Why use old computers and operating systems? • Hacker News Board

Re: Why use old computers and operating systems?

#41

Post by jrockway » Sat, Mar 20, 2021, 10:11 PM UTC

jimktrains2 wrote: post #20

offtop5 wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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'…

I think if you require users to bring their own computer, you can be insulated enough from hardware costs to not really care about memory usage, and that's mostly fine. I have worked on set top boxes at an ISP. We designed and manufactured the hardware; if we could get away with 512MB of RAM instead of 1GB of RAM, that was basically pure profit for us. So some attention was paid to memory use, because it had a real dollar cost associated with it. (I guess I'll point out that the engineering samples had a gig of RAM, and someone got the idea to write the UI in Dart running inside Chrome instead of the very legacy Java that we had on the previous hardware generation... so the production models did not ship with 512MB of RAM.)

To some extent, being careful about memory usage is not the only way to make the business work -- you could, after all, charge more for the service or make people buy the CPE outright. But, being an ISP mostly involves getting enough people to buy the service to make it worth digging up a neighborhood to run fiber; you don't want to sour the deal by costing more than the competition with less able CPE. Doubling the RAM available to software engineers may improve the user experience by more than 100%, but nobody picks their ISP for the software than runs on their TV box, so it's probably wise to be careful.

My point here is that some programmers do have to care about memory usage. If you include a computer as part of your product, you will someday be looking at the BOM cost of the bundled computer in an attempt to turn cost into profit.

Re: Why use old computers and operating systems?

#42

Post by silentsysadmin » Sat, Mar 20, 2021, 10:13 PM UTC

b06tmm wrote: post #23

I recently inherited a 32-bit laptop that runs Vista, any recommendations of what version of Linux to try?

I would load up Slackware 14.2 on that bad boy.

Re: Why use old computers and operating systems?

#43

Post by reaperducer » Sat, Mar 20, 2021, 10:21 PM UTC

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…

A couple of the web sites I maintain have a primary audience of poor, largely immigrant, people with a fifth-grade education and only rudimentary English.

The server logs show most of the connections come from people using what people on HN would consider toy or throwaway convenience store phones. The high-end is people on Windows XP.

(The sites are in the healthcare space, and if one of our clients is really so desperately poor that they can't even afford a smartphone, we'll give them either a laptop and a hotspot, or a smartphone, so they can access the web sites. We pay for their connection.)

Re: Why use old computers and operating systems?

#44

Post by agilob » Sat, Mar 20, 2021, 10:22 PM UTC

cpach wrote: post #37

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…

NB: He wrote ”I think the only solution is to stop expecting every computer to be general-purpose” (my emphasis). He didn’t write ”I think the only solution is to stop expecting computers to be general-purpose”.

>He wrote ”I think the only solution is to stop expecting every computer to be general-purpose”

Which is a bit ironic, as his website doesn't load on my Firefox (disabled HTTP-only connections), and after I added exception, it still looks like crap with DarkReader [1] because the website forces white background, and now I have grey font, with my sight problems, it's just too bright to read. Maybe it's time to stop expecting every website to be even displayed on every browser?

https://darkreader.org/

edit: 99%+ website work fine with darkreader

Re: Why use old computers and operating systems?

#45

Post by BallyBrain » Sat, Mar 20, 2021, 10:23 PM UTC

jstanley wrote: post #33

ajarmst wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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_...

That looks great, I'd love to have a play with one. I wonder what's the easiest way to get one, perhaps a modern replica? It almost looks like it might be possible to implement as a PDF that you just have to print on some card and cut out?

Enjoy!

https://www.instructables.com/CARDIAC-CARDboard-Illustrative...

Re: Why use old computers and operating systems?

#46

Post by squarefoot » Sat, Mar 20, 2021, 10:32 PM UTC

b06tmm wrote: post #23

I recently inherited a 32-bit laptop that runs Vista, any recommendations of what version of Linux to try?

32 bit aren't a problem, RAM however could be. I've run Debian on 32 bit Atom netbooks with 1 Gig RAM without problems. Using light desktop environments such as XFCE or smaller ones would allow also 512MB RAM or even less. Years ago I successfully run Debian + LXDE desktop on one of those toy Win-CE Chinese laptops with just 128MB RAM. CPU was a WM8505 clocked at a whopping 300MHz. And then there's ELKS Linux which would work on 8086 CPUs too which I successfully run on a industrial PC many moons ago. https://github.com/jbruchon/elks

Extremely small systems aside, it can run fine on decently equipped laptops or netbooks. Surfing the web with a full featured browser such as Firefox or using heavy apps such as LibreOffice without having the system swap too much would likely require no less than 2 Gigs or more, but if you do network maintenance using command line tools, even the smallest netbook with half a Gig RAM becomes an useful tool to keep in the bag along with bigger laptops.

Re: Why use old computers and operating systems?

#47

Post by offtop5 » Sat, Mar 20, 2021, 10:48 PM UTC

prox wrote: post #34

lostlogin wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There is something special about the Pi that makes an “oh well, time to reflash and start again” a non-disaster. They are great and hacking about with them is fun, even when disaster strikes.

My version control on the Pi is different SD cards, I just copy the stable versions over and rotate. It’s fun :)

What's the best way to backup the actual sd card. I plan to store it on the cloud. I tried using Windisk 32 and it didn't work .

Re: Why use old computers and operating systems?

#48

Post by lostlogin » Sat, Mar 20, 2021, 10:52 PM UTC

offtop5 wrote: post #47

prox wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My version control on the Pi is different SD cards, I just copy the stable versions over and rotate. It’s fun :)

What's the best way to backup the actual sd card. I plan to store it on the cloud. I tried using Windisk 32 and it didn't work .

I’ve used Pi Baker on the Mac.

It kind of hurts that the image is the same size as the SD card when the card might be pretty much empty, but it does make recovery easier.

Re: Why use old computers and operating systems?

#49

Post by cookiengineer » Sat, Mar 20, 2021, 10:53 PM UTC

b06tmm wrote: post #23

I recently inherited a 32-bit laptop that runs Vista, any recommendations of what version of Linux to try?

Which CPU model do you have exactly? If it's a core 2 model, they are actually 64bit capable (32bit extended) and can run an x86_64 linux without issues.

Rather than that I'd recommend Debian or Mint with MATE if you want an easy and stable distro. Otherwise if you are willing enough, go for archlinux32 to have still the benefits of AUR.

Re: Why use old computers and operating systems?

#50

Post by MaxBarraclough » Sat, Mar 20, 2021, 10:53 PM UTC

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…

Related to this: one of the very few good reasons to offer unencrypted HTTP is that in some parts of the world, old devices are in widespread use, and support for modern HTTPS cannot be taken for granted.