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Re: "When is retro computing?"
It seems like it'd be easy to date yourself by giving a specific cutoff for what counts as "old" for the purposes of "retro" enough computing. What if the "retro" part of the retrocomputing appeal was not a quantity of years-in-the-past, but technologies that haven't managed to continue improving/adapting/evolving? If it doesn't have a mainstream/being-sold instantiation in today's userbase, it's "retro." It's not the distance in the past, but the fact that using it means leaving the forward-moving wave of present time and progress.
C:\MEMORY\NOSTOL~1> FEELS.BAT
Mar 31 · 6 weeks ago
I’ll reply in 20 minutes when my cassette tape finishes playing the program to interface with my 1200 baud acoustic modem and rotary phone into my 8KB RAM.
🐙 norayr [mod] · Apr 01 at 01:50:
i told my friend @antranigv about this thread and he said that since retrocomputng is doing computing like before, then by using unix shell and pipes we do it like in 70-ies so we do retrocompuing. (:
🍩 wholesomedonut · Apr 02 at 03:47:
my thought, like others here, is that retro computing more involves the HOW of the computing moreso than what it's done on.
vintage is firmly a measurement of time, and I'd probably put the cutoff at either 20 years, or obsolesence of all commercial / original software providers it's dependent on, depending on which is longer.
For example, I wouldn't tag any iPhone but the original as being vintage - and even that isn't vintage by my rule until 2027 or 2028, whichever it was.
And likewise I'd say that Unixes aren't vintage, even though a lot of their core bits are ancient by comparison to modern tech. Because they're still actively developed and supported.
🖥️ zetamacs · Apr 04 at 22:31:
I think this question brings to mind how much of the past is still in active use.
Sure, I'm not running Unix v7, but the environment I *am* using would be 75% familiar territory for a Unix v7 user. Some technologies may never be "vintage" because some form of them always survives, only the larger package they were part of is considered obsolete.
Is the keyboard vintage tech? The mouse is pushing 60...
🌲 Half_Elf_Monk [...] · Apr 10 at 15:08:
Worth considering: It's possible that military and mission-critical corporate tech still runs on fairly old tech. I recall that someone had to learn FORTRAN and use a floppy disc annually, in order to update something. They ran into issues ordering new floppies, but otherwise left the system unchanged... because the tech was so stable it didn't need any updates.
Friend who worked for a major health supplier in the USA sent pictures of “the room”. The company, when it went online in early 1980s, took orders via a phone resting on an acoustic modem. In 2014, with millions of dollars of Java powering their business, every inbound medical order ultimately went through the same acoustic modem. They literally built a room around it to protect the phone. The cost of the downtime to change to a modern Internet system was too high given their order volume wasn’t exceeding the modem. I don’t know if they’ve finally been forced into changing it due to gradual termination of POTS service.
@istvan, that sounds like a whole other level of incompetence. I could see it if it was compiled COBOL with no source, but Java is pretty modern. Writing a modem emulation layer is a couple of hours of work...
When is retro computing? — Ubuntu is going to be 20 years old this year and that makes me wonder how old a computer and it's operating system has to be to be considered retro? For me, Windows 2000 is retro but wind XP is not. Also any mac using PowerPC or m68k is retro to me. (The podcast Linux After Dark just did a episode on trying to run warty warthog 4.10 and compare it to the next LTS, 24.04)