For me, anything from the Pentium 4 era and before is oldschool, while Pentium D/Athlon 64x2-era stuff is kinda borderline oldschool/non-oldschool. Anything from the Core 2 era on up is definitely NOT oldschool. 😜

As far as usability goes, I would argue that even though it was created during the height of the Pentium 4 era, the Pentium M is still a usable CPU for modern day to day usage, provided you don't do anything ridiculous like attempting to run Windows 7.

'Retro' to me means 'going back' or 'going backwards'. I tend to agree that roughly anything that's not a dual core could be considered 'retro'.
Obviously this will change as time passes.
In 10 years time Phenom II could perhaps be considered retro, or at least a classic or something! 😜 But right now it's roughly the single cores.

For me right now, anything that's Socket A/Socket 478 and older is definitely retro. But to me it's also a sliding scale, the more you go backwards in time, the more retro a system becomes.

As I write this, this is real difficult for me to accurately define!

It's up to the individiual what is considered retro. For me the latest thing I'd consider retro right now is DX8 hardware and for CPUs perhaps everything pre Athlon64. I used a 3700+/GF 6500/2GB DDR for straight five years so I'm still kind of sick of PC hardware from that generation. 😁 It's just too modern and too similar to the newest hardware, only much slower.

Part of the fascination from messing around with hardware from 2000 and before comes from not being able to do it back in the day due to young age. So for the most part, the vintage computers that are of interest to me are roughly those that I played stuff on back then and/or heard about, but couldn't actually mess with the hardware.

For operating systems, the cutoff is clearly XP because it has a lot of important features for old games and is more compatible with old games than Vista/7.

I personally consider a PIII system and older to be retro and i don't even consider WinXP to be retro yet.

Broadly, I would categorize retro as when a PC part loses the official manufacturer support.

For eg. : 😁

New Retro | Retro | Really Old Retro
------------------ ---------------- ----------------------

Windows 2000 | Windows 95 | Windows 2.0

Sound Blaster Audigy | Sound Blaster 16 | PC Speaker

Pentium III | 486 | 8086

RivaTNT | VGA | Hercules Monochrome

But personally, I tend to correlate "retro" to all my PCs upto my Pentium 133 mega beast! 😁

A retro to one may not be a retro to another. I guess it's just a personal thing.

This is what I set the line for retro myself.. This machine I built:

New Socket 462 (Socket A) Windows XP & Win98 build /w Voodoo2 SLI, 6800GT & Audigy2

I'm with PowerPie5000 on this one. You can still run Vista/Win7 on just about any P4 system reasonably OK. The i845 chipset can handle 2GB memory which is sufficient for Win7. The 440BX chipset has a max of 1GB, but I've never been able to run more than 768MB on a 440BX without stability issues.

Running Vista/Win7 on 768MB will surely force you to throw that PC out the window! P3 and below is retro for me.

About 10~12 years old or older.

Socket 775 - and later - modern
Socket 468 - common and outdated, not retro
Socket 462, 370 - retro!
Socket 7, SS7, Slot1 - cool retro!
486, 386 - rediculously old retro stuff, still fun to play with
286 - seriously, how can you guys do that?
XT, ZX Spectrum, Электроника МС-1504 etc. - stone age of computer technology, I need really good reasons to go for it.

PIIIs, Athlon XPs, and S423 P4s are all retro hardware to me.

mr_bigmouth_502 wrote:

As far as usability goes, I would argue that even though it was created during the height of the Pentium 4 era, the Pentium M is still a usable CPU for modern day to day usage, provided you don't do anything ridiculous like attempting to run Windows 7.

The Pentium M is a fine performer under Win7! I have a P-M 745, overclocked to 2.4GHz, on an MSI Speedster-FA4 motherboard. With 2GB of 3-2-2-8 dual channel DDR2-533 and a GTX-260, it runs Win7 x86 about as fast as it could run XP. Fire up a single-threaded app and it even outperforms my 2.4GHz A64 X2-4600!

I think the world is filled with people rocking P4 yet. That hardware isn't really that much of an impediment for what people want to do. It browses the web just fine. It's also probably faster than tablet CPUs.

I don't really have retro preferences. I just like trying out different hardware. I got a PowerMac 7500/100 from a guy at work recently, and I picked up a DFI nForce4 board to mess with.

Can you call hardware that you've never stopped using, "retro"? I've had some of the hardware in my collection since it was hot newness.

I have some dual Socket 940 and dual Socket 604 stuff that's about 10 years old. I consider it borderline retro.

When the computer stops being able to handle basic tasks. If it cant do modern web browsing, I would consider that my cutoff. Speaking of, I retired my dual 462 2800+ a month ago. Just couldn't deal with full screen video on the internet. That and it developed a bad cap or two that needs replaced.

luckybob wrote:

I retired my dual 462 2800+ a month ago. Just couldn't deal with full screen video on the internet. .

And tragically since Athlon XP lacks SSE2, the GPUs with H.264 and VC-1 acceleration won't do their video acceleration.

Everything before multicore can be retro to me, it is just the way I feel it.

I agree with RacoonRider as to the most fun, for now, being (super)Socket 7 and Slot1, personaly because of 3D games, but also from 1988 until 1994 ms-dos games and there 486 rulez!

If I browsed with Netscape <6 on it.

(Speaking of which, Netscape 3 gold can't open Vogons 🙁 )

Standard Def Steve wrote:

PIIIs, Athlon XPs, and S423 P4s are all retro hardware to me.

mr_bigmouth_502 wrote:

As far as usability goes, I would argue that even though it was created during the height of the Pentium 4 era, the Pentium M is still a usable CPU for modern day to day usage, provided you don't do anything ridiculous like attempting to run Windows 7.

The Pentium M is a fine performer under Win7! I have a P-M 745, overclocked to 2.4GHz, on an MSI Speedster-FA4 motherboard. With 2GB of 3-2-2-8 dual channel DDR2-533 and a GTX-260, it runs Win7 x86 about as fast as it could run XP. Fire up a single-threaded app and it even outperforms my 2.4GHz A64 X2-4600!

I stand corrected then. 😁

To me:

- PIII and below CPUs and their boards
- 64MB and below graphic adapters, AGP and less
- Pre-DDR memories
- 120 GB and less non SATA HDDs
- Pre Ultra320 SCSI devices
- Any kind of FDDs
- ISA sound cards
- non DVD optical drives
- Windows 2000 and any other OS before it

are retro, as of 01.03.2013.

But not all of them are "cool retro". Although my main retro build is a PIII (a very good CPU generation to play with everything from W311 to WXP) the things that I like fiddling with most are ISA era (386s) and early PCI era (486s and socket 7 Pentiums)

And I'm not really into anything pre 386. Not even as museum pieces. I discarded many XT boards, floppy and MFM/RLL controllers, MFM HDDs, 8-bit cards, etc. to waste bins.

To me the limit is 2002. Everything afterwards doesn't have retro feeling. I consider my 2k2 machine barely retro, but i enjoy it the way it is.