintain a clutch of pre-iOS 7 devices to remind myself what good design was.
- hc-taway 6y agoAgreed that iOS7 was a big UX downgrade. It went from being the only OS I'd be halfway-comfortable turning older tech-illiterate relatives loose on, to yet another OS that would leave them confused and lost much of the time. Discoverability and intuitiveness plummeted with 7.
- WalterBright 6y agoI still run my Carver stereo and Dahlquist speakers all day every day I bought back in 1981 or so. Connected to it is my Technics SLQ2 turntable I bought new in the disco era. But the only time I use that is to rip a vinyl, snap crackle pop and all. The stereo gets its signal from a LAN music server.
- 0xdeadbeefbabe 6y agoPhysicists still use those vintage laws of motion. I still use this vintage keyboard layout.
- jjav 6y agoAnd these vintage A/C outlets and power cords. Imagine if we had to rewire the house and all appliances with the frequency of USB connector changes!
- unkoman 6y agoI can now afford the high end tech of a bygone era which is leads to high end products that do not break as they have survived for over 30 years.
- MarkusWandel 6y agoI love older high-end technology. For a couple of decades my stereo receiver was a Sony STR-7800SD. Absolute top of the line from the late 1970s, built like a tank, and component level repairable (the one time it needed fixing - a custom Sony part no less) parts were still available two decades after the thing was new. Got it at a garage sale for a song in the early 1990s. Given away since. I don't do stereo components any more, just listen with bluetooth headphones from a smartphone like everyone else.
- Klwohu 6y ago>like everyone else Believe it or not stereo systems are still frequently purchased even in 2021.
- lowbloodsugar 6y agoRight? My speakers are nearly thirty years old. My current set up, new, would be $30k, adjusted for inflation.
- rootsudo 6y agoI've been buying older macbook pros and am pleasantly surprised how easy they were to repair and service. They still are great machines today if your main usage is an ide, browser and video. Don't get me wrong, I love my new mbp, but, I don't see any true difference in daily usage besides weight, and screen resolution.
- frosted-flakes 6y agoI love the repairability of the old iMacs and Apple displays. When something got jammed in the disk drive, I was shocked at how easy it was to pull the glass off the screen (no tools, it's held on with magnets), and then remove the 8 or so Torx screws holding the screen on, unplug a couple of cables, and have full access to everything inside it. The downside is that those machines are all extremely heavy.
- DubiousPusher 6y agoOne of my personal favorites. Practically a prehistoric "IoT" censor at this point. It needs access to your wifi and an email address. No apps, no flows, no unsupported platform nonsense. https://www.amazon.com/Zircon-Leak-Alert-Contactor-Pack/dp/B01J39MJ16 https://www.amazon.com/Zircon-Leak-Alert-Contactor-Pack/dp/B...
- bullen 6y agoHow you can write an article about old hardware without mentioning the C64 is beyond me. Today there are more scene releases for C64 than for any other device, including PC. AFAIC Apple 1 & 2 where just prototypes for the final 8-bit computer with SID (audio) and VIC2 (graphics) chips that blew everything else away until 16-bit!
- jjav 6y agoI use a lot of technology I guess some would consider vintage. It is not due to any specific preference for vintage or as a vintage hobby. It's just that a lot of the older products are so much better for the consumer. It makes me sad because we have the technology and resources as an industry to make so much better products than ever before, but we just don't focus on quality for the consumer anymore. Can we collectively care to do better? Today main product design drivers are collecting usage data and selling it to advertisers, enforcing dependency on cloud services, preventing repairability and ownership (vs. ongoing licensing). All these factors improve recurring revenue for the producing company but all of them are anti-features for the consumer. All my cars are older and will forever be. No TV screen on the dash to go bad, no integrated CAN bus making diagnostics and repair a nightmare, no fly by wire nonsense. No phone-home spyware or OTA update horrors. If a relay goes bad it's a physical relay I can swap, easy. And so on, everything is fixable. I unpacked my old Wii to play with my son. All the games are on DVD, so I own them, they won't disappear from the cloud, no dependency on internet connectivity, no subscriptions to pay. For music in the house I run many squeezebox devices. The server is self-hosted and open source, no dependency on anything external, no subscriptions or cloud service to be suddenly cancelled.
- cwyers 6y ago> All my cars are older and will forever be. No TV screen on the dash to go bad, no integrated CAN bus making diagnostics and repair a nightmare, no fly by wire nonsense. No phone-home spyware or OTA update horrors. If a relay goes bad it's a physical relay I can swap, easy. And so on, everything is fixable. Fuel efficiency is worse in older cars: https://www.bts.gov/content/average-fuel-efficiency-us-light-duty-vehicles https://www.bts.gov/content/average-fuel-efficiency-us-light... So are emissions: https://www.epa.gov/automotive-trends/highlights-automotive-trends-report https://www.epa.gov/automotive-trends/highlights-automotive-... Safety standards, too. All of those things are quality benefits for the median consumer (who doesn't even know what a CAN bus is).
- d1zzy 6y agoYeah, but on the other hand... http://www.bbc.com/autos/story/20160809-your-car-is-not-your-friend http://www.bbc.com/autos/story/20160809-your-car-is-not-your...
- rchaud 6y agoThe best thing about old school tech was a feeling of permanence. Pop a cassette out of the walkman, and it'll pick up where you left off. If you wanted to make a mixtape, you had to record each song one by one in your CD-Cassette combo boombox. The last Walkman I owned was in 2001. After that it was all discman players and non-iPod MP3 players. I still have relatively strong memories attached to each of them as they were permanent fixture on my person prior to smartphones arriving. I've tried to recapture it on my Neocities page here: https://bad-mood-rising.neocities.org/mp3.html https://bad-mood-rising.neocities.org/mp3.html
- airhead969 6y agoStanford University Student Housing facility maintenance used to be one of the largest hold-out users of Apple Newtons, up until 2004-2005. Ask me how I know. Edit: I drive an '85 VW Vanagon camper with the original 1.9L motor, fuel injection, and control system that lacks OBD2.
- yarone 6y agoPsion 5 had one of the best tiny keyboards of all time. Amazing little device.
- johnzim 6y agoHe uses a Psion! OPL was my first programming language after basic! I made some fun games in OPL. It was a really wonderful basic variant, perfect for the device.
- varispeed 6y agoVintage tech does not track you, you don't have to sign up to manufacturer website in order to use it, you don't have to pay subscriptions. If something goes wrong, you can easily access schematics and often spare parts are still available (electronic components) and the build quality is often exceptional comparing to today's brittle devices made to be replaced within a year.
- whatever1 6y agoI am using vintage hard disk back ups of my files after I lost my research/work OneNote notebook due to the Amazing cloud-only design of the (Windows 10 / modern / metro or whatever they call it these days) OneNote app. Never again.
- pabs3 6y agoIs anyone making "vintage" tech on modern silicon process nodes? Then those AA batteries could last even longer.
- mrweasel 6y agoAfter I been watching a ton of videos about retro-computing, mostly C64 and Amiga, I've been wondering if it would be possible to remake the custom Commodore/MOS chips. You can't get the original schematic and masks obviously, but the chips are pretty big by modern standards. Surely you could send a functional chip to China and have it reverse engineered. You also don't need 5nm processing nodes to remake them, even a 130nm would be an improvement, and I have the feeling that even on 40nm there would be ample fabs able to make them. It's probably more difficult than I imagine, and less efficient than just replacing the whole system with a FPGA.
- patrickk 6y agoHave a browse on /r/iPod. People love the iPod classics and the earlier generations in particular are becoming collectors items.
- nbzso 6y agoGood design is human centric, it serves the function of delivering meaning, added value and positive experience longterm. Todays designs are corporate centric, they convey "value for the consumer" but in actuality use legislation loopholes and design dark patterns to maximise corporate profits. I drive classic cars (under 3k yearly) and every trip is a delightful. No distractions, no absence of control. Craftsmanship and quality of materials. Driving Electric cars will be mandatory, I plan to convert my classic cars. No tracking, no data gathering and corporate overlords for me.