Why use old computers and operating systems?
john.ankarstrom.se
Why use old computers and operating systems?
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Re: Why use old computers and operating systems?
#2> Error establishing a database connection
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Re: Why use old computers and operating systems?
#3At the time of writing the answer appears to be "Error establishing a database connection" which tickled me as, well, accessing my childhood 8 bit computers never involved database errors!
Re: Why use old computers and operating systems?
#4Re: Why use old computers and operating systems?
#5>I think the only solution is to stop expecting every computer to be general-purpose
Why? Computers are general purpose. The software we put on computers may have specific purposes, but computers are general purpose.
As for 'computer powered appliances' plenty of those exist and the general trend does seem to be to abstract the computer away inside some kind of locked down appliance.
I hope general purpose computers never go away. They're one of the most powerful and amazing tools ever created by humans. It's really too bad more people don't seem to understand or appreciate that.
Re: Why use old computers and operating systems?
#6Sounds like nostalgia to me.
Re: Why use old computers and operating systems?
#7I agree with the idea that old computers and OSes might still be useful and that they have a lot of ideas we simply don't even get to experience today.
However the final points of learning to accept that general purpose computing isn't needed or something is not well worded and in it's current version I completely disagree with. Old hardware can be kept and used for specific, non-general purposes. And new hardware could be made which is locked down for security and maintenance reasons (think... routers or IoT bridges...). But a world where we resign ourselves to machines which are not general computing devices is not one I think we should be moving towards.
Re: Why use old computers and operating systems?
#8>I think the only solution is to stop expecting every computer to be general-purpose Why? Computers are general purpose. The software we put on computers may have specific purposes, but computers are general purpose. As for 'computer powered appliances' plenty of those exist and the general trend does seem to be to abstract the computer away inside some kind of locked down appliance. I hope general purpose computers…
I think a lot of people get turned off from general purpose computers because they are using proprietary operating systems and software that mitigate the "general purpose" aspect.
The most "general purpose" software most people interact with is a browser.
Re: Why use old computers and operating systems?
#9I am not GP ng to clutter my home with old, bulky and single-purpose computers.
> and the computers needed to run them are cheap
Old computers aren't always cheap. Retro PCs get expensive quick.
Re: Why use old computers and operating systems?
#10At my institution, our students take a series of courses on programming a simple microcontroller (and were doing so long before IoT/Arduino made that fashionable again). We worked with the HC11 until a few years ago when we moved to the 9s12. They even worked for a while in Assembly Language until quite recently (we now use C exclusively). In this case it wasn’t nostalgia or joy or anything subtle: modern computers are too complex to permit a useful mental model of how they operate. These ‘older’ systems (and their modern simple cousins) are a fantastic way to learn how a computer actually works with sufficient insight that it gives you a much deeper feel for how more complex descendants work. As one example, pointers and indirection are always a topic that students learning programming struggle with. Explaining that topic is much, much easier to a roomful of people who’ve worked directly with address registers and offsets.