13 ms·

Why use old computers and operating systems?

167 points by hutrdvnj 6y ago

lioeters 6y ago
> Error establishing a database connection Archived: https://web.archive.org/web/20210319083317/http://john.ankarstrom.se/desktop/2021/03/18/why-old-systems/ https://web.archive.org/web/20210319083317/http://john.ankar...
dcminter 6y ago
At the time of writing the answer appears to be "Error establishing a database connection" which tickled me as, well, accessing my childhood 8 bit computers never involved database errors!
- prox 6y ago
  Syntax error!
rany_ 6y ago
Repost: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26506812 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26506812
grawprog 6y ago
>I think the only solution is to stop expecting every computer to be general-purpose Why? Computers are general purpose. The software we put on computers may have specific purposes, but computers are general purpose. As for 'computer powered appliances' plenty of those exist and the general trend does seem to be to abstract the computer away inside some kind of locked down appliance. I hope general purpose computers never go away. They're one of the most powerful and amazing tools ever created by humans. It's really too bad more people don't seem to understand or appreciate that.
- thomastjeffery 6y ago
  I think a lot of people get turned off from general purpose computers because they are using proprietary operating systems and software that mitigate the "general purpose" aspect. The most "general purpose" software most people interact with is a browser.
  - grawprog 6y ago
    Computers are general purpose in that they are capable of doing anything possible by a Turing machine with limited memory. Software built on top of that can be whatever we want within those limits. Even most proprietary operating systems are relatively general purpose. On windows and Mac os, you can generally acquire a wide range of software capable of doing many things and can create your own with relative ease. Smartphones get a little less general purpose, again above the level of the actual computer though. In the case of smartphones and consoles and such, the extra software thwarting the general purpose nature of the computer is buried a little deeper as firmware flashed onto rom chips. Then with computer powered appliance type devices, the only software is whatever is flashed onto the rom chip buried inside there that you can't really touch without some hardware modding. In the end, computers have never stopped being general purpose, and likely never will. It's just the software separating the user from the computer is getting deeper and deeper into hardware. I realize there's good security and user friendliness arguments to be made for this kind of thing, but it's a worrying trend. It'll create almost a pseudo class system with the people who have real computers and can use them to make money and do things and the people who have toys that suck money from them and feed them consumer garbage.
    - akiselev 6y ago
      I’m having a hard time coming up with anything that a modern OS on a modern CPU can’t do - they’re about as general purpose as can be for any nontrivial but nuanced definition of “general purpose.” The only exception I can think of is real-time IO, which we offload to specialized chips with buffers and queues through PCIe and other busses. However, that’s a physical limitation since these peripherals would be impractical to implement in software until FPGA tech improves and gets significantly cheaper.
- cpach 6y ago
  NB: He wrote ”I think the only solution is to stop expecting every computer to be general-purpose” (my emphasis). He didn’t write ”I think the only solution is to stop expecting computers to be general-purpose”.
  - agilob 6y ago
    >He wrote ”I think the only solution is to stop expecting every computer to be general-purpose” Which is a bit ironic, as his website doesn't load on my Firefox (disabled HTTP-only connections), and after I added exception, it still looks like crap with DarkReader [1] because the website forces white background, and now I have grey font, with my sight problems, it's just too bright to read. Maybe it's time to stop expecting every website to be even displayed on every browser? https://darkreader.org/ https://darkreader.org/ edit: 99%+ website work fine with darkreader
    - molofaha 6y ago
      ...he's using the old default Wordpress theme from 10+ years ago. Surely the issue can only be with darkreader? At the time this theme was made, it would have worked with every browser, and the theme hasn't changed.
- ehnto 6y ago
  On the other hand, I don't need my fridge to be a general purpose computer when people start making them smarter. Embedded software gains a lot of robustness from being separate from general purpose computing software pipelines. If my toaster starts running node.js and needs internet connectivity I may go find my own shark to jump.
phito 6y ago
Sounds like nostalgia to me.
0xCMP 6y ago
I agree with the idea that old computers and OSes might still be useful and that they have a lot of ideas we simply don't even get to experience today. However the final points of learning to accept that general purpose computing isn't needed or something is not well worded and in it's current version I completely disagree with. Old hardware can be kept and used for specific, non-general purposes. And new hardware could be made which is locked down for security and maintenance reasons (think... routers or IoT bridges...). But a world where we resign ourselves to machines which are not general computing devices is not one I think we should be moving towards.
- chasil 6y ago
  Let me give you a more concrete reason to maintain legacy systems. We run a major set of COBOL applications developed under VAX/VMS, running under ACMS, utilizing TDMS. Please note, I can barely spell some of these things, let alone grasp what they do. The application software that my predecessors wrote for these systems supports thousands of users, and is a vertical wall of technical debt. I am far from the decision-maker, but I run the corporate-mandated communication gateways. I just switched my bastions from stunnel-telnet to tinyssh-telnet. At least my keys don't expire now, and the crypto is strict DJB. We make due with what we have. I do the best I can. I respect the work of those that came before (and it signs my paychecks).
madpata 6y ago
I am not GP ng to clutter my home with old, bulky and single-purpose computers. > and the computers needed to run them are cheap Old computers aren't always cheap. Retro PCs get expensive quick.
ajarmst 6y ago
At my institution, our students take a series of courses on programming a simple microcontroller (and were doing so long before IoT/Arduino made that fashionable again). We worked with the HC11 until a few years ago when we moved to the 9s12. They even worked for a while in Assembly Language until quite recently (we now use C exclusively). In this case it wasn’t nostalgia or joy or anything subtle: modern computers are too complex to permit a useful mental model of how they operate. These ‘older’ systems (and their modern simple cousins) are a fantastic way to learn how a computer actually works with sufficient insight that it gives you a much deeper feel for how more complex descendants work. As one example, pointers and indirection are always a topic that students learning programming struggle with. Explaining that topic is much, much easier to a roomful of people who’ve worked directly with address registers and offsets.
- ajarmst 6y ago
  My father believed strongly in this. I first learned to program in my early teens (at the time there were precisely two computers in a 300 km range of where we lived, my father was an operator on one of them). The ‘computer’ I learned on was made of cardboard, and I was the CPU: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CARDboard_Illustrative_Aid_to_Computation https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CARDboard_Illustrative_Aid_to_...
  - jstanley 6y ago
    That looks great, I'd love to have a play with one. I wonder what's the easiest way to get one, perhaps a modern replica? It almost looks like it might be possible to implement as a PDF that you just have to print on some card and cut out?
    - BallyBrain 6y ago
      Enjoy! https://www.instructables.com/CARDIAC-CARDboard-Illustrative-Aid-to-Computation-/ https://www.instructables.com/CARDIAC-CARDboard-Illustrative...
      - 6y ago
hx2a 6y ago
A reason to use old computers that I don't see mentioned here has to do with accessibility. People in the US usually have current hardware such as the latest Mac laptop, but that is not the case in all other countries. Current hardware is a bit of a luxury that we don't fully appreciate. I have an open source project with global users, and one person in Mexico contacted me looking for help. He was trying to create 3D visualizations of MRI brain scans and was running it on an old computer that hardly anybody in the US would consider using. Happily I had done testing on an old laptop and much performance tuning during my development. I was able to help him get his project working. It was still slow, but at least it was usable. It wouldn't have been if my code only worked on current hardware.
- offtop5 6y ago
  Technically, couldn't he install a very lightweight Linux distribution. I have a few Raspberry Pi zeros and I actually enjoy coding within the limitations of said hardware, when you know you only have 500 megs of RAM on the device you have to solve problems differently
  - jimktrains2 6y ago
    For some reason I find "only have 500megs of RAM" very amusing. Many/most modern laptops only have 8-16 times more RAM than that. I'm genuinely curious what problems you're working where that "limitation" is your bottleneck and not the processor speed (which at 1GHz is still pretty speedy for many/most tasks other than pure computation (e.g. machine learning training and processing large datasets for statistics)). I'm also assuming you're treating it as a dedicated tool, and not doing tasks while running a DE and web browser at the same time.
    - inetknght 6y ago
      Browsing "modern" websites for one
    - offtop5 6y ago
      Ram tends to create issues when you're building stuff locally. I used ram as an off hand example of something which is limited. I actually did go out and buy a Raspberry Pi 4 8gb since I want to start processing some machine learning, and the 512 on the Zero won't cut it
spideymans 6y ago
>On this blog, I write about the various computers I use and about the operating systems I use on them. Apart from Windows 7, which is relatively modern, these include Mac OS 10.6 Snow Leopard, which at this point is quite old Completely nitpicking here, but both operating systems are the exact same age. I agree that Snow Leopard feels significantly less up-to-date than Windows 7 though, which speaks to how quickly Apple’s operating systems are obsoleted (and this isn't necessarily a bad thing).
accrual 6y ago
For others who love old software and hardware I'll share two of my favorite sites, an excellent retro PC emulator, 86Box [0] and a clean and well-maintained software archive, WinWorld [1]. These two sites together have provided me hours of exploration into old hardware, BIOS screens I'd never otherwise see, and plenty of interesting software scenarios. [0] https://github.com/86Box/86Box https://github.com/86Box/86Box [1] https://winworldpc.com https://winworldpc.com
- the_af 6y ago
  Interesting. What's the difference between 86Box and DOSBox?
  - acidburnNSA 6y ago
    For one thing, upon brief investigation I don't think 86Box has Linux builds. Might be mistaken though.
    - badsectoracula 6y ago
      86box is a fork of PCem (though it does get updates with new stuff from it) with IMO a nicer UI. If you are on Linux you ca use PCem instead.
  - badsectoracula 6y ago
    DOSBox is made for emulating a PC running some form of DOS to play games. It does emulate enough of PC hardware to do that and because of booter games (ie. games running directly from their own boot disks) it can also boot MS-DOS. However the development team doesn't care for non-game uses. There are some forks (e.g. DOSBox-X) that do (and also add more features) but in general it is more of a "compatibility" layer than a full emulator - think of it as Rosetta for DOS. 86box (a fork of PCem) is a full PC hardware emulator trying to emulate original real hardware as faithfully as possible, including their performance characteristics, limitations, etc. You can actually install Windows XP inside 86box on an emulated Pentium MMX 233MHz with an S3 Virge and a Voodoo 2 (though for better performance -and compatibility- Windows 95 is better).
brabel 6y ago
All software is bound to keep changing forever unless people stop using it... even after it's past its "perfect" place in terms of usability and benefits it brings to its intended audience (I am not saying perfect in terms of having no bugs - though that may also be the case)... because we can only know that in hindsight and we have no way of measuring this objectively. Some old Unix tools are perhaps the closest we have to that. (ls, cd, tail...) but in terms of UI, I can't think of anything. As the needs of users change, so does what the "perfect software" for such users looks like... however, I would think there's usually a decades-long period in which some software could stay just as it is without there being possible improvements one could make to it. I think it would be really interesting if we could find a good way to tell when that "perfection" is reached and tried to intentionally stop changing what is literally already perfect (though that will never happen in a commercial product, for obvious reasons).
- Siira 6y ago
  Old unix tools are serviceable, but nowhere near perfect. I find exa better than ls, fd better than find, rg better than grep, etc.
  - totetsu 6y ago
    Thanks for reminding me to use exa
b06tmm 6y ago
I recently inherited a 32-bit laptop that runs Vista, any recommendations of what version of Linux to try?
- jsyedidia 6y ago
  Debian with Raspberry Pi Desktop https://www.raspberrypi.org/software/raspberry-pi-desktop/ https://www.raspberrypi.org/software/raspberry-pi-desktop/
- lelanthran 6y ago
  > I recently inherited a 32-bit laptop that runs Vista, any recommendations of what version of Linux to try? I'll have to check to be sure that it is 32bit(l/top is downstairs and I'm lazy), but I do my personal projects on a 2008 Asus that came with Vista and 2GB of RAM. I literally use it daily using: 1. Emacs 2. Vim + every plugin you can think of for development 3. GCC + all the devtools for C development 4. Standard gui tools (browser, some solitaire games, dia for diagrams, etc). I am pretty certain I am using this: https://www.linuxmint.com/edition.php?id=255 https://www.linuxmint.com/edition.php?id=255 Once again, I might be wrong (although "pretty certain" covers that), but you can give it a try.
- pomian 6y ago
  Mint has all sorts of versions that work great.
- silentsysadmin 6y ago
  I would load up Slackware 14.2 on that bad boy.
- squarefoot 6y ago
  32 bit aren't a problem, RAM however could be. I've run Debian on 32 bit Atom netbooks with 1 Gig RAM without problems. Using light desktop environments such as XFCE or smaller ones would allow also 512MB RAM or even less. Years ago I successfully run Debian + LXDE desktop on one of those toy Win-CE Chinese laptops with just 128MB RAM. CPU was a WM8505 clocked at a whopping 300MHz. And then there's ELKS Linux which would work on 8086 CPUs too which I successfully run on a industrial PC many moons ago. https://github.com/jbruchon/elks https://github.com/jbruchon/elks Extremely small systems aside, it can run fine on decently equipped laptops or netbooks. Surfing the web with a full featured browser such as Firefox or using heavy apps such as LibreOffice without having the system swap too much would likely require no less than 2 Gigs or more, but if you do network maintenance using command line tools, even the smallest netbook with half a Gig RAM becomes an useful tool to keep in the bag along with bigger laptops.
benlumen 6y ago
Anyone else in the UK thinking what a fine thing it would be to designate the space for a dedicated “HyperCard” machine? I practically operate a one-in, one-out policy for retro stuff like this.
sleavey 6y ago
It's fitting that this post is written on a blog running the very old (original?) default theme from WordPress 1.0.
TedDoesntTalk 6y ago
> imagine if spreadsheet programs like Microsoft Excel stopped being developed and eventually just disappeared – that’s the level of significance that HyperCard had. I often hear similar claims about the significance of HyperCard. But if HyperCard was so significant to so many people, wouldn’t it have been ported and/or rewritten over the years to still be available today? Even if not by Apple, then by someone else? That’s happened to Excel and other programs. So why not HyperCard? (Serious question)
- the_only_law 6y ago
  There’s LiveCode (https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/LiveCode https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/LiveCode) Which is the modern evolution of HyperCard to my understanding
- chillpenguin 6y ago
  In some cases it has to do with the operating system cooperating or not. Modern operating systems don't allow certain things to work due to restrictions in what apps are capable of. Consider a Smalltalk OS, where you can dynamically link objects across "apps" in interesting ways (see Alan Kay's "Tribute to Ted Nelson" where he shows a demo of this). You simply cannot do such a thing with mac/windows/linux. In the case of Hypercard, I cannot say whether or not this is the case. It could be that Hypercard is absolutely possible today. But I wouldn't doubt it if it was somewhat unusable on modern systems due to this "cooperation" issue I mentioned. It may need buy-in from other apps and/or the host OS for it to work fully as intended. For another example, consider emacs. Emacs effectively gives you the lisp-machine experience, but the problem is it isn't integrated with the rest of the system. You sort of have to live in an emacs bubble. With hypercard, you could surely get it running, but would you be in a bubble? Ideally you could use hypercard to script the rest of your system as well. What we should want is something like a "card" that could "link" to a specific cell in a spreadsheet, as an example. Or a card that could open a PDF to a specific page. The more the rest of the system "plays along", the more powerful something like hypercard could be.
- brudgers 6y ago
  Hypercard was replaced by the World Wide Web and Power Point. The World Wide Web because it solved distribution and vendor lock-in. Power Point because slide shows were an important use case Windows Desktops were much much more common in the 1990's and 00's than Macs. Power Point also provided much better integration with wordprocessors and spreadsheets.
jcpst 6y ago
I worked as a recording engineer for several years. The first studio I worked at, the B room had an SSL 6000 G Series and a Pro Tools 888 system hooked up to an Apple machine running OS9. This was 2008, so already old back then, but with the way it was configured plus the 888 system, it was still valuable. I have friends who work in water treatment infrastructure, and out of necessity carry laptops with VMs for DOS, windows 3.1, etc. Even my AD/DA converter at home is no longer supported. I use a 2010 mac mini running OSX 10.11 with it. As long as people are using older hardware that interfaces with a computer, older OSes and machines will be useful.
someperson 6y ago
It's actually possible to browse the web on retro PCs by setting up a Raspberry Pi running "Browservice": https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5MjZdKtv9ak https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5MjZdKtv9ak If you're on a machine with only a RJ11 / 56k dial-up port, you can also setup Raspberry Pi to handle this too: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NFUTInM7gq8 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NFUTInM7gq8 Hope this helps some retrocomputing enthusiasts!
- neurostimulant 6y ago
  In addition to Browservice, WRP is also pretty good for very old browser that can't do anything but to load images. As long as you can load a webpage with image map support, you can browse any modern websites on it (I think Browservice requires some js support on the client browser). https://github.com/tenox7/wrp https://github.com/tenox7/wrp
lew89 6y ago
Sometimes I used old computers because they appeared functional enough. Not so long ago I used a computer from late 2000s and it was a quite normal user experience on Linux (on lightweight window manager of course) with a small exception of web browser. Amount of scripts and data on modern sites caused problems, made whole OS hang often. If only JS was turned off, no problem.
- badsectoracula 6y ago
  Coincidentally i'm writing this from my late 2009 iMac. It is already more than a decade old but i think it is a perfectly fine computer. With the latest version of Firefox every site works. The main issue it has is that it is a bit sluggish but i think an additional 8GB of RAM (it has 4GB) and perhaps an SSD would make it feel perfectly fine. Sadly Apple doesn't seem to agree and the last version of macOS to support it is 10.13 - which itself isn't supported anymore as of December 2020 (just ~3 years after it was released, which is kinda mad IMO). Most things seem to work fine so far (most open source applications seem to support even older versions anyway), though Homebrew (which i used to install a couple of command line tools) does warn that they have no official support for it and some stuff may break (fortunately that didn't happen).
  - dcassett 6y ago
    I'm using an early 2008 MBP with Debian Buster with 6GB of RAM and SSD. The nvidia-340 driver is still supported so Youtube works nicely. With mbpfan it does not overheat. Touchpad and suspend are working pretty well. The Amazon website with Firefox is where I get warnings about a script taking too long.
wizzerking 6y ago
When I was an independent consultant in the mountains in northern california. There were companies running devices from their Windows 7 and Window NT computers where the device manufacturer had gone belly up, quit or just decided to not support their previous products. I had several sucesses using WINE on Linux. The companies were so grateful that in some cases I get free pastry, coffee, and/or sandwiches Here in LA some schools are in a bad way so I put Linux on old hardware and teach the kids what is different between linux, libre Office, GIMP, and other FOSS software. I freely transfer my HATE of M$Soft and MAC to these young minds
dcassett 6y ago
I have an old Win2K box with a P3-450 with a SB-Live! soundcard which has some nice environmental effects such as reverb that I use for recording. I haven't used it much in the past few years because I need to clone the two drives, which are close to 20 years old. Rebuilding the system from scratch would be a nightmare.
transfire 6y ago
Emulators can give you the best at of both worlds.
dudeinjapan 6y ago
"Why use old computers and operating systems?" > link returns "Error establishing a database connection." Is this an attempt at ironic humor?
dudeinjapan 6y ago
At Brown U.'s semiconductor fab cleanroom we had a Windows 3.1 PC controlling our plasma etching machine. One day we opened up its case--not a speck of visible dust despite operating continuously since the early 90's!
- frabert 6y ago
  Isn't that expected, given it was operating in a cleanroom?
  - dudeinjapan 6y ago
    Sure, but still surprising on some level.
elevation 6y ago
I've enjoyed installing windows 98 on old hardware; unlike windows xp, the OS installs without network authorization and runs mind of legacy software. But the couple of old towers I've gotten from friend's closets have lacked driver CDs. Once you reinstall windows (perhaps because of a bad hard drive sector) it becomes impossible to get the sound card working again or better than 16 colors out of the graphics card. Vendors like even intel no longer provide 80710E chipset drivers and the ones for download on shareware sites don't work.
anticensor 6y ago
The website crashed, failing to withstand viewers from HN.
hazeii 6y ago
One thing about old computers is how hackable the hardware is. On old PCs, things like parallel ports, serial ports, joysticks and so on are trivially easy to interface to and have great performance. Even further back, generating and measuring periods in the sub-microsecond range was just a quick bit of assembler on 4MHZ Z80's back in the early 80's. Although that sort of hacking is still very possible now, it's the province of things like PICs, Arduino's and Pi's which are all relatively specialised and require far more effort to get started with than sticking a couple of wires in a parallel port and doing an outportb().
0df8dkdf 6y ago
> Quite literally, the only way to use HyperCard is to get a hold of an old Mac – or emulate it, but emulation always falls short of the real deal. That’s why HyperCard alone is a pretty clear reason to use Mac OS 9 Not to mention Beautiful Doreena! Misses
0df8dkdf 6y ago
> Quite literally, the only way to use HyperCard is to get a hold of an old Mac – or emulate it, but emulation always falls short of the real deal. That’s why HyperCard alone is a pretty clear reason to use Mac OS 9 Not to mention Beautiful Doreena! Misses Mac OS pre X.

167 points by hutrdvnj 6y ago

> Error establishing a database connection Archived: https://web.archive.org/web/20210319083317/http://john.ankarstrom.se/desktop/2021/03/18/why-old-systems/ https://web.archive.org/web/20210319083317/http://john.ankar...

dcminter 6y ago

At the time of writing the answer appears to be "Error establishing a database connection" which tickled me as, well, accessing my childhood 8 bit computers never involved database errors!

prox 6y ago
Syntax error!

rany_ 6y ago

Repost: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26506812 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26506812

grawprog 6y ago

>I think the only solution is to stop expecting every computer to be general-purpose Why? Computers are general purpose. The software we put on computers may have specific purposes, but computers are general purpose. As for 'computer powered appliances' plenty of those exist and the general trend does seem to be to abstract the computer away inside some kind of locked down appliance. I hope general purpose computers never go away. They're one of the most powerful and amazing tools ever created by humans. It's really too bad more people don't seem to understand or appreciate that.

thomastjeffery 6y ago
I think a lot of people get turned off from general purpose computers because they are using proprietary operating systems and software that mitigate the "general purpose" aspect. The most "general purpose" software most people interact with is a browser.
- grawprog 6y ago
  Computers are general purpose in that they are capable of doing anything possible by a Turing machine with limited memory. Software built on top of that can be whatever we want within those limits. Even most proprietary operating systems are relatively general purpose. On windows and Mac os, you can generally acquire a wide range of software capable of doing many things and can create your own with relative ease. Smartphones get a little less general purpose, again above the level of the actual computer though. In the case of smartphones and consoles and such, the extra software thwarting the general purpose nature of the computer is buried a little deeper as firmware flashed onto rom chips. Then with computer powered appliance type devices, the only software is whatever is flashed onto the rom chip buried inside there that you can't really touch without some hardware modding. In the end, computers have never stopped being general purpose, and likely never will. It's just the software separating the user from the computer is getting deeper and deeper into hardware. I realize there's good security and user friendliness arguments to be made for this kind of thing, but it's a worrying trend. It'll create almost a pseudo class system with the people who have real computers and can use them to make money and do things and the people who have toys that suck money from them and feed them consumer garbage.
  - akiselev 6y ago
    I’m having a hard time coming up with anything that a modern OS on a modern CPU can’t do - they’re about as general purpose as can be for any nontrivial but nuanced definition of “general purpose.” The only exception I can think of is real-time IO, which we offload to specialized chips with buffers and queues through PCIe and other busses. However, that’s a physical limitation since these peripherals would be impractical to implement in software until FPGA tech improves and gets significantly cheaper.
cpach 6y ago
NB: He wrote ”I think the only solution is to stop expecting every computer to be general-purpose” (my emphasis). He didn’t write ”I think the only solution is to stop expecting computers to be general-purpose”.
- agilob 6y ago
  >He wrote ”I think the only solution is to stop expecting every computer to be general-purpose” Which is a bit ironic, as his website doesn't load on my Firefox (disabled HTTP-only connections), and after I added exception, it still looks like crap with DarkReader [1] because the website forces white background, and now I have grey font, with my sight problems, it's just too bright to read. Maybe it's time to stop expecting every website to be even displayed on every browser? https://darkreader.org/ https://darkreader.org/ edit: 99%+ website work fine with darkreader
  - molofaha 6y ago
    ...he's using the old default Wordpress theme from 10+ years ago. Surely the issue can only be with darkreader? At the time this theme was made, it would have worked with every browser, and the theme hasn't changed.
ehnto 6y ago
On the other hand, I don't need my fridge to be a general purpose computer when people start making them smarter. Embedded software gains a lot of robustness from being separate from general purpose computing software pipelines. If my toaster starts running node.js and needs internet connectivity I may go find my own shark to jump.

phito 6y ago

Sounds like nostalgia to me.

0xCMP 6y ago

I agree with the idea that old computers and OSes might still be useful and that they have a lot of ideas we simply don't even get to experience today. However the final points of learning to accept that general purpose computing isn't needed or something is not well worded and in it's current version I completely disagree with. Old hardware can be kept and used for specific, non-general purposes. And new hardware could be made which is locked down for security and maintenance reasons (think... routers or IoT bridges...). But a world where we resign ourselves to machines which are not general computing devices is not one I think we should be moving towards.

chasil 6y ago
Let me give you a more concrete reason to maintain legacy systems. We run a major set of COBOL applications developed under VAX/VMS, running under ACMS, utilizing TDMS. Please note, I can barely spell some of these things, let alone grasp what they do. The application software that my predecessors wrote for these systems supports thousands of users, and is a vertical wall of technical debt. I am far from the decision-maker, but I run the corporate-mandated communication gateways. I just switched my bastions from stunnel-telnet to tinyssh-telnet. At least my keys don't expire now, and the crypto is strict DJB. We make due with what we have. I do the best I can. I respect the work of those that came before (and it signs my paychecks).

madpata 6y ago

I am not GP ng to clutter my home with old, bulky and single-purpose computers. > and the computers needed to run them are cheap Old computers aren't always cheap. Retro PCs get expensive quick.

ajarmst 6y ago

At my institution, our students take a series of courses on programming a simple microcontroller (and were doing so long before IoT/Arduino made that fashionable again). We worked with the HC11 until a few years ago when we moved to the 9s12. They even worked for a while in Assembly Language until quite recently (we now use C exclusively). In this case it wasn’t nostalgia or joy or anything subtle: modern computers are too complex to permit a useful mental model of how they operate. These ‘older’ systems (and their modern simple cousins) are a fantastic way to learn how a computer actually works with sufficient insight that it gives you a much deeper feel for how more complex descendants work. As one example, pointers and indirection are always a topic that students learning programming struggle with. Explaining that topic is much, much easier to a roomful of people who’ve worked directly with address registers and offsets.

ajarmst 6y ago
My father believed strongly in this. I first learned to program in my early teens (at the time there were precisely two computers in a 300 km range of where we lived, my father was an operator on one of them). The ‘computer’ I learned on was made of cardboard, and I was the CPU: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CARDboard_Illustrative_Aid_to_Computation https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CARDboard_Illustrative_Aid_to_...
- jstanley 6y ago
  That looks great, I'd love to have a play with one. I wonder what's the easiest way to get one, perhaps a modern replica? It almost looks like it might be possible to implement as a PDF that you just have to print on some card and cut out?
  - BallyBrain 6y ago
    Enjoy! https://www.instructables.com/CARDIAC-CARDboard-Illustrative-Aid-to-Computation-/ https://www.instructables.com/CARDIAC-CARDboard-Illustrative...
    - 6y ago

hx2a 6y ago

A reason to use old computers that I don't see mentioned here has to do with accessibility. People in the US usually have current hardware such as the latest Mac laptop, but that is not the case in all other countries. Current hardware is a bit of a luxury that we don't fully appreciate. I have an open source project with global users, and one person in Mexico contacted me looking for help. He was trying to create 3D visualizations of MRI brain scans and was running it on an old computer that hardly anybody in the US would consider using. Happily I had done testing on an old laptop and much performance tuning during my development. I was able to help him get his project working. It was still slow, but at least it was usable. It wouldn't have been if my code only worked on current hardware.

offtop5 6y ago
Technically, couldn't he install a very lightweight Linux distribution. I have a few Raspberry Pi zeros and I actually enjoy coding within the limitations of said hardware, when you know you only have 500 megs of RAM on the device you have to solve problems differently
- jimktrains2 6y ago
  For some reason I find "only have 500megs of RAM" very amusing. Many/most modern laptops only have 8-16 times more RAM than that. I'm genuinely curious what problems you're working where that "limitation" is your bottleneck and not the processor speed (which at 1GHz is still pretty speedy for many/most tasks other than pure computation (e.g. machine learning training and processing large datasets for statistics)). I'm also assuming you're treating it as a dedicated tool, and not doing tasks while running a DE and web browser at the same time.
  - inetknght 6y ago
    Browsing "modern" websites for one
  - offtop5 6y ago
    Ram tends to create issues when you're building stuff locally. I used ram as an off hand example of something which is limited. I actually did go out and buy a Raspberry Pi 4 8gb since I want to start processing some machine learning, and the 512 on the Zero won't cut it

spideymans 6y ago

>On this blog, I write about the various computers I use and about the operating systems I use on them. Apart from Windows 7, which is relatively modern, these include Mac OS 10.6 Snow Leopard, which at this point is quite old Completely nitpicking here, but both operating systems are the exact same age. I agree that Snow Leopard feels significantly less up-to-date than Windows 7 though, which speaks to how quickly Apple’s operating systems are obsoleted (and this isn't necessarily a bad thing).

accrual 6y ago

For others who love old software and hardware I'll share two of my favorite sites, an excellent retro PC emulator, 86Box [0] and a clean and well-maintained software archive, WinWorld [1]. These two sites together have provided me hours of exploration into old hardware, BIOS screens I'd never otherwise see, and plenty of interesting software scenarios. [0] https://github.com/86Box/86Box https://github.com/86Box/86Box [1] https://winworldpc.com https://winworldpc.com

the_af 6y ago
Interesting. What's the difference between 86Box and DOSBox?
- acidburnNSA 6y ago
  For one thing, upon brief investigation I don't think 86Box has Linux builds. Might be mistaken though.
  - badsectoracula 6y ago
    86box is a fork of PCem (though it does get updates with new stuff from it) with IMO a nicer UI. If you are on Linux you ca use PCem instead.
- badsectoracula 6y ago
  DOSBox is made for emulating a PC running some form of DOS to play games. It does emulate enough of PC hardware to do that and because of booter games (ie. games running directly from their own boot disks) it can also boot MS-DOS. However the development team doesn't care for non-game uses. There are some forks (e.g. DOSBox-X) that do (and also add more features) but in general it is more of a "compatibility" layer than a full emulator - think of it as Rosetta for DOS. 86box (a fork of PCem) is a full PC hardware emulator trying to emulate original real hardware as faithfully as possible, including their performance characteristics, limitations, etc. You can actually install Windows XP inside 86box on an emulated Pentium MMX 233MHz with an S3 Virge and a Voodoo 2 (though for better performance -and compatibility- Windows 95 is better).

brabel 6y ago

All software is bound to keep changing forever unless people stop using it... even after it's past its "perfect" place in terms of usability and benefits it brings to its intended audience (I am not saying perfect in terms of having no bugs - though that may also be the case)... because we can only know that in hindsight and we have no way of measuring this objectively. Some old Unix tools are perhaps the closest we have to that. (ls, cd, tail...) but in terms of UI, I can't think of anything. As the needs of users change, so does what the "perfect software" for such users looks like... however, I would think there's usually a decades-long period in which some software could stay just as it is without there being possible improvements one could make to it. I think it would be really interesting if we could find a good way to tell when that "perfection" is reached and tried to intentionally stop changing what is literally already perfect (though that will never happen in a commercial product, for obvious reasons).

Siira 6y ago
Old unix tools are serviceable, but nowhere near perfect. I find exa better than ls, fd better than find, rg better than grep, etc.
- totetsu 6y ago
  Thanks for reminding me to use exa

b06tmm 6y ago

I recently inherited a 32-bit laptop that runs Vista, any recommendations of what version of Linux to try?

jsyedidia 6y ago
Debian with Raspberry Pi Desktop https://www.raspberrypi.org/software/raspberry-pi-desktop/ https://www.raspberrypi.org/software/raspberry-pi-desktop/
lelanthran 6y ago
> I recently inherited a 32-bit laptop that runs Vista, any recommendations of what version of Linux to try? I'll have to check to be sure that it is 32bit(l/top is downstairs and I'm lazy), but I do my personal projects on a 2008 Asus that came with Vista and 2GB of RAM. I literally use it daily using: 1. Emacs 2. Vim + every plugin you can think of for development 3. GCC + all the devtools for C development 4. Standard gui tools (browser, some solitaire games, dia for diagrams, etc). I am pretty certain I am using this: https://www.linuxmint.com/edition.php?id=255 https://www.linuxmint.com/edition.php?id=255 Once again, I might be wrong (although "pretty certain" covers that), but you can give it a try.
pomian 6y ago
Mint has all sorts of versions that work great.
silentsysadmin 6y ago
I would load up Slackware 14.2 on that bad boy.
squarefoot 6y ago
32 bit aren't a problem, RAM however could be. I've run Debian on 32 bit Atom netbooks with 1 Gig RAM without problems. Using light desktop environments such as XFCE or smaller ones would allow also 512MB RAM or even less. Years ago I successfully run Debian + LXDE desktop on one of those toy Win-CE Chinese laptops with just 128MB RAM. CPU was a WM8505 clocked at a whopping 300MHz. And then there's ELKS Linux which would work on 8086 CPUs too which I successfully run on a industrial PC many moons ago. https://github.com/jbruchon/elks https://github.com/jbruchon/elks Extremely small systems aside, it can run fine on decently equipped laptops or netbooks. Surfing the web with a full featured browser such as Firefox or using heavy apps such as LibreOffice without having the system swap too much would likely require no less than 2 Gigs or more, but if you do network maintenance using command line tools, even the smallest netbook with half a Gig RAM becomes an useful tool to keep in the bag along with bigger laptops.

benlumen 6y ago

Anyone else in the UK thinking what a fine thing it would be to designate the space for a dedicated “HyperCard” machine? I practically operate a one-in, one-out policy for retro stuff like this.

sleavey 6y ago

It's fitting that this post is written on a blog running the very old (original?) default theme from WordPress 1.0.

TedDoesntTalk 6y ago

> imagine if spreadsheet programs like Microsoft Excel stopped being developed and eventually just disappeared – that’s the level of significance that HyperCard had. I often hear similar claims about the significance of HyperCard. But if HyperCard was so significant to so many people, wouldn’t it have been ported and/or rewritten over the years to still be available today? Even if not by Apple, then by someone else? That’s happened to Excel and other programs. So why not HyperCard? (Serious question)

the_only_law 6y ago
There’s LiveCode (https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/LiveCode https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/LiveCode) Which is the modern evolution of HyperCard to my understanding
chillpenguin 6y ago
In some cases it has to do with the operating system cooperating or not. Modern operating systems don't allow certain things to work due to restrictions in what apps are capable of. Consider a Smalltalk OS, where you can dynamically link objects across "apps" in interesting ways (see Alan Kay's "Tribute to Ted Nelson" where he shows a demo of this). You simply cannot do such a thing with mac/windows/linux. In the case of Hypercard, I cannot say whether or not this is the case. It could be that Hypercard is absolutely possible today. But I wouldn't doubt it if it was somewhat unusable on modern systems due to this "cooperation" issue I mentioned. It may need buy-in from other apps and/or the host OS for it to work fully as intended. For another example, consider emacs. Emacs effectively gives you the lisp-machine experience, but the problem is it isn't integrated with the rest of the system. You sort of have to live in an emacs bubble. With hypercard, you could surely get it running, but would you be in a bubble? Ideally you could use hypercard to script the rest of your system as well. What we should want is something like a "card" that could "link" to a specific cell in a spreadsheet, as an example. Or a card that could open a PDF to a specific page. The more the rest of the system "plays along", the more powerful something like hypercard could be.
brudgers 6y ago
Hypercard was replaced by the World Wide Web and Power Point. The World Wide Web because it solved distribution and vendor lock-in. Power Point because slide shows were an important use case Windows Desktops were much much more common in the 1990's and 00's than Macs. Power Point also provided much better integration with wordprocessors and spreadsheets.

jcpst 6y ago

I worked as a recording engineer for several years. The first studio I worked at, the B room had an SSL 6000 G Series and a Pro Tools 888 system hooked up to an Apple machine running OS9. This was 2008, so already old back then, but with the way it was configured plus the 888 system, it was still valuable. I have friends who work in water treatment infrastructure, and out of necessity carry laptops with VMs for DOS, windows 3.1, etc. Even my AD/DA converter at home is no longer supported. I use a 2010 mac mini running OSX 10.11 with it. As long as people are using older hardware that interfaces with a computer, older OSes and machines will be useful.

someperson 6y ago

It's actually possible to browse the web on retro PCs by setting up a Raspberry Pi running "Browservice": https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5MjZdKtv9ak https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5MjZdKtv9ak If you're on a machine with only a RJ11 / 56k dial-up port, you can also setup Raspberry Pi to handle this too: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NFUTInM7gq8 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NFUTInM7gq8 Hope this helps some retrocomputing enthusiasts!

neurostimulant 6y ago
In addition to Browservice, WRP is also pretty good for very old browser that can't do anything but to load images. As long as you can load a webpage with image map support, you can browse any modern websites on it (I think Browservice requires some js support on the client browser). https://github.com/tenox7/wrp https://github.com/tenox7/wrp

lew89 6y ago

Sometimes I used old computers because they appeared functional enough. Not so long ago I used a computer from late 2000s and it was a quite normal user experience on Linux (on lightweight window manager of course) with a small exception of web browser. Amount of scripts and data on modern sites caused problems, made whole OS hang often. If only JS was turned off, no problem.

badsectoracula 6y ago
Coincidentally i'm writing this from my late 2009 iMac. It is already more than a decade old but i think it is a perfectly fine computer. With the latest version of Firefox every site works. The main issue it has is that it is a bit sluggish but i think an additional 8GB of RAM (it has 4GB) and perhaps an SSD would make it feel perfectly fine. Sadly Apple doesn't seem to agree and the last version of macOS to support it is 10.13 - which itself isn't supported anymore as of December 2020 (just ~3 years after it was released, which is kinda mad IMO). Most things seem to work fine so far (most open source applications seem to support even older versions anyway), though Homebrew (which i used to install a couple of command line tools) does warn that they have no official support for it and some stuff may break (fortunately that didn't happen).
- dcassett 6y ago
  I'm using an early 2008 MBP with Debian Buster with 6GB of RAM and SSD. The nvidia-340 driver is still supported so Youtube works nicely. With mbpfan it does not overheat. Touchpad and suspend are working pretty well. The Amazon website with Firefox is where I get warnings about a script taking too long.

wizzerking 6y ago

When I was an independent consultant in the mountains in northern california. There were companies running devices from their Windows 7 and Window NT computers where the device manufacturer had gone belly up, quit or just decided to not support their previous products. I had several sucesses using WINE on Linux. The companies were so grateful that in some cases I get free pastry, coffee, and/or sandwiches Here in LA some schools are in a bad way so I put Linux on old hardware and teach the kids what is different between linux, libre Office, GIMP, and other FOSS software. I freely transfer my HATE of M$Soft and MAC to these young minds

dcassett 6y ago

I have an old Win2K box with a P3-450 with a SB-Live! soundcard which has some nice environmental effects such as reverb that I use for recording. I haven't used it much in the past few years because I need to clone the two drives, which are close to 20 years old. Rebuilding the system from scratch would be a nightmare.

transfire 6y ago

Emulators can give you the best at of both worlds.

dudeinjapan 6y ago

"Why use old computers and operating systems?" > link returns "Error establishing a database connection." Is this an attempt at ironic humor?

dudeinjapan 6y ago

At Brown U.'s semiconductor fab cleanroom we had a Windows 3.1 PC controlling our plasma etching machine. One day we opened up its case--not a speck of visible dust despite operating continuously since the early 90's!

frabert 6y ago
Isn't that expected, given it was operating in a cleanroom?
- dudeinjapan 6y ago
  Sure, but still surprising on some level.

elevation 6y ago

I've enjoyed installing windows 98 on old hardware; unlike windows xp, the OS installs without network authorization and runs mind of legacy software. But the couple of old towers I've gotten from friend's closets have lacked driver CDs. Once you reinstall windows (perhaps because of a bad hard drive sector) it becomes impossible to get the sound card working again or better than 16 colors out of the graphics card. Vendors like even intel no longer provide 80710E chipset drivers and the ones for download on shareware sites don't work.

anticensor 6y ago

The website crashed, failing to withstand viewers from HN.

hazeii 6y ago

One thing about old computers is how hackable the hardware is. On old PCs, things like parallel ports, serial ports, joysticks and so on are trivially easy to interface to and have great performance. Even further back, generating and measuring periods in the sub-microsecond range was just a quick bit of assembler on 4MHZ Z80's back in the early 80's. Although that sort of hacking is still very possible now, it's the province of things like PICs, Arduino's and Pi's which are all relatively specialised and require far more effort to get started with than sticking a couple of wires in a parallel port and doing an outportb().

0df8dkdf 6y ago

> Quite literally, the only way to use HyperCard is to get a hold of an old Mac – or emulate it, but emulation always falls short of the real deal. That’s why HyperCard alone is a pretty clear reason to use Mac OS 9 Not to mention Beautiful Doreena! Misses

0df8dkdf 6y ago