Oh the bliss of yesteryear. I’ve had the fun ideas running through my head of what I’m going to do with my amiga as soon as I have the project I have done with it first to retrieve data and send it to the previous owner, or what I might do with a powermac G3/4/5 or with my ibook G4 is I just spent my time with it. Listening to some podcasts this week however I was reminded of an odd sort of people that I could probably get behind.
Out there, somewhere, are people that still use PowerMac G3’s and G4’s that they bought in 1998 or 2000 and have upgraded the fuck out of them. Or, theres people on dual socket Pentium 2 systems with the best nvidia card that they can manage running windows 98 or 2000. To the average person these people are probably silly, and they would probably admit to some of it if you questioned them. But thinking about it, it makes sense what they want out of their machines. We of the modern world of computing always want the newest hardware that we can afford and to run the newest kernels or have the newest games, where they can really spend very little in relative upkeep to have their machines run amazingly well for what they want to actually do.
Take for example one that I heard about recently. In Omaha Nebraska theres a guy with a PowerMac G3 running OS9 and 10.2. He’s got a 1GHz processor (which is the max proc speed) with some slow down tools when he needs them, a Radeon 9200, a gig of ram, and some SSD’s on a sata to PCI adapter. All he does is write stuff, play old games like Deus Ex, might and magic, and whatever DosBox will do, and fuck around on IRC and the internet. Its just what he uses, and to be honest he can do it so cheaply its ridiculous.
Aside from the rarity of the 1GHz Sonnet 750 processors, the ram is cheap if it dies, the motherboards are cheap if it dies, the graphics card is cheap if it dies, and 2 120GB SSD’s aren’t that terrible expensive if you know where to look. Using Classilla you can do youtube rather fine on a G3, even in OS9, and general web stuff is fine. I find this rather odd, but I guess when you have what you want, you don’t need anymore!
With PowerPC machines I get it, but the windows 98 and 2000 people I don’t really understand. Old apps run great in wine, even games, and you can install 98SE in DOSBOX and get good performance out of it… Or run a VM, or dedicate a machine. I find it kinda silly to be honest. Especially when theres better hardware to be had than pentium 2’s and 3’s but… I mean OK. Still unsure why people mainline it though aside from cheapness and comfort. Though I guess I could say the same for the guy in Omaha but only doing 25-50 bucks in upgrades and repairs per year is more than impressive….
Then I get to my machines like my ibook and think “What the hell am I going to use you for?” Well, Age of Empires, a web browser, writing, DOSBOX… If I REALLY wanted to I could use this laptop as my main carry every day and be completely happy. Its from the perfect era of mobile keyboards, I have it in Dvorak…. I mean that alone makes it outclass my thinkpad, and I love my thinkpad a lot [though for fucks sakes lenovo make your key caps a uniform size UGH].
So, I dunno. Just some thoughts floating around the last few days and a story I thought to share. Just enjoying the quiet of the michigan winter.