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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?

#91

Post by ehnto »

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…

On the other hand, I don't need my fridge to be a general purpose computer when people start making them smarter. Embedded software gains a lot of robustness from being separate from general purpose computing software pipelines.

If my toaster starts running node.js and needs internet connectivity I may go find my own shark to jump.

Re: Why use old computers and operating systems?

#92

Post by locusofself »

IggleSniggle wrote: post #81
heavyset_go wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And older phones might have certificate stores that can't be upgraded and have already expired.

It’s kinda annoying that I can barely use my 2013 iPad Mini because of this kind of issue, even though I absolutely love that thing (I even used it as my primary smartphone using voip for a few years!).

if it's a limited number of Root CA certs that are not supported, you can likely install those manually.

Re: Why use old computers and operating systems?

#93

Post by locusofself »

icedchai wrote: post #53
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

"Only"... My first Linux system had 3 megabytes of RAM! I was running SLS Linux on a 386SX/20.

:) 16mb on my first computer and that had Win95 (then redhat linux)

Re: Why use old computers and operating systems?

#94

Post by sildur »

bombcar wrote: post #73
lostlogin wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Write zeros to the empty space (many method available- make a big file of zeros or something and delete it) - then your image of the SD card should compress really well.

You can also use fallocate -d if you are in Linux.

Re: Why use old computers and operating systems?

#95

Post by dataflow »

jcelerier wrote: post #25
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…

my personal rule of thumb is that my software must be useable at -O0 with address sanitizers on my desktop - so far that has meant that at -O3 it stays useable on raspberry pi-3 level hardware. A few months ago I tried to make a build which targetted ivybridge-level CPUs, it took no more than one day for a few users to report that it didn't work on their machines, turns out a lot of people still rock some old AMD Phe…

> my personal rule of thumb is that my software must be useable at -O0 with address sanitizers on my desktop

The trouble with this criterion is that it fundamentally alters the language from the ground-up: it forces you to optimize the source code structure for this too, not just run-time performance. Specifically, one of the core strengths of C++ is that no matter how many (practical) levels of wrapping and forwarding you do, as long as they're simple, they can generally all get flattened and go away with optimizations like inlining. But if you don't enable optimizations, now every indirection in your source code will cost you—even absolutely trivial things, like std::move() or std::forward(), that should be 100% free. This obviously hampers your ability to design good C++ abstractions, and, basically, turns C++ into a different language (like Javascript or Python). It seems rather suboptimal. (Do you not encounter these issues in your particular application?)

What I would probably prefer in your situation is to change the criteria somewhat, by doing things like keeping ASAN, enabling some debug-mode facilities (like ITERATOR_DEBUG_LEVEL=1 for MSVC), but also enabling some optimizations for inlining and such so that you don't fundamentally alter the language like this. And/or you can just slow down your CPU when testing (in Windows you can just set the max CPU speed in Advanced Power Options).

Re: Why use old computers and operating systems?

#97

Post by musicale »

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…

Slightly more complicated, but you can also do bare metal programming on a Raspberry Pi, e.g. http://cs107e.github.io

Re: Why use old computers and operating systems?

#98

Post by neurostimulant »

someperson wrote: post #66

It's actually possible to browse the web on retro PCs by setting up a Raspberry Pi running "Browservice": https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5MjZdKtv9ak If you're on a machine with only a RJ11 / 56k dial-up port, you can also setup Raspberry Pi to handle this too: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NFUTInM7gq8 Hope this helps some retrocomputing enthusiasts!

In addition to Browservice, WRP is also pretty good for very old browser that can't do anything but to load images. As long as you can load a webpage with image map support, you can browse any modern websites on it (I think Browservice requires some js support on the client browser).

https://github.com/tenox7/wrp

Re: Why use old computers and operating systems?

#99

Post by GrayShade »

bawolff wrote: post #86
MaxBarraclough wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

How many of those are old enough that they can't download firefox? (I realize this sounds snobby. I'm mostly just actually curious how much that is a viable option)

About years ago I saw a phone that could no longer connect to Play Store, probably because of lacking support for newer TLS versions. It was a rebranded Chinese phone, with no firmware update available.

I managed to install Firefox and a couple of apps by transferring the APKs from my phone using Bluetooth, but it's a popular brand in my country and I'm sure a lot of people are in the same situation.

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