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Why use old computers and operating systems?

john.ankarstrom.se

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Re: Why use old computers and operating systems?

#11

Post by ajarmst »

ajarmst wrote: post #10

At 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 a…

My father believed strongly in this. I first learned to program in my early teens (at the time there were precisely two computers in a 300 km range of where we lived, my father was an operator on one of them). The ‘computer’ I learned on was made of cardboard, and I was the CPU: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CARDboard_Illustrative_Aid_to_...

Re: Why use old computers and operating systems?

#12

Post by grawprog »

thomastjeffery wrote: post #8
grawprog wrote: post #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…

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.

Computers are general purpose in that they are capable of doing anything possible by a Turing machine with limited memory.

Software built on top of that can be whatever we want within those limits. Even most proprietary operating systems are relatively general purpose. On windows and Mac os, you can generally acquire a wide range of software capable of doing many things and can create your own with relative ease.

Smartphones get a little less general purpose, again above the level of the actual computer though. In the case of smartphones and consoles and such, the extra software thwarting the general purpose nature of the computer is buried a little deeper as firmware flashed onto rom chips.

Then with computer powered appliance type devices, the only software is whatever is flashed onto the rom chip buried inside there that you can't really touch without some hardware modding.

In the end, computers have never stopped being general purpose, and likely never will. It's just the software separating the user from the computer is getting deeper and deeper into hardware.

I realize there's good security and user friendliness arguments to be made for this kind of thing, but it's a worrying trend. It'll create almost a pseudo class system with the people who have real computers and can use them to make money and do things and the people who have toys that suck money from them and feed them consumer garbage.

Re: Why use old computers and operating systems?

#13

Post by hx2a »

A reason to use old computers that I don't see mentioned here has to do with accessibility. People in the US usually have current hardware such as the latest Mac laptop, but that is not the case in all other countries. Current hardware is a bit of a luxury that we don't fully appreciate.

I have an open source project with global users, and one person in Mexico contacted me looking for help. He was trying to create 3D visualizations of MRI brain scans and was running it on an old computer that hardly anybody in the US would consider using. Happily I had done testing on an old laptop and much performance tuning during my development. I was able to help him get his project working. It was still slow, but at least it was usable. It wouldn't have been if my code only worked on current hardware.

Re: Why use old computers and operating systems?

#14

Post by chasil »

0xCMP wrote: post #7

I 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 co…

Let me give you a more concrete reason to maintain legacy systems.

We run a major set of COBOL applications developed under VAX/VMS, running under ACMS, utilizing TDMS. Please note, I can barely spell some of these things, let alone grasp what they do.

The application software that my predecessors wrote for these systems supports thousands of users, and is a vertical wall of technical debt.

I am far from the decision-maker, but I run the corporate-mandated communication gateways. I just switched my bastions from stunnel-telnet to tinyssh-telnet. At least my keys don't expire now, and the crypto is strict DJB.

We make due with what we have. I do the best I can. I respect the work of those that came before (and it signs my paychecks).

Re: Why use old computers and operating systems?

#15

Post by spideymans »

>On this blog, I write about the various computers I use and about the operating systems I use on them. Apart from Windows 7, which is relatively modern, these include Mac OS 10.6 Snow Leopard, which at this point is quite old

Completely nitpicking here, but both operating systems are the exact same age. I agree that Snow Leopard feels significantly less up-to-date than Windows 7 though, which speaks to how quickly Apple’s operating systems are obsoleted (and this isn't necessarily a bad thing).

Re: Why use old computers and operating systems?

#16

Post by accrual »

For others who love old software and hardware I'll share two of my favorite sites, an excellent retro PC emulator, 86Box [0] and a clean and well-maintained software archive, WinWorld [1].

These two sites together have provided me hours of exploration into old hardware, BIOS screens I'd never otherwise see, and plenty of interesting software scenarios.

[0] https://github.com/86Box/86Box

[1] https://winworldpc.com

Re: Why use old computers and operating systems?

#17

Post by offtop5 »

hx2a wrote: post #13

A reason to use old computers that I don't see mentioned here has to do with accessibility. People in the US usually have current hardware such as the latest Mac laptop, but that is not the case in all other countries. Current hardware is a bit of a luxury that we don't fully appreciate. I have an open source project with global users, and one person in Mexico contacted me looking for help. He was trying to create 3D…

Technically, couldn't he install a very lightweight Linux distribution.

I have a few Raspberry Pi zeros and I actually enjoy coding within the limitations of said hardware, when you know you only have 500 megs of RAM on the device you have to solve problems differently

Re: Why use old computers and operating systems?

#18

Post by akiselev »

grawprog wrote: post #12
thomastjeffery wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Computers are general purpose in that they are capable of doing anything possible by a Turing machine with limited memory. Software built on top of that can be whatever we want within those limits. Even most proprietary operating systems are relatively general purpose. On windows and Mac os, you can generally acquire a wide range of software capable of doing many things and can create your own with relative ease. Sma…

I’m having a hard time coming up with anything that a modern OS on a modern CPU can’t do - they’re about as general purpose as can be for any nontrivial but nuanced definition of “general purpose.” The only exception I can think of is real-time IO, which we offload to specialized chips with buffers and queues through PCIe and other busses. However, that’s a physical limitation since these peripherals would be impractical to implement in software until FPGA tech improves and gets significantly cheaper.

Re: Why use old computers and operating systems?

#20

Post by jimktrains2 »

offtop5 wrote: post #17
hx2a wrote: post #13

A reason to use old computers that I don't see mentioned here has to do with accessibility. People in the US usually have current hardware such as the latest Mac laptop, but that is not the case in all other countries. Current hardware is a bit of a luxury that we don't fully appreciate. I have an open source project with global users, and one person in Mexico contacted me looking for help. He was trying to create 3D…

Technically, couldn't he install a very lightweight Linux distribution. I have a few Raspberry Pi zeros and I actually enjoy coding within the limitations of said hardware, when you know you only have 500 megs of RAM on the device you have to solve problems differently

For some reason I find "only have 500megs of RAM" very amusing. Many/most modern laptops only have 8-16 times more RAM than that. I'm genuinely curious what problems you're working where that "limitation" is your bottleneck and not the processor speed (which at 1GHz is still pretty speedy for many/most tasks other than pure computation (e.g. machine learning training and processing large datasets for statistics)). I'm also assuming you're treating it as a dedicated tool, and not doing tasks while running a DE and web browser at the same time.
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