8 ms·

Why bother with old technology? (2013)

62 points by nickt 5y ago

low_tech_love 5y ago
As a retro enthusiast, I've been asked "why bother with old technology" a few times and, in my opinion, the best answer is simply "because I like it". There are probably some underlying objective reasons behind that which I'm not consciously aware of (like maybe studying old technology makes me a better tech person today, some kind of indirect pedagogical effect), but I can't really pinpoint that specifically, and it can be a bit tiresome sometimes. Next time I guess I'll link them to this article!
- chevill 5y ago
  Got any recommendations for a good vintage computer to get started with that's more advanced than the C64? I took a course on C64 assembly and it was pretty good but I wanted to learn something a bit more complex but not as complex as a modern architecture.
  - kordlessagain 5y ago
    The Amiga had a 68000 chip in it and dedicated graphics and audio hardware which enabled it to be quite a bit faster than the C64.
  - daggersandscars 5y ago
    Any of the 68000-based machines may be worth a look. Atari ST, Amiga 500/1000, early Macs. There are also SBCs available that use the 68K. An early-ish 8086/8088 PC clone is a possibility, but the Atari/Amiga/Macs will have better graphics options and won't have segment/offset memory addressing.
    - buescher 5y ago
      A 680x0-based workstation could be really interesting for someone into that kind of thing, but an Amiga would probably be the most fun.
      - rbanffy 5y ago
        The advantage of Unix workstations is that they are still useful as X terminals. But then they aren’t much simpler than our modern desktops running their own Unixes.
        buescher 5y ago
        I'm thinking an eighties workstation like a Sun 3. If you can find one, an SGI Indigo or early NeXT cube. Much closer to an Amiga than to a modern system, but even more funky and exotic hardware. I wouldn't consider an X server running on one of those "still useful" but others might disagree.
        rbanffy 5y ago
        I used an IBM PPC-based 43P as a work machine for some time. It can't run a modern browser, but back then using NetBeans running on my laptop was perfectly doable. Using Emacs and a terminal will work really well. Using one of these machines as a workstation is not much different from an older Raspberry Pi - you'll need to do the heavy lifting on the other side of the network anyway. The killer feature of this specific 43P was that it came with a gargantuan Intergraph CRT monitor.
    - Hublium 5y ago
      I feel like the Atari ST is the second easiest one to get into (after x86), because they share the floppy format with PC's.
      - rbanffy 5y ago
        Its hardware is also much simpler than the Amiga’s.
  - Lio 5y ago
    I'll add to the other suggestions with any of the Acorn Risc OS line[1]. They're the original Arm based computers (not counting the development processor for the BBC Micro) and some of the earliest system on a chip computers. Might be fun if you fancy playing with Arm assembly language. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RISC_OS https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RISC_OS https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Acorn_Archimedes#Later_A-series_models https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Acorn_Archimedes#Later_A-serie... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Risc_PC https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Risc_PC [1] I say Risc OS but they actually also supported a Unix like called Risc ix.
  - NegativeLatency 5y ago
    I’ve been working on getting a Macintosh II to boot A/UX a sys v Unix. My eventual goal is to use it for doing the K and R C exercises, and just generally see what Unix was like.
    - chevill 5y ago
      That sounds like a really interesting project.
      - NegativeLatency 5y ago
        http://aux-penelope.com/ http://aux-penelope.com/ There are some resources here if you’re curious and want to see screenshots. (Not my site)
    - kjs3 5y ago
      AU/X was a pretty weird Unix, an SVR2 base with various SVR3 and BSD bits bolted on, all topped off with a mostly-functional (classic) MacOS 7 emulation layer. It wasn't much like other, contemporary Unixen. I did some rather serious time with it in a previous life, and really grew to hate it.
      - NegativeLatency 5y ago
        Got any other old Unix recommendations? Was hoping to find xenix or some other old x86 one I could use. What did you use A/UX for?
        kjs3 5y ago
        SCO Unix (or OpenDesktop or whatever they're calling it now) would be an example of a 'state of the art' x86 Unix before Linux matured. I, however, was always more fond of Dell Unix SVR4 for x86; a more 'pure' Unix. Install images are 'around'. It's new enough to be familiar and comes with a bunch of extras (like a pile of ported GNU tools). Interactive or Microport SVR3 are a little more old-skewl, if that's where you're at. Xenix is very old school, and shows you what you can to with very limited x86 hardware (esp Xenix for the 8086 or 80286), and you'll find a lot of tools you might want don't compile for various reasons (like a K&R C compiler). Other folks shipped an x86 SVR3 or SVR4, but they generally added very little to the AT&T code base. If you go the emulated route (e.g. SIMH), I'd go with BSD 4.3 or Sun SunOS 3.5. That's where I started out with Unix so there's a lot of nostalgia there.
  - dTal 5y ago
    Not quite sure what you're after but you can get a Voyage 200 graphing calculator for not much more than a RasPi now - it's got a Motorola 68000, a qwerty keyboard, a sunlight-readable screen, a serial jack, a useful OS with many games, a C IDE, a disassembler (both onboard!)... and it runs on 4 alkaline batteries.
  - danielrpa 5y ago
    Try the Commodore Amiga!
- jerf 5y ago
  One possible advantage is that it can be easier to learn the fundamentals when they aren't as obscured by as many later layers of smoothing over and/or complexity. For instance, it's very common for schools to teach assembler based on older tech, because it's simpler to deal with. Older tech will more directly expose you to the underlying issues with the foundations of the technology. For an example of something that smooths a lot of things over, using a nice, high-level USB library is abstracting away a huge amount of the issues involved with that sort of signaling. If you want to deeply understand how computers communicate with each other over wires, you're probably better off studying RS-232 first.
  - jdsully 5y ago
    When I was first learning how to program I felt this way. High level languages were unsettling in that I knew they were doing a ton of "stuff" but I didn't know what. Old 8-bit micros get you closer to understanding how computers work.
  - WalterBright 5y ago
    I tried to learn PDP-10 assembly language. I was just baffled by one concept after another (what's an accumulator? what's an addressing mode?). But then I did some programming for a 6800 with something like 40 simple instructions, and I "got it", and the -10 became simple, too.
    - jerf 5y ago
      I've been doing web development since the late 1990s. I don't know every fiddly detail of every current web technology, but I can pretty much pick up any of them, read the docs for an hour, and have them going in just a bit more time, because I've got a solid foundation from working on things back when even XMLHTTPRequest was but a fever dream. I was recently speaking online to someone trying to get into it from a fresh start, and they lent me their perspective (kinda like a rubber duck debugging session), and I was a bit appalled at how hard it is to get into web development at this level now. I ended up recommending an approach in which one recapitulates the browser's development cycle if you want to really understand what's going on out there... it isn't the best choice technically in the short term because it's a long path to tread just to do "this one thing", but if you want to be similarly flexible and know how to work with the mess of technologies out there, for path-dependent and historically-contingent reasons (that is, opposed to any other good reasons), I think it may still be the best way to go. And to be honest, there's still a lot you can do with server-side generated HTML, the tags in modern HTML, and a bit of pure Javascript. There are good reasons to move beyond that; I don't mean that in a "back in my day" sort of way. But if you do start there, the rest of the stack makes a lot more sense than trying to start directly with React as your first intro to the web, as fine as React may be.
- rbanffy 5y ago
  One fascinating feature of some old computers like the 8-bit Commodores and Ataris are the intelligent peripherals. The computer wouldn’t need to wait for IO operations as long as the data would fit in the peripheral’s buffers.
ClosedPistachio 5y ago
One thing I've never truly appreciated until I started reading the Dolphin Blog [0] is the many nuances physical hardware has, AND how software developers often leverage these nuances (which aren't typically reproduced, for example, with an emulator). With this perspective, I think we should memorialize old tech. [0] https://dolphin-emu.org/blog/ https://dolphin-emu.org/blog/
grouphugs 5y ago
being poor and unable to transition, and also you just might not want a cop in your home. fucking libera.chat troll admins called me anprim. fucking idiots
haolez 5y ago
I like to imagine post-apocalyptic scenarios sometimes and mastering retro tech restoration would be a game changing skill :)
eatonphil 5y ago
Older technology is extremely practical for teaching (yourself or others) because it's (mostly?) simpler than what exists today. For example writing an emulator for an older 8-bit CPU will be a simple problem overall to tackle than x86. That said, sometimes using modern technology is better for teaching since there are more tools and resources that exist today to help you learn today's technology than there are for older technology. So it depends. But it's definitely worth not completely ignoring old technology when learning a topic in case the older tech _is_ easier to learn because it's simpler.
gwbas1c 5y ago
Sometimes older technology is easier to develop for, mostly because there's more documentation, more stack overflow discussions, better understanding of quirks, ect.
- the_only_law 5y ago
  I used to have an old 5150 (recently sold, as it’s not my particular retro niche). The source code for the BIOS was listed in the manual for the machine. I was mildly and pleasantly surprised. I suppose a modern equivalent would be the firmware source code for your motherboard being downloadable from the vendor. I guess there’s edk2, but I’d be content never to touch that again.
  - jandrese 5y ago
    A lot of this is complexity. The underlying systems are so complex that it is not really practical to try to explain them to the end user. But another part of this is political. Some parts are hidden on purpose to support features like DRM or to preserve a vendor's trade secrets.
adhoc32 5y ago
Nostalgia.
the_only_law 5y ago
For me: Because it’s cool. I play around a lot with retro networking and have exposed myself to all sorts of old protocols, technologies, etc. that maintain my interest much more than the IP monoculture of today. Also I get to practice skills I otherwise wouldn’t. I’ve done more hardware hacking reverse engineering in retro stuff than modern stuff, partially because it’s simpler, partially because I actually have a real goal or objective, versus just doing something for rote.
- bear8642 5y ago
  > all sorts of old protocols, technologies, etc. Indeed - recently discovered the Transputer and Connection Machine and their attempts to build and code parallel machines! More modern examples of retro tech include Chuck Moore's GA144 a forth based 144 core asynchronous chip
johnklos 5y ago
Every age, this age not excepted, has programmers who somehow find the energy to go out of their way to advocate for writing non-portable code. "Who cares if it doesn't run on 80386?" "Who cares if it doesn't run on PowerPC?" "Who cares if it doesn't run on 64 bit?" "Who cares if it doesn't run on ARM?" And now: "Who cares if it doesn't run on 32 bit?" They write code that makes assumptions about endianness, about sizes of pointers, about floating point formats, and then come up with rationalizations about why it shouldn't matter if their code only compiles and runs on one architecture. If we had taken all of them at their word, every architectural upgrade would require a rewriting of a majority of software instead of a recompile, and the open source world would be vastly different, and not in a good way. Old technology is a way to teach people about our roots, how our current path was informed by those roots, the lessons learned from mistakes, and the lessons learned from the successes.
- h2odragon 5y ago
  Not disagreeing at all with your well expressed point, but: I wrote code to fully utilize the machines I had at the time. When new systems became available, the code needed to be re-written to fully exploit the new just as much as it needed to be de-crufted from the obsolete. Code that has been functional, untouched, for decades has a nobility; but a job that has been worth re-coding the solution every few years is actually important.
- mumblemumble 5y ago
  I think you're maybe framing it the wrong way around. It often takes more energy to write portable code than non-portable code. "This isn't something I want to spend my time on" isn't a rationalization, it's a simple statement of preference. I personally feel absolutely no cognitive dissonance or regret about all the hand-coded PPC I wrote a couple decades ago, nor do I accept someone else wanting me to feel bad about it. It was (and needed to be) optimized for the machine I was working on at the time, and if I were moving it to a new platform, I probably would have wanted to do the same for it, too. As it turns out, though, the need never arose. The code was abandoned before the platform was. In short, YAGNI. Similarly, "This isn't a worthwhile expenditure of our company's resources," isn't a rationalization, it may be a simple statement of business reality. To take a simple example, a video game studio producing an exclusive title has very different incentives around code portability than an indie studio that plans to release on 5 different platforms. What's the point of developing your game to work on iOS if you have no plans to - and may even be contractually not allowed to - release it on that platform?
mikewarot 5y ago
I imagine programmers thinking something like "This code only has to run on the 1401, when we get a new system it won't be compatible, so it won't be around long anyway. Next time we'll write a better version incorporating our experience from this one, and taking advantage of the new hardware." Then IBM System 360 made things backward compatible, and the world broke. We saved tons of programmers time, and Y2K was a secondary effect of those savings.
jes5199 5y ago
when I work on old machines, I often get an overwhelming feeling that modern machines are wasteful. there was so much room to be clever and careful, but instead we just kept throwing more hardware at our problems
- bartread 5y ago
  You of course know this already but it's not the machines that are wasteful, but rather the software we run on them and - by extension - the developers who create that software. UI latency is a never ending source of frustration to me, in large part, because it simply shouldn't exist with the computing power we have at our fingertips. On the other hand we have Microsoft Outlook and Microsoft Teams that are both absolute bastions of waste and instability. And not just in compute terms either, but in terms of my time - the finite number of breaths and heartbeats I have left - that is squandered in waiting around, restarting, rebooting my machine, because of these unstable, crashy behemoths.
  - zzo38computer 5y ago
    It is true. Too much fancy animations, too much other stuff internally too, wastes energy. Also bad user interfaces, and bad documentation, and too complicated designs, and many other problems. I prefer without all of that stuff; it looks better to me and can be worked better too if it is done in the less wasteful way, I think.
- theandrewbailey 5y ago
  cough Electron cough
iamwil 5y ago
This article talks about hardware, but for me it raises software equivalents in mind. Lately, I've been looking at Datalog. It's an old ass query language that's found a slight resurgence in specific niches. Sometimes, old ideas are not fully known or understood, as our field is relatively new. Going back to the writings of Engelbart or Papert, I've discovered some new things about original intent that the first implementations missed.
abruzzi 5y ago
My use of old computing technology is really in support of old music synthesizer technology. For instance my Yamaha VL1, one of the first and greatest waveguide physical modeling synthesizers, does not allow full editing of the model parameters from the keyboard itself. Yamaha made a few editors for it that use MIDI SYSEX to edit the models. Unfortunatley those only run on MacOS System 7. So I have to keep an ancient mac for that. Many of my synths use 3.5" floppies. The ones that use FAT formatting can easily be used with a USB floppy on a modern computer, but the ones that have their own proprietary disk formats (most of them) require software with direct access to the floppy that can't be got through a USB connection. So, for those, I have an old Windows laptop with built-in floppy and software like Omniflop to manage those disks. Probably one of the greatest things to make old tech more manageable (for me) is the SCSI2SD project, which makes an SD card into a SCAI device. Since SCSI was hugely popular with classic samplers (synths that can record audio and use the recorded audio as the sound source in the synth sound) I have a half dozen SCSI2SD drives so I don't have to keep ancient parallel SCSI dive alive.
michaelbrave 5y ago
I collect things like old Mp3 players because they are interesting examples of product design and UX design. But mostly it's because I just think they're neat.
baus 5y ago
I don't know if "technology" is limited to digital tech, but I am having a lot of fun working on vintage analog gear, specifically tube amps. It helps me think about totally different types of engineering problems than my day-to-day work.
- cratermoon 5y ago
  Typewriters, slide rules, abaci, film cameras, fountain pens, morse code, ham radio, vinyl records... what else?
cratermoon 5y ago
Time is a flat circle
elcapitan 5y ago
Why bother with new technology?
martinmakesgame 5y ago
I realise everyone is probably already aware but Adrian's Digital Basement on youtube is a lot of fun to watch. I don't have access to the hardware or diagnostics that he has but I really appreciate remembering what things were like 30 years ago. Electronics is fun!
cptnapalm 5y ago
You get to play with things you'd never have been able to dream of even touching or even seeing when they were in their heyday.
hasmanean 5y ago
There’s a sayings, the C language was developed to compile for the PDP-11. In the meantime much has happened. So Modern processors were designed to seamlessly run existing software. For example Memory used to be fated the processors clock cycles so fetches were free. Now it’s 100x slower. So we put caches in to fool the software into thinking it’s just as fast as it used to be. So all software runs in a bubble like it was still running on a PDP-11. Just like the body continues to carry around a liquid environment with a salinity level equal to the ancient ocean.

62 points by nickt 5y ago

As a retro enthusiast, I've been asked "why bother with old technology" a few times and, in my opinion, the best answer is simply "because I like it". There are probably some underlying objective reasons behind that which I'm not consciously aware of (like maybe studying old technology makes me a better tech person today, some kind of indirect pedagogical effect), but I can't really pinpoint that specifically, and it can be a bit tiresome sometimes. Next time I guess I'll link them to this article!

chevill 5y ago
Got any recommendations for a good vintage computer to get started with that's more advanced than the C64? I took a course on C64 assembly and it was pretty good but I wanted to learn something a bit more complex but not as complex as a modern architecture.
- kordlessagain 5y ago
  The Amiga had a 68000 chip in it and dedicated graphics and audio hardware which enabled it to be quite a bit faster than the C64.
- daggersandscars 5y ago
  Any of the 68000-based machines may be worth a look. Atari ST, Amiga 500/1000, early Macs. There are also SBCs available that use the 68K. An early-ish 8086/8088 PC clone is a possibility, but the Atari/Amiga/Macs will have better graphics options and won't have segment/offset memory addressing.
  - buescher 5y ago
    A 680x0-based workstation could be really interesting for someone into that kind of thing, but an Amiga would probably be the most fun.
    - rbanffy 5y ago
      The advantage of Unix workstations is that they are still useful as X terminals. But then they aren’t much simpler than our modern desktops running their own Unixes.
      - buescher 5y ago
        I'm thinking an eighties workstation like a Sun 3. If you can find one, an SGI Indigo or early NeXT cube. Much closer to an Amiga than to a modern system, but even more funky and exotic hardware. I wouldn't consider an X server running on one of those "still useful" but others might disagree.
        rbanffy 5y ago
        I used an IBM PPC-based 43P as a work machine for some time. It can't run a modern browser, but back then using NetBeans running on my laptop was perfectly doable. Using Emacs and a terminal will work really well. Using one of these machines as a workstation is not much different from an older Raspberry Pi - you'll need to do the heavy lifting on the other side of the network anyway. The killer feature of this specific 43P was that it came with a gargantuan Intergraph CRT monitor.
  - Hublium 5y ago
    I feel like the Atari ST is the second easiest one to get into (after x86), because they share the floppy format with PC's.
    - rbanffy 5y ago
      Its hardware is also much simpler than the Amiga’s.
- Lio 5y ago
  I'll add to the other suggestions with any of the Acorn Risc OS line[1]. They're the original Arm based computers (not counting the development processor for the BBC Micro) and some of the earliest system on a chip computers. Might be fun if you fancy playing with Arm assembly language. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RISC_OS https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RISC_OS https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Acorn_Archimedes#Later_A-series_models https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Acorn_Archimedes#Later_A-serie... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Risc_PC https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Risc_PC [1] I say Risc OS but they actually also supported a Unix like called Risc ix.
- NegativeLatency 5y ago
  I’ve been working on getting a Macintosh II to boot A/UX a sys v Unix. My eventual goal is to use it for doing the K and R C exercises, and just generally see what Unix was like.
  - chevill 5y ago
    That sounds like a really interesting project.
    - NegativeLatency 5y ago
      http://aux-penelope.com/ http://aux-penelope.com/ There are some resources here if you’re curious and want to see screenshots. (Not my site)
  - kjs3 5y ago
    AU/X was a pretty weird Unix, an SVR2 base with various SVR3 and BSD bits bolted on, all topped off with a mostly-functional (classic) MacOS 7 emulation layer. It wasn't much like other, contemporary Unixen. I did some rather serious time with it in a previous life, and really grew to hate it.
    - NegativeLatency 5y ago
      Got any other old Unix recommendations? Was hoping to find xenix or some other old x86 one I could use. What did you use A/UX for?
      - kjs3 5y ago
        SCO Unix (or OpenDesktop or whatever they're calling it now) would be an example of a 'state of the art' x86 Unix before Linux matured. I, however, was always more fond of Dell Unix SVR4 for x86; a more 'pure' Unix. Install images are 'around'. It's new enough to be familiar and comes with a bunch of extras (like a pile of ported GNU tools). Interactive or Microport SVR3 are a little more old-skewl, if that's where you're at. Xenix is very old school, and shows you what you can to with very limited x86 hardware (esp Xenix for the 8086 or 80286), and you'll find a lot of tools you might want don't compile for various reasons (like a K&R C compiler). Other folks shipped an x86 SVR3 or SVR4, but they generally added very little to the AT&T code base. If you go the emulated route (e.g. SIMH), I'd go with BSD 4.3 or Sun SunOS 3.5. That's where I started out with Unix so there's a lot of nostalgia there.
- dTal 5y ago
  Not quite sure what you're after but you can get a Voyage 200 graphing calculator for not much more than a RasPi now - it's got a Motorola 68000, a qwerty keyboard, a sunlight-readable screen, a serial jack, a useful OS with many games, a C IDE, a disassembler (both onboard!)... and it runs on 4 alkaline batteries.
- danielrpa 5y ago
  Try the Commodore Amiga!
jerf 5y ago
One possible advantage is that it can be easier to learn the fundamentals when they aren't as obscured by as many later layers of smoothing over and/or complexity. For instance, it's very common for schools to teach assembler based on older tech, because it's simpler to deal with. Older tech will more directly expose you to the underlying issues with the foundations of the technology. For an example of something that smooths a lot of things over, using a nice, high-level USB library is abstracting away a huge amount of the issues involved with that sort of signaling. If you want to deeply understand how computers communicate with each other over wires, you're probably better off studying RS-232 first.
- jdsully 5y ago
  When I was first learning how to program I felt this way. High level languages were unsettling in that I knew they were doing a ton of "stuff" but I didn't know what. Old 8-bit micros get you closer to understanding how computers work.
- WalterBright 5y ago
  I tried to learn PDP-10 assembly language. I was just baffled by one concept after another (what's an accumulator? what's an addressing mode?). But then I did some programming for a 6800 with something like 40 simple instructions, and I "got it", and the -10 became simple, too.
  - jerf 5y ago
    I've been doing web development since the late 1990s. I don't know every fiddly detail of every current web technology, but I can pretty much pick up any of them, read the docs for an hour, and have them going in just a bit more time, because I've got a solid foundation from working on things back when even XMLHTTPRequest was but a fever dream. I was recently speaking online to someone trying to get into it from a fresh start, and they lent me their perspective (kinda like a rubber duck debugging session), and I was a bit appalled at how hard it is to get into web development at this level now. I ended up recommending an approach in which one recapitulates the browser's development cycle if you want to really understand what's going on out there... it isn't the best choice technically in the short term because it's a long path to tread just to do "this one thing", but if you want to be similarly flexible and know how to work with the mess of technologies out there, for path-dependent and historically-contingent reasons (that is, opposed to any other good reasons), I think it may still be the best way to go. And to be honest, there's still a lot you can do with server-side generated HTML, the tags in modern HTML, and a bit of pure Javascript. There are good reasons to move beyond that; I don't mean that in a "back in my day" sort of way. But if you do start there, the rest of the stack makes a lot more sense than trying to start directly with React as your first intro to the web, as fine as React may be.
rbanffy 5y ago
One fascinating feature of some old computers like the 8-bit Commodores and Ataris are the intelligent peripherals. The computer wouldn’t need to wait for IO operations as long as the data would fit in the peripheral’s buffers.

ClosedPistachio 5y ago

One thing I've never truly appreciated until I started reading the Dolphin Blog [0] is the many nuances physical hardware has, AND how software developers often leverage these nuances (which aren't typically reproduced, for example, with an emulator). With this perspective, I think we should memorialize old tech. [0] https://dolphin-emu.org/blog/ https://dolphin-emu.org/blog/

grouphugs 5y ago

being poor and unable to transition, and also you just might not want a cop in your home. fucking libera.chat troll admins called me anprim. fucking idiots

haolez 5y ago

I like to imagine post-apocalyptic scenarios sometimes and mastering retro tech restoration would be a game changing skill :)

eatonphil 5y ago

Older technology is extremely practical for teaching (yourself or others) because it's (mostly?) simpler than what exists today. For example writing an emulator for an older 8-bit CPU will be a simple problem overall to tackle than x86. That said, sometimes using modern technology is better for teaching since there are more tools and resources that exist today to help you learn today's technology than there are for older technology. So it depends. But it's definitely worth not completely ignoring old technology when learning a topic in case the older tech _is_ easier to learn because it's simpler.

gwbas1c 5y ago

Sometimes older technology is easier to develop for, mostly because there's more documentation, more stack overflow discussions, better understanding of quirks, ect.

the_only_law 5y ago
I used to have an old 5150 (recently sold, as it’s not my particular retro niche). The source code for the BIOS was listed in the manual for the machine. I was mildly and pleasantly surprised. I suppose a modern equivalent would be the firmware source code for your motherboard being downloadable from the vendor. I guess there’s edk2, but I’d be content never to touch that again.
- jandrese 5y ago
  A lot of this is complexity. The underlying systems are so complex that it is not really practical to try to explain them to the end user. But another part of this is political. Some parts are hidden on purpose to support features like DRM or to preserve a vendor's trade secrets.

adhoc32 5y ago

Nostalgia.

the_only_law 5y ago

For me: Because it’s cool. I play around a lot with retro networking and have exposed myself to all sorts of old protocols, technologies, etc. that maintain my interest much more than the IP monoculture of today. Also I get to practice skills I otherwise wouldn’t. I’ve done more hardware hacking reverse engineering in retro stuff than modern stuff, partially because it’s simpler, partially because I actually have a real goal or objective, versus just doing something for rote.

bear8642 5y ago
> all sorts of old protocols, technologies, etc. Indeed - recently discovered the Transputer and Connection Machine and their attempts to build and code parallel machines! More modern examples of retro tech include Chuck Moore's GA144 a forth based 144 core asynchronous chip

johnklos 5y ago

Every age, this age not excepted, has programmers who somehow find the energy to go out of their way to advocate for writing non-portable code. "Who cares if it doesn't run on 80386?" "Who cares if it doesn't run on PowerPC?" "Who cares if it doesn't run on 64 bit?" "Who cares if it doesn't run on ARM?" And now: "Who cares if it doesn't run on 32 bit?" They write code that makes assumptions about endianness, about sizes of pointers, about floating point formats, and then come up with rationalizations about why it shouldn't matter if their code only compiles and runs on one architecture. If we had taken all of them at their word, every architectural upgrade would require a rewriting of a majority of software instead of a recompile, and the open source world would be vastly different, and not in a good way. Old technology is a way to teach people about our roots, how our current path was informed by those roots, the lessons learned from mistakes, and the lessons learned from the successes.

h2odragon 5y ago
Not disagreeing at all with your well expressed point, but: I wrote code to fully utilize the machines I had at the time. When new systems became available, the code needed to be re-written to fully exploit the new just as much as it needed to be de-crufted from the obsolete. Code that has been functional, untouched, for decades has a nobility; but a job that has been worth re-coding the solution every few years is actually important.
mumblemumble 5y ago
I think you're maybe framing it the wrong way around. It often takes more energy to write portable code than non-portable code. "This isn't something I want to spend my time on" isn't a rationalization, it's a simple statement of preference. I personally feel absolutely no cognitive dissonance or regret about all the hand-coded PPC I wrote a couple decades ago, nor do I accept someone else wanting me to feel bad about it. It was (and needed to be) optimized for the machine I was working on at the time, and if I were moving it to a new platform, I probably would have wanted to do the same for it, too. As it turns out, though, the need never arose. The code was abandoned before the platform was. In short, YAGNI. Similarly, "This isn't a worthwhile expenditure of our company's resources," isn't a rationalization, it may be a simple statement of business reality. To take a simple example, a video game studio producing an exclusive title has very different incentives around code portability than an indie studio that plans to release on 5 different platforms. What's the point of developing your game to work on iOS if you have no plans to - and may even be contractually not allowed to - release it on that platform?

mikewarot 5y ago

I imagine programmers thinking something like "This code only has to run on the 1401, when we get a new system it won't be compatible, so it won't be around long anyway. Next time we'll write a better version incorporating our experience from this one, and taking advantage of the new hardware." Then IBM System 360 made things backward compatible, and the world broke. We saved tons of programmers time, and Y2K was a secondary effect of those savings.

jes5199 5y ago

when I work on old machines, I often get an overwhelming feeling that modern machines are wasteful. there was so much room to be clever and careful, but instead we just kept throwing more hardware at our problems

bartread 5y ago
You of course know this already but it's not the machines that are wasteful, but rather the software we run on them and - by extension - the developers who create that software. UI latency is a never ending source of frustration to me, in large part, because it simply shouldn't exist with the computing power we have at our fingertips. On the other hand we have Microsoft Outlook and Microsoft Teams that are both absolute bastions of waste and instability. And not just in compute terms either, but in terms of my time - the finite number of breaths and heartbeats I have left - that is squandered in waiting around, restarting, rebooting my machine, because of these unstable, crashy behemoths.
- zzo38computer 5y ago
  It is true. Too much fancy animations, too much other stuff internally too, wastes energy. Also bad user interfaces, and bad documentation, and too complicated designs, and many other problems. I prefer without all of that stuff; it looks better to me and can be worked better too if it is done in the less wasteful way, I think.
theandrewbailey 5y ago
cough Electron cough

iamwil 5y ago

This article talks about hardware, but for me it raises software equivalents in mind. Lately, I've been looking at Datalog. It's an old ass query language that's found a slight resurgence in specific niches. Sometimes, old ideas are not fully known or understood, as our field is relatively new. Going back to the writings of Engelbart or Papert, I've discovered some new things about original intent that the first implementations missed.

abruzzi 5y ago

My use of old computing technology is really in support of old music synthesizer technology. For instance my Yamaha VL1, one of the first and greatest waveguide physical modeling synthesizers, does not allow full editing of the model parameters from the keyboard itself. Yamaha made a few editors for it that use MIDI SYSEX to edit the models. Unfortunatley those only run on MacOS System 7. So I have to keep an ancient mac for that. Many of my synths use 3.5" floppies. The ones that use FAT formatting can easily be used with a USB floppy on a modern computer, but the ones that have their own proprietary disk formats (most of them) require software with direct access to the floppy that can't be got through a USB connection. So, for those, I have an old Windows laptop with built-in floppy and software like Omniflop to manage those disks. Probably one of the greatest things to make old tech more manageable (for me) is the SCSI2SD project, which makes an SD card into a SCAI device. Since SCSI was hugely popular with classic samplers (synths that can record audio and use the recorded audio as the sound source in the synth sound) I have a half dozen SCSI2SD drives so I don't have to keep ancient parallel SCSI dive alive.

michaelbrave 5y ago

I collect things like old Mp3 players because they are interesting examples of product design and UX design. But mostly it's because I just think they're neat.

baus 5y ago

I don't know if "technology" is limited to digital tech, but I am having a lot of fun working on vintage analog gear, specifically tube amps. It helps me think about totally different types of engineering problems than my day-to-day work.

cratermoon 5y ago
Typewriters, slide rules, abaci, film cameras, fountain pens, morse code, ham radio, vinyl records... what else?

cratermoon 5y ago

Time is a flat circle

elcapitan 5y ago

Why bother with new technology?

martinmakesgame 5y ago

I realise everyone is probably already aware but Adrian's Digital Basement on youtube is a lot of fun to watch. I don't have access to the hardware or diagnostics that he has but I really appreciate remembering what things were like 30 years ago. Electronics is fun!

cptnapalm 5y ago

You get to play with things you'd never have been able to dream of even touching or even seeing when they were in their heyday.

hasmanean 5y ago

There’s a sayings, the C language was developed to compile for the PDP-11. In the meantime much has happened. So Modern processors were designed to seamlessly run existing software. For example Memory used to be fated the processors clock cycles so fetches were free. Now it’s 100x slower. So we put caches in to fool the software into thinking it’s just as fast as it used to be. So all software runs in a bubble like it was still running on a PDP-11. Just like the body continues to carry around a liquid environment with a salinity level equal to the ancient ocean.