3 ms·
Meh. I'm a decade or two younger than you, and I've got plenty of stuff going on, but I'm still so drawn to sentimentalism. I miss workstations and the feelin
by mlyle 4y ago
Meh. I'm a decade or two younger than you, and I've got plenty of stuff going on, but I'm still so drawn to sentimentalism.
I miss workstations and the feeling of quality. I miss slapping in a router and having connectivity. I miss the sheer degree of early 2000's brogrammer tomfoolery. I miss BBSes and local community. I miss usenet. I miss the sense that IPC and single thread performance was gonna increase forever. I miss having a T1 to my apartment and playing with frame relay and Serious HiCap Telco Circuits (tm). I miss HalTed and the maker movement before we called it a maker movement.
Man, we've got such great stuff now. I've got a home 2gbps PON link and 10 gigabit ethernet everywhere and plastic crappy machines that are 20 million times faster than that decked out SPARCStation 20 and more IOPS than I could have ever imagined.
But why'd it have to eat all the best parts of those things? (I know why, but that doesn't mean I have to like it...)
- eps 4y agoYeah, the whoomp of a CRT monitor powering up, the sound of a modem handshake at 2am and the flex of 5" floppies. Good memories of times never to return. But that's just nostalgie.
- IntelMiner 4y agoI picked up an old CRT at Seattle's RePC a few months ago. An absolutely massive 1600 x 1200 (at 85 Hz!) thing The first thing I did after powering it on was hit that degauss button, and my god the feeling The bastard clonnnggeddd so loud my roommate heard it through the floor!
- xnx 4y agoI forgot all about degaussing!
- drewzero1 4y agoI drooled over all that stuff but couldn't afford it. Now I might be able to afford some of the workstations I coveted as a kid, but they can hardly do anything by today's standards. Some of them can heat a room pretty well at least.
- mlyle 4y agoThe stuff I like is from an era where machines weren't too power hungry. Typical supplies were 150W, though not very efficient. The main thing is-- it was all very nice sheet metal; they'd thought about RAS, etc; tantalum capacitors everywhere instead of aluminum electrolytic; etc. Today, machines probably have a much longer useful life than ever before, but are built more cheaply and disposable than before. If you buy a high-end ThinkStation or whatever, you basically get an ordinary PC with a nicer CPU inside. I resented my dad buying a PS/2 when I was growing up because it had poor game compatibility and couldn't run (early) Linux... acquired one for nostalgia and found that it has a whole lot of the things I liked about late 90's Unix workstations inside.