2 ms·

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

• 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 :-).