Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Why I still use an old PowerPC Mac

howtogeek.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

241–250 of 262 posts

Re: Why I still use an old PowerPC Mac

#241

Post by junar »

Marsymars wrote: post #82
saagarjha wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Got there and tried to connect my laptop to their wifi network. No dice. My laptop (2014-15 era) doesn't do 5ghz Wow, that’s surprising…most laptops from like 2010 onwards have done 5 GHz. Did yours have a particularly old Wi-Fi card in it?

Not a laptop, but the Nintendo 3DS was notably first released in 2011 and does 2.4 GHz only. The iPhone 4S was also released in 2011 as a 2.4 GHz-only device, and not discontinued worldwide until 2016.

Nintendo devices seem to be generally poor at supporting networking standards. The DS did not support WPA or WPA2. The Switch does not support IPv6.

Re: Why I still use an old PowerPC Mac

#242

Post by dividedbyzero »

verytrivial wrote: post #203
golergka wrote: post #187

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I've never understood how they become "bad" just because time passes Because your needs grow, and you want to able to do more stuff with it. A great workstation from 00s won't render your 4k video project or compile Chromium from source in reasonable time, or let you mix an entire virtual orchestra with several dozens of Kompakt sample libraries at all. All of those things are just something you couldn't do on the…

Slight straw man there. :-) I referred explicitly to games and productivity software. The problems you cite here, namely 4k video and Chromium are both arguments in favor of retro computing in my opinion -- Both are solutions looking for a problem that succeed only in perpetuating the churn in hardware, no intrinsic value added, like the 100th re-imagining FPS machine gun splatter fest game. Yawn! :-)

To me it seems the big thing 4k improves on is video immersiveness. After all, reality is 210 degrees field of view, not a comparatively tiny rectangle metres away, and it's crisp and sharp, not somewhat blurry-ish like Full HD at somewhat closer range. I like being able to have a considerably bigger rectangle in my face while still getting acceptable quality; 4k at 60fps is a joy, feels real in a way movies usually don't. Besides, on mobile devices and tablets especially, it's really neat to be able to pinch-zoom into a video and still get some quality. That's not possible with Full HD.

As for Chromium (and by extension all major modern browsers), it's played a pretty important part in making the web a platform to reach pretty much everyone with comparably little effort. A lot of the productivity applications I use day-to-day are web apps, and I guess most wouldn't exist in their anything like their current form if there had to be native Windows, Mac, iOS, and Android apps that people would have to download and install and update and secure (and certainly no Linux app – way too few users to even think about).

To my mind that adds a lot of intrinsic value, at the price of much higher resource consumption, true, but I'd rather have that than the snail pace of innovation and still usually questionable quality we had in the "old days"...

Re: Why I still use an old PowerPC Mac

#243

Post by bacon_waffle »

elpescado wrote: post #149
bacon_waffle wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Do we need a word for it? I've got a 1996 Toyota van and a 2ish year old Dell XPS, both serve my needs well enough. Some new tools are appreciably better than older ones, others aren't; I generally prefer to not spend extra money/time for things in the second category. The 25-year-old car still takes a driver's time and some fuel, and moves stuff around just like a brand new one would. There's no hope of using a 1995…

While 25-year-old car lacks many of new tech gadgets it still is likely to have most important conveniences (A/C etc). The most important difference is safety (while not death cages like cars from 50 years ago, 25-year-old cars are still light years behind current cars) and emissions. The latter means that soon those cars might be banned from cities (at least in Europe), which renders "moves stuff around just like a…

I would rather be identified by what I use the tool to accomplish, not by the particular (age) tool.

The risk/reward of car travel in 1996 was OK with me at the time... It's great that cities are considering banning vehicles over emissions - I bike, walk, bus, or take the electric car (recently bought a Leaf) when just moving myself. The van is for moving big stuff and/or longer rural trips; it's an example of a tool that still serves my purposes and is not something that I want to be identified by.

Re: Why I still use an old PowerPC Mac

#244

Post by dividedbyzero »

I wish I had something like that, but I never got into PowerPC Macs, I bought into the ecosystem with I think the second generation of plastic Intel Macbooks (which, looking back, were quite terrible), and while there's still an early 90s Schneider home computer somewhere in the basement, I fear it won't work anymore and not be any joy to use anyway; that thing was incredibly primitive. It took almost a whole afternoon for my dad to make it play a really simple child's tune for little me. I don't think I appreciated it properly at the time.

I wonder if a Pi 4 would have the horsepower to run a PowerPC emulator with OS 9 properly. If it did, the biggest difficulty might be finding a decent small-ish external screen.

Re: Why I still use an old PowerPC Mac

#245

Post by Stierlitz »

nordsieck wrote: post #74
emersonrsantos wrote: post #55

George R.R. Martin uses Wordstar 4.0 on DOS to write the Game of Thrones novels, he saves his work on floppy disks. Of course, he has a second computer for email and web browsing.

> George R.R. Martin uses Wordstar 4.0 on DOS to write the Game of Thrones novels A much better modern alternative is the Alphasmart Neo 2. * It was designed for elementary school children so it's decently rugged. * It runs a long time (months) on 2 AA batteries. * To get the text off the device, it impersonates a USB keyboard, making it compatible with basically every computer.

To the downvoter: what was wrong with that post?

- quote - @nordsieck

>> George R.R. Martin uses Wordstar 4.0 on DOS to write the Game of Thrones novels

> A much better modern alternative is the Alphasmart Neo 2.

* It was designed for elementary school children so it's decently rugged. * It runs a long time (months) on 2 AA batteries. * To get the text off the device, it impersonates a USB keyboard, making it compatible with basically every computer. - unquote -

Re: Why I still use an old PowerPC Mac

#246

Post by mixmastamyk »

RalfWausE wrote: post #143
dschooh wrote: post #129

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This sounds interesting. Would you mind to elaborate on your workflow and what you do with it specifically? I'd love to see some screen shots.

I work (apart from my sysop dayjob) as a it-trainer, so i need to design handouts for my students for which i use "Singum!", an old, but really nice DTP software. Normally i print the handout on my Epson LQ-500 dot-matrix printer (which produces really nice prints for an dot matrix printer) and photocopy them in the institute i teach in. I need to maintain attendance-stats, lists of exam-results and other spreadsheet…

No desire for unicode? I'm not sure of the charset on Atari. What about newlines?

Re: Why I still use an old PowerPC Mac

#247

Post by mixmastamyk »

morganvachon wrote: post #141
flomo wrote: post #88

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For a TUI program Wordstar seemed much more accessible than WordPerfect. But I guess WP was more aimed at professional secretaries and typists, and people with offbrand printers. When I was first messing around with Linux, I was (pleasantly) surprised when a WordStar clone popped-up instead of vi. Googling says it was called joe editor.

> joe editor JOE is one of the most versatile TUI editors out there. It can emulate not only Wordstar, but Pico/nano, and Emacs. It has full UTF-8 support and can display pretty much any character in any written language. These days I just use nano for simple, quick command line editing, but my writing machine (2000 era Dell Latitude CPx with Slackware) has JOE for long-form writing in Wordstar mode. Like the article…

I left nano behind when micro became mature. Now it is in the Ubuntu repos.

Re: Why I still use an old PowerPC Mac

#248

Post by mixmastamyk »

dan_hawkins wrote: post #191
specialist wrote: post #145

Earlier quoted context omitted.

5 1⁄4" floppies in the year 2020? I'd be sweating. I assume he's saving multiple copies. Still have painful memories of using Fastback, a DOS based backup software. Sitting there feeding floppies into a drive. Stacks of floppies. Twice. Praying the data would restore. Part of my innovative file sharing solution, aka SneakerNet.

~90% of my 5.25" floppies written between 1992 and 1995 are readable (verified 2 years ago.) As for my CD-R collection from 1999-2005 ~50% got problems reading everything from it.

I tried my CDR collection from the late 90's last year. Everything worked perfectly. However I destroyed a number of the obsolete ones.

Re: Why I still use an old PowerPC Mac

#249

Post by einr »

bfuclusion wrote: post #240
einr wrote: post #111

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I see your 386 and raise you an 8088 at 4.77 MHz and 256K of RAM (or less, I'm not sure what the actual requirements of ircjr is if you want to push it): http://www.brutman.com/mTCP/IRCjr.html Really, it's just text, it doesn't matter. Literally any general purpose computer will run IRC if it can do TCP/IP and someone bothers to write a client.

Nice. I have an old Cordata 8088 around somewhere at my parents house. I'll have to boot it up and see if I can get a network card for it.

If you do want to pursue that, a couple of tips:

Most ISA network cards are for the 16-bit bus, XT class machines only have 8-bit slots. This doesn't necessarily mean that the cards will not function, but you also need a packet driver and they very often use 186/286 instructions and will not run at all on an 8088.

The Intel EtherExpress 8∕16 will work, so will the 3Com 3C501. You may also have some luck with generic NE1000/NE2000 clones.

Re: Why I still use an old PowerPC Mac

#250

Post by unicornporn »

nordsieck wrote: post #74
emersonrsantos wrote: post #55

George R.R. Martin uses Wordstar 4.0 on DOS to write the Game of Thrones novels, he saves his work on floppy disks. Of course, he has a second computer for email and web browsing.

> George R.R. Martin uses Wordstar 4.0 on DOS to write the Game of Thrones novels A much better modern alternative is the Alphasmart Neo 2. * It was designed for elementary school children so it's decently rugged. * It runs a long time (months) on 2 AA batteries. * To get the text off the device, it impersonates a USB keyboard, making it compatible with basically every computer.

> A much better modern alternative is the Alphasmart Neo 2.

Yeah, that's what the hipsters say. With a maximum of 5 rows of visible text I don't think it would be a very good option for novels.

Post reply on HN