When I was an independent consultant in the mountains in northern california. There were companies running devices from their Windows 7 and Window NT computers where the device manufacturer had gone belly up, quit or just decided to not support their previous products. I had several sucesses using WINE on Linux. The companies were so grateful that in some cases I get free pastry, coffee, and/or sandwiches
Here in LA some schools are in a bad way so I put Linux on old hardware and teach the kids what is different between linux, libre Office, GIMP, and other FOSS software. I freely transfer my HATE of M$Soft and MAC to these young minds
Why use old computers and operating systems?
71–80 of 146 posts
Re: Why use old computers and operating systems?
#72> 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?…
Re: Why use old computers and operating systems?
#73Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
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.
Re: Why use old computers and operating systems?
#74Earlier 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’ve found that when working on things like this it’s better to make the engineering samples half HALF the RAM instead of double - it encourages minimalism.
Re: Why use old computers and operating systems?
#75Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 impract…
There's a lot you can't do, or can only do too slowly to be useful.
This is why scientific and commercial mainframes still exist, and why a lot of computing is offloaded to cloud services, relegating the modern OS on a modern CPU to a client system.
There are also entirely classes of fairly conventional applications - A(G)I, true holographic displays, pseudo-real telepresence, real-time photo-realistic rendering (although that's starting to become possible), distributed non-localised filesystems, associative semantic storage of all kinds - that modern hardware is still too slow for.
And more speculative classes too.
In fact contemporary hardware is mostly quite slow and dumb. It's incredibly fast, small, and cheap compared to a mid-80s mainframe, but it's going to look very underpowered and crude fifty years from now.
Re: Why use old computers and operating systems?
#76A 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
I like how cushy we have it when 500Megs are considered 'only'. I appreciate nowadays even tetris runs on 6GB but if the software is written well, 500MB is a lot of memory to use.
Re: Why use old computers and operating systems?
#77Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 t…
Thanks! Very informative reply. I understand the difference now.
Re: Why use old computers and operating systems?
#78A 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…
> -O0 with address sanitizers on my desktop
> that at -O3
What does this notation mean?
Re: Why use old computers and operating systems?
#79Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
> -O0 with address sanitizers on my desktop > that at -O3 What does this notation mean?
Optimization levels for C compilers like GCC and Clang.