7 ms·

> I have been interested in retro hardware for a long time. Retro. 1997. Cries in 8088.

by sbf501 4y ago

the_only_law 4y ago
Wait till you find out the debate about XP era machines being retro.
- zmgsabst 4y ago
  I thought the cutoff was 1 generation, or ~15 years. Everything before the iPhone is “retro”.
- badsectoracula 4y ago
  I don't think there is really much of a debate, anything older than around 15 to 20 year (depending on who you ask, there isn't really a hard threshold) is pretty much retro. E.g. nowadays an Xbox 360 or PS3 console (both released around mid-2000s) is considered a retro console and you can find them in various retro YouTube channels. Even the games released for them have a distinct "feel" and visual style. WinXP, released in 2001, is full-on retro :-P. It might sound weird if you grew up to think retro as machines like ZX Spectrum, Atari 2600, Commodore 64, Apple 2, etc but time does move forward and with it also does the concept of what is retro :-) (and those machines are retro too of course :-P).
  - sponaugle 4y ago
    It is amazing what collections of this newer-old hardware is still around. It is easy to find things like the early PCI video cards, accelerators like the 3dfx Voodoo, and even some classics like the awesomely(at the time) overclockable Celeron 300 on ebay or in garage sales. It is perhaps even more amazing to see how many 5150s and 5160s are still operational!
  - hotpotamus 4y ago
    WinXP probably should feel weird in that it's life is exactly in your range for retro. The original release was 2001, so over 20 years, but service pack 3 was 2008, 14 years ago. And EOL for extended support was 2014, and if memory serves they even pushed out a couple patches after for big vulnerabilities. You could even edit the registry and pretend to be XP embedded to get more updates. It was a long lived OS which is why it's debatable.
    - badsectoracula 4y ago
      I don't think it makes much sense to use the latest update dates as any sort of indication for that though, old stuff with updates is still old (e.g. a simple way to think of it, fixing some old radio from the 20s wont make it any less old unless you change the entire mechanism and even then assuming you didn't modify that, the "interface" would still be the same). It might have been long lived but the overall user experience didn't change much between the original release and the very last release. You can see a screenshot or even a video of the original WinXP and the last WinXP patch and they'd look and feel almost the same. On a similar note, when people play around with 90s retro PCs, they often install software, patches and drivers released in the early 2000s (or even late 2000s or sometimes recent stuff) - that doesn't make these machines any less "90s PCs" either.
      - hotpotamus 4y ago
        I'd just say software is a bit different than hardware. Hardware is quite fixed in time while software is ever changing. XP is really just an iteration of WinNT to unify MS's home and enterprise codebases and XP was really just a point in time snapshot of the code on its way from NT through to 11 today.
        badsectoracula 4y ago
        Yes but what the users actually associate with the WinXP time period isn't the look&feel and UX of Win NT 3.1 nor the look&feel and UX of Win11, it is the very specific look& feel and UX of Windows XP which didn't really change much in later SPs. And yeah, sure, a machine running XP in 2014 (or later, people didn't stop using WinXP because Microsoft officially dropped support) isn't really retro, but the original argument was "WinXP era" machines which at least i'd put them into the early to midlate 2000s, when WinXP was the mainstream OS, before Vista started being used by the mainstream. PCs are very backwards compatible and unlike a ZX Spectrum or Commodore 64, they are highly modular, so using edge cases (like WinXP being supported until 2014) isn't really that representative - by 2014 people had moved on to Win8.x and Win10 release was just some months away. Meanwhile almost every PC from 2003 or so, which originally would run only WinXP, can run Windows 8 - but aside from curiosity, nobody would really do that in practice. But still despite this vagueness, people do see those older PCs as retro. Even personally, despite growing up with XT clones, i cannot see the Athlon64 PC i bought in 2003 as anything else than a retro PC, even if it can run some modern indie games (at like 2 FPS :-).
- sponaugle 4y ago
  No doubt retro is a broad term, and perhaps it is reasonable for the term to follow the experience of the speaker. I have a reasonable collection of retro-hardware, but it does span a wide time span. The oldest would be the Kaypro, Osborn, and a few other Z80 late 70s machines, following through with all of the key IBMs of the 80s (PC, XT, XT/286, AT, PS/2), plus a sampling of the Mac lines from the original 128K Mac up through a few Quadras, Amiga, Commodore, Atari, etc. For me they are all 'retro', but I tend to think of the interesting stuff to be the things from my childhood - so the Commodore, TI, Amiga, Atari, IBM PC, Televideo, etc. It is interesting to see the enthusiasm of people building 'retro' XP machine. For some of them it represents the platform they grew up with. For us old folks it is more like that OS we were using for work some time ago. I did just build up a reasonably authentic Pentium 100 machine in a configuration that was very close to the Pentium 100 machine I used when I worked at Intel during that processors release. Fun times.
- selfhoster11 4y ago
  Recently I heard a Windows 7-era machine being called very old. I gained a grey hair or two just hearing this.
bsedlm 4y ago
I hope that by the time a PC with keyboard and mouse (or even a laptop with trackpad and keyboard) are considered retro I am able to stay away from all computers. because on this trend, such a world where all computing is through 'smart' devices is a world in which we have even less individual power than we do now.
- sbf501 4y ago
  Unfortunately, I think in the world you describe, you will be immersed in 100x more computers, they will just be smaller, and everywhere (possibly inside you).
  - TMWNN 4y ago
    Vernor Vinge's A Deepness in the Sky depicts a human interstellar civilization thousands of years in the future, in which superluminal travel is impossible (for the humans), so travelers use hibernation to pass the decades while their ships travel between star systems. Merchants often revisit systems after a century or two, so see great changes in each visit. The merchants repeatedly find that once smart dust (tiny swarms of nanomachines) are developed, governments inevitably use them for ubiquitous surveillance, which inevitably causes societal collapse. <https://blog.regehr.org/archives/255 https://blog.regehr.org/archives/255>
    - sbf501 4y ago
      Interesting. I'd like to read that. Similar to how the plot moves along in Rememberance of Earth's Past: everyone keeps hopping into hibernation to scoot along another 100 or so years.
bee_rider 4y ago
Would you have called the 8088 retro in 1997? Because a '79 vintage 8088 in '97 would be more recent than that '97 machine is now.
- bombcar 4y ago
  In 1997 many machines in common usage were still running DOS (even if they were a 386 or even a 486) - so the 8088 wouldn't have looked as "retro" perhaps. But even a few short years later everyone was on Windows 98SE or XP and the DOS machines began to look seriously retro.
- letitbeirie 4y ago
  Now I want to cry too.
- sbf501 4y ago
  Perhaps if we scaled time by Moore's law. :) In that case, the distance from 1979 to 1997 is much longer than 1997 to 2022.
  - forinti 4y ago
    The 80s were crazy. In 1981 you got a ZX81 with 1KB of RAM. In 1985 the Amiga came out. Then in the late 90s I remember RAM doubling every year. From about 2010 onwards, things have gotten slower.
    - sbf501 4y ago
      I was looking it at from the product point of view. The time between the 8088, 286, 386, 486, Pentium spans nearly two decades. Now intel churns out a dozen new SKUs a year. Granted they are all variations on the same silicon as the process improves, but it is far more accelerated than in the past.
__MatrixMan__ 4y ago
Overheard the other day: > Tupac, a rapper from the 1900's
pjmlp 4y ago
In 1997 I was using a Pentium 75, what were you doing with an 8088?!?
- squarefoot 4y ago
  I successfully run ELKS on a Flytech Carry 1 industrial computer. https://github.com/jbruchon/elks https://github.com/jbruchon/elks http://elks.sourceforge.net/ http://elks.sourceforge.net/ (old Sourceforge page) https://vinc.prv.pl/text/299e3ed5-320.html https://vinc.prv.pl/text/299e3ed5-320.html
phendrenad2 4y ago
Anything > 20 years old is retro. What modern PCs will be hot collector's items in 20 years?

> I have been interested in retro hardware for a long time. Retro. 1997. Cries in 8088.

by sbf501 4y ago

> I have been interested in retro hardware for a long time. Retro. 1997. Cries in 8088.

the_only_law 4y ago

Wait till you find out the debate about XP era machines being retro.

zmgsabst 4y ago
I thought the cutoff was 1 generation, or ~15 years. Everything before the iPhone is “retro”.
badsectoracula 4y ago
I don't think there is really much of a debate, anything older than around 15 to 20 year (depending on who you ask, there isn't really a hard threshold) is pretty much retro. E.g. nowadays an Xbox 360 or PS3 console (both released around mid-2000s) is considered a retro console and you can find them in various retro YouTube channels. Even the games released for them have a distinct "feel" and visual style. WinXP, released in 2001, is full-on retro :-P. It might sound weird if you grew up to think retro as machines like ZX Spectrum, Atari 2600, Commodore 64, Apple 2, etc but time does move forward and with it also does the concept of what is retro :-) (and those machines are retro too of course :-P).
- sponaugle 4y ago
  It is amazing what collections of this newer-old hardware is still around. It is easy to find things like the early PCI video cards, accelerators like the 3dfx Voodoo, and even some classics like the awesomely(at the time) overclockable Celeron 300 on ebay or in garage sales. It is perhaps even more amazing to see how many 5150s and 5160s are still operational!
- hotpotamus 4y ago
  WinXP probably should feel weird in that it's life is exactly in your range for retro. The original release was 2001, so over 20 years, but service pack 3 was 2008, 14 years ago. And EOL for extended support was 2014, and if memory serves they even pushed out a couple patches after for big vulnerabilities. You could even edit the registry and pretend to be XP embedded to get more updates. It was a long lived OS which is why it's debatable.
  - badsectoracula 4y ago
    I don't think it makes much sense to use the latest update dates as any sort of indication for that though, old stuff with updates is still old (e.g. a simple way to think of it, fixing some old radio from the 20s wont make it any less old unless you change the entire mechanism and even then assuming you didn't modify that, the "interface" would still be the same). It might have been long lived but the overall user experience didn't change much between the original release and the very last release. You can see a screenshot or even a video of the original WinXP and the last WinXP patch and they'd look and feel almost the same. On a similar note, when people play around with 90s retro PCs, they often install software, patches and drivers released in the early 2000s (or even late 2000s or sometimes recent stuff) - that doesn't make these machines any less "90s PCs" either.
    - hotpotamus 4y ago
      I'd just say software is a bit different than hardware. Hardware is quite fixed in time while software is ever changing. XP is really just an iteration of WinNT to unify MS's home and enterprise codebases and XP was really just a point in time snapshot of the code on its way from NT through to 11 today.
      - badsectoracula 4y ago
        Yes but what the users actually associate with the WinXP time period isn't the look&feel and UX of Win NT 3.1 nor the look&feel and UX of Win11, it is the very specific look& feel and UX of Windows XP which didn't really change much in later SPs. And yeah, sure, a machine running XP in 2014 (or later, people didn't stop using WinXP because Microsoft officially dropped support) isn't really retro, but the original argument was "WinXP era" machines which at least i'd put them into the early to midlate 2000s, when WinXP was the mainstream OS, before Vista started being used by the mainstream. PCs are very backwards compatible and unlike a ZX Spectrum or Commodore 64, they are highly modular, so using edge cases (like WinXP being supported until 2014) isn't really that representative - by 2014 people had moved on to Win8.x and Win10 release was just some months away. Meanwhile almost every PC from 2003 or so, which originally would run only WinXP, can run Windows 8 - but aside from curiosity, nobody would really do that in practice. But still despite this vagueness, people do see those older PCs as retro. Even personally, despite growing up with XT clones, i cannot see the Athlon64 PC i bought in 2003 as anything else than a retro PC, even if it can run some modern indie games (at like 2 FPS :-).
sponaugle 4y ago
No doubt retro is a broad term, and perhaps it is reasonable for the term to follow the experience of the speaker. I have a reasonable collection of retro-hardware, but it does span a wide time span. The oldest would be the Kaypro, Osborn, and a few other Z80 late 70s machines, following through with all of the key IBMs of the 80s (PC, XT, XT/286, AT, PS/2), plus a sampling of the Mac lines from the original 128K Mac up through a few Quadras, Amiga, Commodore, Atari, etc. For me they are all 'retro', but I tend to think of the interesting stuff to be the things from my childhood - so the Commodore, TI, Amiga, Atari, IBM PC, Televideo, etc. It is interesting to see the enthusiasm of people building 'retro' XP machine. For some of them it represents the platform they grew up with. For us old folks it is more like that OS we were using for work some time ago. I did just build up a reasonably authentic Pentium 100 machine in a configuration that was very close to the Pentium 100 machine I used when I worked at Intel during that processors release. Fun times.
selfhoster11 4y ago
Recently I heard a Windows 7-era machine being called very old. I gained a grey hair or two just hearing this.

bsedlm 4y ago

I hope that by the time a PC with keyboard and mouse (or even a laptop with trackpad and keyboard) are considered retro I am able to stay away from all computers. because on this trend, such a world where all computing is through 'smart' devices is a world in which we have even less individual power than we do now.

sbf501 4y ago
Unfortunately, I think in the world you describe, you will be immersed in 100x more computers, they will just be smaller, and everywhere (possibly inside you).
- TMWNN 4y ago
  Vernor Vinge's A Deepness in the Sky depicts a human interstellar civilization thousands of years in the future, in which superluminal travel is impossible (for the humans), so travelers use hibernation to pass the decades while their ships travel between star systems. Merchants often revisit systems after a century or two, so see great changes in each visit. The merchants repeatedly find that once smart dust (tiny swarms of nanomachines) are developed, governments inevitably use them for ubiquitous surveillance, which inevitably causes societal collapse. <https://blog.regehr.org/archives/255 https://blog.regehr.org/archives/255>
  - sbf501 4y ago
    Interesting. I'd like to read that. Similar to how the plot moves along in Rememberance of Earth's Past: everyone keeps hopping into hibernation to scoot along another 100 or so years.

bee_rider 4y ago

Would you have called the 8088 retro in 1997? Because a '79 vintage 8088 in '97 would be more recent than that '97 machine is now.

bombcar 4y ago
In 1997 many machines in common usage were still running DOS (even if they were a 386 or even a 486) - so the 8088 wouldn't have looked as "retro" perhaps. But even a few short years later everyone was on Windows 98SE or XP and the DOS machines began to look seriously retro.
letitbeirie 4y ago
Now I want to cry too.
sbf501 4y ago
Perhaps if we scaled time by Moore's law. :) In that case, the distance from 1979 to 1997 is much longer than 1997 to 2022.
- forinti 4y ago
  The 80s were crazy. In 1981 you got a ZX81 with 1KB of RAM. In 1985 the Amiga came out. Then in the late 90s I remember RAM doubling every year. From about 2010 onwards, things have gotten slower.
  - sbf501 4y ago
    I was looking it at from the product point of view. The time between the 8088, 286, 386, 486, Pentium spans nearly two decades. Now intel churns out a dozen new SKUs a year. Granted they are all variations on the same silicon as the process improves, but it is far more accelerated than in the past.

__MatrixMan__ 4y ago

Overheard the other day: > Tupac, a rapper from the 1900's

pjmlp 4y ago

In 1997 I was using a Pentium 75, what were you doing with an 8088?!?

squarefoot 4y ago
I successfully run ELKS on a Flytech Carry 1 industrial computer. https://github.com/jbruchon/elks https://github.com/jbruchon/elks http://elks.sourceforge.net/ http://elks.sourceforge.net/ (old Sourceforge page) https://vinc.prv.pl/text/299e3ed5-320.html https://vinc.prv.pl/text/299e3ed5-320.html

phendrenad2 4y ago

Anything > 20 years old is retro. What modern PCs will be hot collector's items in 20 years?