Oh the bliss of old hardware

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.

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I just bought a 3 year old blackberry. Old shit just usually works better.

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T-shirt material.

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Security updates are a pretty big reason to run up to date software.

But I guess if you can get a current version of Linux or BSD to run on it you would be alright.

On older hardware the big thing is power efficiency. There are a ton of sub $100 and even sub $50 single board computers that will out class 20 year old hardware. And the those boards use less power than a light bulb. They also have modern I/O so you can have whatever peripheral you want.

Edit: Not to mention the opportunity cost of trying to get ancient hardware to run. Especially if that machine makes money. Time is money. I for one value time more than money.

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In tte case of the guy in omaha, bet those single boards can’t play deus ex!

You are cherry picking a single non crucial item and ignored all other criticisms.

And the statement was for using out of dadte machines in general.

Furthermore there are Intel based SOCs that could play it for under $180. Would pay itself off in one year in just energy savings.

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Haha I’m not ignoring anything, I’m just pointing out that kicking over to some SOC based machine would kill 90% of what that guy is used to. Its not a matter of what is better hardware in that case, nor am I going to argue about it.

Good day.

It is melted sand, nothing to be nostalgic about. And he is wasting money on his electric bill.

Also, it is unsafe to run a machine without security updates for the OS, anti-malware and browser.

I am all for having a retro machine for fun but is very unwise to use it as a daily driver.

There is nothing to gain and only to loose from doing it.

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as someone whose messed with the G3/G4/G5 hardware and linux on it and tried to use one asa . daily driver, all that ill say is that its not worth it in every way possible

Even upon release the hardware was already slow relative to the competition, power efficiency doesnt exist at all, they get really hot, and many of the older ones are starting to fail due to dying capacitors.

Software wise, early OSX is basically unusable for modern tasks besides playing old games and light coding. Linus gives it a bit more life but youll still be limited by its overall lack of speed.

powerPC macs are selling for dirt cheap for a reason, while even the oldest intel macs retain their value. The $200 1st gen intel mac pro (base config) would completely wipe the floor with the highest end G5 unit available, plus with a bit of trickery you can get newer version of OSX to run on it too.

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My favorite item to collect is the IBM PS/2 line, a marketplace failure they represent the end of an era. The machines are probably the best made computers ever and were IBM’s flagship line, lower tier lines were the Valuepoint and ZEOS at the bottom.
They were never about speed, they were about reliability, and franly they were the best looking PC’s ever made IMHO.
The idea is not to use them for modern tasks just like collectors of old cars don’t use them for grocery shopping.
It’s about appreciating how much they could do with software that had to run on a mere 30k to 1.2M transistors instead of the multi-billion transistor behemoths we have today.
Also trying out early OS’s that may have been failures but you get to appreciate how they influence us today like OS2 and GEOS.
It is one of the cheapest collecting hobbies in existence. And just owning something, even if it was from a dumpster, that at one time cost more then your car is just cool.
The hard part is explaining to ones wife that having a pile of old junk makes you happy. It also is a cure for what I call “upgradeitis” that need to upgrade that comes from reading reviews of new stuff.