7 ms·

Is 2002 considered “vintage” now? Semantics aside, it was a fun read :)

by laumars 5y ago

BossingAround 5y ago
2002 was 20 years ago. I would consider Windows 2000 fairly vintage.
- laumars 5y ago
  It’s old, definitely retro, but I always thought vintage meant older than that. Like how vintage cars are 50+ years old. To that end you wouldn’t call the Dreamcast “vintage gaming” (like you might with Pong machines) but you’d definitely still call it retro. Maybe my comment comes more from a place of “oh shit I’m old” rather than a strong objection to the authors comments…
  - seized 5y ago
    In many areas cars can qualify for collector plates at 25 years old ( and other requirements like condition). So depending on your definition of retro vs collector vs vintage...
    - rbanffy 5y ago
      I wonder if my Unix workstations can get collector MAC addresses ;-)
  - Jaruzel 5y ago
    I'm heavily into retro computing, and my cut off year is 2000. Anything newer than that is not 'retro' in my book. For vintage computing though, I think it would be before the IBM PC, so 1981.
    - hnlmorg 5y ago
      You're talking PC gaming where as the OP was talking about consoles. PC gaming definitely matured around 2000 with many of the titles post-2000 losing their innovative "omg can computers really do that" mystique. However for consoles 2000 slices between machines of the same generation like the aforementioned Dreamcast (pre-2000) and Gamecube (post-2000). These are systems that shared groundbreaking titles between them like Phantasy Star Online; which was one of the very first online multiplayer games for consoles (and which I still play weekly guild matches, streamed on Twitch). After that generation of consoles the specifications for consoles were all pretty similar to PC (chipsets aside): ethernet, wireless, HDMI (the previous generation were all pre-HD too), a HDD, etc. But it was the Dreamcast (and, released much later, the Xbox) in the generation of consoles before that really pioneered this shift in paradigm for console gaming and which many of the consoles of that era only had support for via addons (GC Ethernet Adapter, PS2 Network Adaptor, HDDs for the PS2 Expansion Bay, etc. Heck, even the GC didn't ship with ethernet instead having a dial up modem, and it wasn't even as fast as 56K in most regions!) Thus I think they deserve to be retro for the same reason that 1996-2000 for PC gaming does: they defined how the next couple of decades of gaming would look while making plenty of mistakes along the way.
      - hulitu 5y ago
        > PC gaming definitely matured around 2000 with many of the titles post-2000 losing their innovative "omg can computers really do that" mystique. They definitely lost innovation. The only innovations in gamimg were bloat and greed. That's why is more entertaining to play older titles: they are all about play, they do not try to extort you or bring your PC to the limit.
        hnlmorg 5y ago
        I'm a massive hard retro gamer too and if you only look at AAA titles then it's easy to see how you're right. However the gaming industry is so much bigger than EA et al. There are so many fun indie games out now that have a real embodiment of that creativity you miss. Take Untitled Goose Game, for example. It was released 3 years ago and you play the part of a Goose who's mission it is to annoy as many people in a quaint English village as possible. The game is basically a modern day equivalent of the How to Be a Complete Bastard class of games from the Spectrum era of home systems. And it's fun too! There's also no shortage of modern games released for older hardware. On the shelf behind me I have at least 5 games released in the last 5 years for various Sega consoles. The Gameboy and Gameboy Advance also see a surprising number of new releases each year too (though I don't collect for those consoles specifically).
    - theodric 5y ago
      Most of the classic Palms have 68k CPUs in them, and feel more like a handheld Classic Mac than a modern smartphone. I am also a vintage snob with a low cutoff (anything after 1985 puts me to sleep) but I will give Palms and other such primitive handhelds a pass.
  - indrora 5y ago
    Let me make you old. The following things happened 30 years ago, give or take a few weeks: * H W Bush meets with Yeltsin, Cold War officially declared over. * The EU was officially formed. * Ukraine and four other nations in the Commonwealth of Independent States reject Russia's proposal to maintain unified armed forces. * Dahmer sentenced to 15 terms of life in prison 20 years ago, NASA began mapping the surface of Mars and the Sierra Leone Civil War came to a close. 20/30 years is around the line where "Vintage" starts to come into play. PowerPC Macs are on the edge of "Vintage" but their mid-90s Motorola68k based versions are definitely there.
    - anthk 5y ago
      Mac OS X Tiger looks fairly modem and a G4 with OpenBSD for macppc it's still usable enough for lots of environments.
    - hulitu 5y ago
      > The EU was officially formed. EU existed from some time.
      - andylynch 5y ago
        It's predecessors like the EEC were set up in the fifties post WWII, but yes the European Union was only established in 1992 with the Maastricht Treaty.
        anthk 5y ago
        Spain joined EEC at 1986, I consider that a pre-EU.
    - laumars 5y ago
      You’re listing off that that’s 30 years ago yet we are talking about 20 years ago, and barely 20 years at that. The difference between 20 and 30 is pretty significant (it’s literally 50% more).
  - BuildTheRobots 5y ago
    Classic cars become tax exempt after 40 years in the UK.
- rbanffy 5y ago
  Nah... Windows never gets vintage. It's just old and clunky. ;-) In order to be "vintage" in retrocomputing terms it'd need to evoke a different time. Windows 2000 is... just Windows, but with less bling. It's not like an Amiga, with its idiosyncratic OS, or a BBC micro, booting up to a menu of what ROM's were inserted in the motherboard sockets. Or even modern zOS, which workflows that are kind of based on stacks of punch cards and tapes, even though both are virtualized and abstracted into tiered storage and everything runs on freakishly fast hardware.
  - ralphc 5y ago
    Windows 2000 evokes a time when Windows was still enjoyable, or at lease useable. File Manager made sense, the UI elements were distinguishable enough that it's easy to tell what you're doing, the look was consistent. Definitely nostalgia if you use Windows 10.
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
rob74 5y ago
Well, if you go back to the meaning of the word, "vintage" is just the year when a wine was produced, so anything is "vintage" as long as the year it was produced is known. For example, the monitor standing before me right now is 2016 vintage (yeah, I know, pretty old already)...
Fnoord 5y ago
It depends on your definition of 'vintage'. The broad term, does not refer to any specific culture or age: "Vintage design refers to an item of another era that holds important and recognizable value. This style can be applied to interior design, decor and other areas." [1] Note that 'holds important and recognizable value' is subjective and broad (as is 'other areas'). In the context of retro computing, you can easily make an argument for such, as I could for an SGI Indy and SGI Octane and SGI Tezro (or, practically any SGI, though I never owned a Tezro nor an Origin series. Electricity bill was high enough with an Octane). How about this rule of thumb: if you can't securely use it online, it is vintage. Latest SGI IRIX version? Vintage. Any PalmOS devices? Vintage. This device is put online with what, WEP? I wouldn't hang such on my internet connection directly, that's for sure. Its OK if you want to run Windows XP or Windows 2000 or Amiga OS. Just don't put the damn thing online on the internet, connecting to remote devices with ancient TCP/IP stacks, outdated browsers (even embedded!). FTA: "Unfortunately however PQA files can no longer use the Internet as Palm’s proxy under “proxy.palm.net” is no longer in service." The irony here is that I consider that a Good Thing (tm). [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vintage_(design) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vintage_(design)
- anthk 5y ago
  Retrozilla will work well under W2K/XP or even Win9x. Just don't use wireless, use Ethernet.
- AshamedCaptain 5y ago
  > How about this rule of thumb: if you can't securely use it online, it is vintage. My Android device from 4 years ago with no longer a valid root for Let's Encrypt certificates? Vintage.
  - Fnoord 5y ago
    Yup, vintage, though you could flash pmOS or LOS or something on it, the SoC firmware is still out of date. There's a lot of insecure Android devices out there. iOS, too, but its at least more obvious in that space.
reaperducer 5y ago
Is 2002 considered “vintage” now? My wife is into antiques, and tells me that anything older than 25 years is "vintage," and anything older than 100 years is "antique." However, there is some fuzziness with "antique," as some people put that line at 50 or 75 years, depending on the item. In those cases, 100 years is referred to as a "proper antique."
pjerem 5y ago
I always thought that the word "vintage" came from the french word "vingt" (the word for the number 20). So I was going to answer "of course, 2002 is vintage, it's 20 years old". But I checked and I was wrong, it comes from the wine world. Thanks to you, TIL

Is 2002 considered “vintage” now? Semantics aside, it was a fun read :)

BossingAround 5y ago

2002 was 20 years ago. I would consider Windows 2000 fairly vintage.

laumars 5y ago
It’s old, definitely retro, but I always thought vintage meant older than that. Like how vintage cars are 50+ years old. To that end you wouldn’t call the Dreamcast “vintage gaming” (like you might with Pong machines) but you’d definitely still call it retro. Maybe my comment comes more from a place of “oh shit I’m old” rather than a strong objection to the authors comments…
- seized 5y ago
  In many areas cars can qualify for collector plates at 25 years old ( and other requirements like condition). So depending on your definition of retro vs collector vs vintage...
  - rbanffy 5y ago
    I wonder if my Unix workstations can get collector MAC addresses ;-)
- Jaruzel 5y ago
  I'm heavily into retro computing, and my cut off year is 2000. Anything newer than that is not 'retro' in my book. For vintage computing though, I think it would be before the IBM PC, so 1981.
  - hnlmorg 5y ago
    You're talking PC gaming where as the OP was talking about consoles. PC gaming definitely matured around 2000 with many of the titles post-2000 losing their innovative "omg can computers really do that" mystique. However for consoles 2000 slices between machines of the same generation like the aforementioned Dreamcast (pre-2000) and Gamecube (post-2000). These are systems that shared groundbreaking titles between them like Phantasy Star Online; which was one of the very first online multiplayer games for consoles (and which I still play weekly guild matches, streamed on Twitch). After that generation of consoles the specifications for consoles were all pretty similar to PC (chipsets aside): ethernet, wireless, HDMI (the previous generation were all pre-HD too), a HDD, etc. But it was the Dreamcast (and, released much later, the Xbox) in the generation of consoles before that really pioneered this shift in paradigm for console gaming and which many of the consoles of that era only had support for via addons (GC Ethernet Adapter, PS2 Network Adaptor, HDDs for the PS2 Expansion Bay, etc. Heck, even the GC didn't ship with ethernet instead having a dial up modem, and it wasn't even as fast as 56K in most regions!) Thus I think they deserve to be retro for the same reason that 1996-2000 for PC gaming does: they defined how the next couple of decades of gaming would look while making plenty of mistakes along the way.
    - hulitu 5y ago
      > PC gaming definitely matured around 2000 with many of the titles post-2000 losing their innovative "omg can computers really do that" mystique. They definitely lost innovation. The only innovations in gamimg were bloat and greed. That's why is more entertaining to play older titles: they are all about play, they do not try to extort you or bring your PC to the limit.
      - hnlmorg 5y ago
        I'm a massive hard retro gamer too and if you only look at AAA titles then it's easy to see how you're right. However the gaming industry is so much bigger than EA et al. There are so many fun indie games out now that have a real embodiment of that creativity you miss. Take Untitled Goose Game, for example. It was released 3 years ago and you play the part of a Goose who's mission it is to annoy as many people in a quaint English village as possible. The game is basically a modern day equivalent of the How to Be a Complete Bastard class of games from the Spectrum era of home systems. And it's fun too! There's also no shortage of modern games released for older hardware. On the shelf behind me I have at least 5 games released in the last 5 years for various Sega consoles. The Gameboy and Gameboy Advance also see a surprising number of new releases each year too (though I don't collect for those consoles specifically).
  - theodric 5y ago
    Most of the classic Palms have 68k CPUs in them, and feel more like a handheld Classic Mac than a modern smartphone. I am also a vintage snob with a low cutoff (anything after 1985 puts me to sleep) but I will give Palms and other such primitive handhelds a pass.
- indrora 5y ago
  Let me make you old. The following things happened 30 years ago, give or take a few weeks: * H W Bush meets with Yeltsin, Cold War officially declared over. * The EU was officially formed. * Ukraine and four other nations in the Commonwealth of Independent States reject Russia's proposal to maintain unified armed forces. * Dahmer sentenced to 15 terms of life in prison 20 years ago, NASA began mapping the surface of Mars and the Sierra Leone Civil War came to a close. 20/30 years is around the line where "Vintage" starts to come into play. PowerPC Macs are on the edge of "Vintage" but their mid-90s Motorola68k based versions are definitely there.
  - anthk 5y ago
    Mac OS X Tiger looks fairly modem and a G4 with OpenBSD for macppc it's still usable enough for lots of environments.
  - hulitu 5y ago
    > The EU was officially formed. EU existed from some time.
    - andylynch 5y ago
      It's predecessors like the EEC were set up in the fifties post WWII, but yes the European Union was only established in 1992 with the Maastricht Treaty.
      - anthk 5y ago
        Spain joined EEC at 1986, I consider that a pre-EU.
  - laumars 5y ago
    You’re listing off that that’s 30 years ago yet we are talking about 20 years ago, and barely 20 years at that. The difference between 20 and 30 is pretty significant (it’s literally 50% more).
- BuildTheRobots 5y ago
  Classic cars become tax exempt after 40 years in the UK.
rbanffy 5y ago
Nah... Windows never gets vintage. It's just old and clunky. ;-) In order to be "vintage" in retrocomputing terms it'd need to evoke a different time. Windows 2000 is... just Windows, but with less bling. It's not like an Amiga, with its idiosyncratic OS, or a BBC micro, booting up to a menu of what ROM's were inserted in the motherboard sockets. Or even modern zOS, which workflows that are kind of based on stacks of punch cards and tapes, even though both are virtualized and abstracted into tiered storage and everything runs on freakishly fast hardware.
- ralphc 5y ago
  Windows 2000 evokes a time when Windows was still enjoyable, or at lease useable. File Manager made sense, the UI elements were distinguishable enough that it's easy to tell what you're doing, the look was consistent. Definitely nostalgia if you use Windows 10.
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]

rob74 5y ago

Well, if you go back to the meaning of the word, "vintage" is just the year when a wine was produced, so anything is "vintage" as long as the year it was produced is known. For example, the monitor standing before me right now is 2016 vintage (yeah, I know, pretty old already)...

Fnoord 5y ago

It depends on your definition of 'vintage'. The broad term, does not refer to any specific culture or age: "Vintage design refers to an item of another era that holds important and recognizable value. This style can be applied to interior design, decor and other areas." [1] Note that 'holds important and recognizable value' is subjective and broad (as is 'other areas'). In the context of retro computing, you can easily make an argument for such, as I could for an SGI Indy and SGI Octane and SGI Tezro (or, practically any SGI, though I never owned a Tezro nor an Origin series. Electricity bill was high enough with an Octane). How about this rule of thumb: if you can't securely use it online, it is vintage. Latest SGI IRIX version? Vintage. Any PalmOS devices? Vintage. This device is put online with what, WEP? I wouldn't hang such on my internet connection directly, that's for sure. Its OK if you want to run Windows XP or Windows 2000 or Amiga OS. Just don't put the damn thing online on the internet, connecting to remote devices with ancient TCP/IP stacks, outdated browsers (even embedded!). FTA: "Unfortunately however PQA files can no longer use the Internet as Palm’s proxy under “proxy.palm.net” is no longer in service." The irony here is that I consider that a Good Thing (tm). [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vintage_(design) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vintage_(design)

anthk 5y ago
Retrozilla will work well under W2K/XP or even Win9x. Just don't use wireless, use Ethernet.
AshamedCaptain 5y ago
> How about this rule of thumb: if you can't securely use it online, it is vintage. My Android device from 4 years ago with no longer a valid root for Let's Encrypt certificates? Vintage.
- Fnoord 5y ago
  Yup, vintage, though you could flash pmOS or LOS or something on it, the SoC firmware is still out of date. There's a lot of insecure Android devices out there. iOS, too, but its at least more obvious in that space.

reaperducer 5y ago

Is 2002 considered “vintage” now? My wife is into antiques, and tells me that anything older than 25 years is "vintage," and anything older than 100 years is "antique." However, there is some fuzziness with "antique," as some people put that line at 50 or 75 years, depending on the item. In those cases, 100 years is referred to as a "proper antique."

pjerem 5y ago

I always thought that the word "vintage" came from the french word "vingt" (the word for the number 20). So I was going to answer "of course, 2002 is vintage, it's 20 years old". But I checked and I was wrong, it comes from the wine world. Thanks to you, TIL