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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?

#61

Post by brudgers »

pjmlp wrote: post #32
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

My first computer was a Timex 2068. With 500 MB the world is boundless. If you want to experiment with constraints get a ESP32.

Why would anyone need more than one 5.25" floppy disk?

It's got 160KB!

Re: Why use old computers and operating systems?

#62

Post by acidburnNSA »

the_af wrote: post #54
accrual wrote: post #16

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

Interesting. What's the difference between 86Box and DOSBox?

For one thing, upon brief investigation I don't think 86Box has Linux builds. Might be mistaken though.

Re: Why use old computers and operating systems?

#63

Post by brudgers »

TedDoesntTalk wrote: post #39

> imagine if spreadsheet programs like Microsoft Excel stopped being developed and eventually just disappeared – that’s the level of significance that HyperCard had. I often hear similar claims about the significance of HyperCard. But if HyperCard was so significant to so many people, wouldn’t it have been ported and/or rewritten over the years to still be available today? Even if not by Apple, then by someone else?…

Hypercard was replaced by the World Wide Web and Power Point.

The World Wide Web because it solved distribution and vendor lock-in.

Power Point because slide shows were an important use case Windows Desktops were much much more common in the 1990's and 00's than Macs.

Power Point also provided much better integration with wordprocessors and spreadsheets.

Re: Why use old computers and operating systems?

#64

Post by marbletiles »

TedDoesntTalk wrote: post #39

> imagine if spreadsheet programs like Microsoft Excel stopped being developed and eventually just disappeared – that’s the level of significance that HyperCard had. I often hear similar claims about the significance of HyperCard. But if HyperCard was so significant to so many people, wouldn’t it have been ported and/or rewritten over the years to still be available today? Even if not by Apple, then by someone else?…

HyperCard is like Concorde: it was replaced by less powerful alternatives (eg PowerPoint) that took away any hope of mass success and left the remaining audience too small to be viable.

That's why later successors like LiveCode have to aim themselves at niches of the original HyperCard audience, like those who want an easy dev tool. Which is nice, but misses the tool-for-everyone dream of the original

Re: Why use old computers and operating systems?

#65

Post by jimktrains2 »

jrockway wrote: post #41
jimktrains2 wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 d…

I didn't say that paying attention to memory use wasn't important. I was more just curious about what kind of task 512MB of RAM is limiting for.

Re: Why use old computers and operating systems?

#66

Post by someperson »

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!

Re: Why use old computers and operating systems?

#67

Post by lew89 »

Sometimes I used old computers because they appeared functional enough. Not so long ago I used a computer from late 2000s and it was a quite normal user experience on Linux (on lightweight window manager of course) with a small exception of web browser. Amount of scripts and data on modern sites caused problems, made whole OS hang often. If only JS was turned off, no problem.

Re: Why use old computers and operating systems?

#68

Post by badsectoracula »

acidburnNSA wrote: post #62
the_af wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Interesting. What's the difference between 86Box and DOSBox?

For one thing, upon brief investigation I don't think 86Box has Linux builds. Might be mistaken though.

86box is a fork of PCem (though it does get updates with new stuff from it) with IMO a nicer UI. If you are on Linux you ca use PCem instead.

Re: Why use old computers and operating systems?

#69

Post by badsectoracula »

the_af wrote: post #54
accrual wrote: post #16

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

Interesting. What's the difference between 86Box and DOSBox?

DOSBox is made for emulating a PC running some form of DOS to play games. It does emulate enough of PC hardware to do that and because of booter games (ie. games running directly from their own boot disks) it can also boot MS-DOS. However the development team doesn't care for non-game uses. There are some forks (e.g. DOSBox-X) that do (and also add more features) but in general it is more of a "compatibility" layer than a full emulator - think of it as Rosetta for DOS.

86box (a fork of PCem) is a full PC hardware emulator trying to emulate original real hardware as faithfully as possible, including their performance characteristics, limitations, etc. You can actually install Windows XP inside 86box on an emulated Pentium MMX 233MHz with an S3 Virge and a Voodoo 2 (though for better performance -and compatibility- Windows 95 is better).

Re: Why use old computers and operating systems?

#70

Post by badsectoracula »

lew89 wrote: post #67

Sometimes I used old computers because they appeared functional enough. Not so long ago I used a computer from late 2000s and it was a quite normal user experience on Linux (on lightweight window manager of course) with a small exception of web browser. Amount of scripts and data on modern sites caused problems, made whole OS hang often. If only JS was turned off, no problem.

Coincidentally i'm writing this from my late 2009 iMac. It is already more than a decade old but i think it is a perfectly fine computer. With the latest version of Firefox every site works.

The main issue it has is that it is a bit sluggish but i think an additional 8GB of RAM (it has 4GB) and perhaps an SSD would make it feel perfectly fine.

Sadly Apple doesn't seem to agree and the last version of macOS to support it is 10.13 - which itself isn't supported anymore as of December 2020 (just ~3 years after it was released, which is kinda mad IMO). Most things seem to work fine so far (most open source applications seem to support even older versions anyway), though Homebrew (which i used to install a couple of command line tools) does warn that they have no official support for it and some stuff may break (fortunately that didn't happen).

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