What keeps us so interested in these old machines?...
Posted by Beige_Box_Enthusiast@reddit | vintagecomputing | View on Reddit | 42 comments
Posted by Beige_Box_Enthusiast@reddit | vintagecomputing | View on Reddit | 42 comments
VivienM7@reddit
For me, it represents going back to an era where computer stuff was exciting. New sound cards, new software, new storage forms, new peripherals, etc. Things that represented actual innovation.
Modern stuff is boring. The excitement switched to smartphones almost two decades ago. Modern enthusiast PCs don’t even have drive bays and barely any PCI-E slots for anything other than a GPU… and when you think about it, no exciting thing that goes into either of those will be coming.
agent_flounder@reddit
There's something to be said for the adventure of carefully configuring your motherboard per the instructions versus the point and click bios, auto irq stuff we have now. Sometimes easy isn't as fulfilling.
Cool_Dark_Place@reddit
Reminds me of when I got my 486 DX2/66 system for Christmas in 1994. Was SO excited to finally have a machine that could play Doom/Doom2, and also have a fast enough modem to explore this new "World Wide Web" thing. However, it turned out that the "fly-by-night" computer shop my folks got the system from (which quickly went out of business) didn't configure the system right... as the mouse and modem wouldn't work at the same time. So, 16 year old me dug out the DOS manual, and jumper schematics for the I/O card, did a little research, and manually reconfigured (hardware and BIOS) the IRQ and address settings for all the devices in the system so they'd all work at the same time. Was SO satisfying to be able to fix something that the idiots that built my machine couldn't do!
MWink64@reddit
Well put. I was recently digging through boxes of old parts and thinking the exact same thing. I remember when getting a new sound card was exciting because it meant your games could sound very different (because most used MIDI music). Today, user-friendly has been replaced by user-hostile, and the information superhighway has been replaced by the disinformation dirt road. I now look at new technologies with dread, not excitement.
jdx6511@reddit
Nice turn of phrase.
EskildDood@reddit
Not the prices, that's for certain
ElectronMaster@reddit
For me it's fun to repair stuff and experience what could be done with such minimal hardware compared to what we have today, also I have a particular interest in archaic storage technologies such as tape drives, old hard drives, floppy drives, etc...
MWink64@reddit
I struggle to wrap my mind around the fact that I used to surf the web on a machine with 8MB of RAM and now it would take 8GB, and the experience isn't that much better.
You'd probably love my collection.
agent_flounder@reddit
It is really wild how little ram we got by with 20 years ago. 48M used to be a lot once. Wth happened?! I guess layers upon layers of abstraction, feature bloat, poor optimization...
MWink64@reddit
I have some very bad news about what decade it is.
agent_flounder@reddit
2010s right?
Laktosefreier@reddit
It makes us feel young again. When we turn off the computer again after delving into nostalgia, there is a glimpse of that 10 year old kid reflecting from the now dark screen, but after the blink of an eye it's the old, grey haired (if not bald), bearded guy again you know from the mirror. The eyes are the same, though.
berrmal64@reddit
That is beautifully said, reminds me of something my grandpa told me when he was in his 90s. He said the worst part of aging is you never really feel old mentally, but it's when you try to do something and your body doesn't work right, or you realize you haven't seen that car or person in 50 years, or you're just too too tired to do anything, that it hits you all over again fresh how old you are.
Infamous-Umpire-2923@reddit
It's fun to explore the limitations they had to work around back then.
Jimxor@reddit
What I found most interesting about the earliest home computers was that it was actually still possible for one individual to understand every single thing there was to know about them. I disassembled the entire TRS Model I operating system and included comments by another enthusiast who figured out what each part of that code did. Tandy even included the hardware circuit diagram with every purchase.
That is unlikely to ever happen again.
frenchretronerd@reddit
The memories bro. The memories... A pivotal era we'll never have again. We were pioneers, we had a beautiful future ahead, we were young and each new product was bringing incredible performance uplifts, each year brought us games that were both good and even more beautiful than the ones from the year before, all of that made the PC world so exciting, every week with a new release or review of hardware. Internet was a far west but with more knowledge and information than slop and ads (although there were ads too), mostly with geeks like us wandering around in newsgroups , IRC etc.
We were young and it meant for us that was usually associated to leisure time. I think we just want to go back to the time we were excited about the new hardware, amazed when released, happy to enjoy it and optimistic about the future.
IamTheJohn@reddit
For me, I can't understand why people are interested in bland beige boxes that run windows. Then again, my youth was with the cambrian explosion of home computers, where they all were new and incompatible. Don't get me wrong, I made a great career in tech support, working with windows boxes in some capacity or the other. Pre-pc computers just are more interesting to me, with their often brilliant designs and adorable shortcomings.
ScudsCorp@reddit
Right - the 8 bit micro era is where everyone had to design from scratch and there was no concept of a shared platform.
IamTheJohn@reddit
Even within the same company, there was often no concept of a shared platform. (I'm looking at you, Commodore.... 🙄😄)
GenTenStation@reddit
Truthfully I find modern PCs boring. Everything is very handholdy and constantly trying to sell you something. Back in the day you got a box and it more or less just said figure it out to you on start up and there was a sense of exploration and accomplishment to getting it to do what you wanted.
ImASharkRawwwr@reddit
Nostalgia. But there's a rising trend of choosing old hardware and software to be less exposed to modern corporate bs.
Win 11 installs sponsored apps ball even if you removed them? Win98 doesn't even have the concept for a ms store.
Win 11 forcing you to install updates and reboot? Win 98 can't force you and is so far out of date there arent even official update servers anymore, it's entirely optional today
jdx6511@reddit
There's always Linux. Still have to choose distro wisely to avoid corporate BS. It's ease-of-use issues have largely been addressed. I've dabbled in it, but put up with Windows, through 10 (the "last" version). I've resolved not to use Windows 11.
MWink64@reddit
To be fair, Windows 98 will force you to reboot for other reasons.
zzTWiLiGHTzz@reddit
A different and pioneering era of exciting developments and some hardware peripherals that simply don’t exist on modern computers. For me, there is always more to explore and learn and these machines were not pushed to their absolute limits in terms of exploring during the 3 or 4 years of their hey day.
mnlx@reddit
Idk man, I just like computers, old and new. I have more fun with emulation/virtualisation binges actually, so there's only been one 20th century machine out of storage for a while. I'm not buying vintage (in this economy, lol), just not power-hungry business stuff for specific jobs and new gear for the rest. Probably my best CRT needs a replacement and that won't be cheap right now, neither will be a new beige mechanical PS/2, preferably with N-key rollover, but we need these things you see.
ScudsCorp@reddit
80’s /90’s Unix is interesting because it’s a simpler cleaner version of the unixes of today.
And the 8 bit micros are completely alien compared to today so making things happen on them is a journey in itself
2016-679@reddit
Back to basics, software that sucks less, distraction free
TomOnABudget@reddit
Software that sucks less? I think you're misremembering the 90s.
Windows XP had sich a big impact because it was so much more sophisticated, less finicky and way less crashy.
We reinstalled windows every 6 months because the whole machine slowed down so much.
The most common actions required you to restart the PC which took long enough that you'd go out and fire up the kettle.
orion3311@reddit
The challenge
Hefty_Principle700@reddit
It’s the feeling of riding the wave of technology. When there was optimism for the future.
MelinaSeeDee@reddit
They're from a time we can never return to... I always find it funny that we went from clickety clack keyboards to quiet keyboards back to clickety clacks. Marble mouse has always been best mouse, though.
lordfarshave@reddit
Because they are our beginning...and our end.
sharpied79@reddit
Nostalgia and sentimentality.
For me it's the Amiga because my Dad absolutely loved his Amiga.
He's no longer with us, but everytime I fire up my MiST running Minimig in an A1200 case it just reminds me of better days of my youth with my Dad still around...
AIMRunningMan@reddit
I'm romantically attracted to them (as well as pretty much any other consumer electronics for that matter) and have been ever since I first learned how to use a computer at age 5 or 6. Maybe I'm a little weird for that, but hey, there's a lot of way worse things to be into... Plus a computer can't break my heart, and if they die they're almost always repairable.
Lonely-Artist5371@reddit
I have a ddr2 q6600 running windows 11. Fun stuff
KonnivingKiwi@reddit
the first mainstream quad-core. That time was a blast.
sw1ss_dude@reddit
I mean just look at it
Just_to_rebut@reddit
For me… the idea of something just being enough. I’m exhausted by the stream of newer technology. Let me figure out how this box works first.
JollyQuiscalus@reddit
They have character.
muse_head@reddit
Nostalgia, and I enjoy the challenge and satisfaction of cleaning up and fixing something that has been seen as junk and almost trashed / recycled. I don't have any real purpose for using them.
I'm only interested in tech that I don't remember as being cutting edge technology though, so it has to be 80s or 90s stuff as I was already a teenager in 2000!
henk717@reddit
I like the tinkering aspect, windows works to well these days for me.
Take windows 10, you installed it, the OS would automatically get all the drivers from Windows Update on modern hardware and then ran pretty stable.
When I went to my retro hardware its very much not that, by design. I went with a 2005 era machine and wanted to run as wide of an operating system range on it as I could manage.
That requires tinkering, finding obscure drivers, memory limiting, making my own boot setup for dos, finding ways to run things that shouldn't run and just generally designing around the self imposed limitations by picking something thats a bit to new for 98 and making it as smoothly as it does now.
That whole challenge was fun, and every OS just does what I want and nothing else. While modern windows is the opposite of that, there the challenge is making it do what you want rather than making it work well.
Beige_Box_Enthusiast@reddit (OP)
For me it’s reliving my favourite old games, finally building the systems I could only dream of back then, the fun of restoring old parts and just sharing it with people who get it.