Anonymous Coward wrote:I'm kind of skeptical anything beyond PIII will ever be considered desireable. It's just too generic and boring.
But that's what we were saying about Pentium II's, III's, and 4's back in 2001 when I started?
That's what everyone was saying about ALL of the PC's we talk about here on VOGONS back then.....
"HAHAH, 486? What are you doing with that old Boat Anchor"
"Tandy 1000 - whatta' dinosaur!"
"286? I remember when Bill Gates called them "Braindead"
"It's just another stupid beige box with grey panels.......who wants an old 386? Dude, you need a Girlfriend!"
I think PC Nostalgia might not be as strong with future generations, but it will be there. We all go back and try to get the things we wanted when we were kids. Heck, half the reason I'm here is because back when my sister had a 386 we used to get in arguments over who broke it (someone turned it off without exiting a program and it corrupted AUTOEXEC.BAT and cost $60 to fix) - so I swore up and down to that sister I'd have the computer SHE'D want someday - a 486 with a huge hard disk, a soundblaster, and SVGA, and you would not need to remove a game to install another one because no rinky dink 80MB HDD. It'd like to think I have achived that one 1000x over now, 🤣.
I think the collectables of the future will be a lot in tablets, the Microsoft Surface series, iPads, iPhones, and such. Already people are hoarding Zunes and it pisses me off because I want to stockpile a few to actually USE (I prefer a discreet mp3 player to using my phone). The Samsung Galaxy S3 would be another one (kind of the same way we love PS/2s). The Samsung Tablets from 2013 will be like what the PC Chips M919 is now....speaking of....
dionb wrote:
Don't knock the budget boards - just look how popular the PC-Chips M919 is these days... 😜
Jeebuz, I remember cringing when I first found the Redhill Guide to PC hardware back in the 2000's, now I bought one for $20 just a couple weeks ago myself. I'm planning to find a cache module that's bad and etch my own PCBs for them! Still need to get that thing to POST first though....and by golly I will get it to POST, even if it takes breaking out a logic analyser and firing up the soldering iron. PC's are really boosting my electronics abilities lately.
Koltoroc wrote:
Yeah, I remember the late 90s, 486 machines getting dumped because nobody believed anyone would ever want to use them again in the future.
Exactly. Hell, if I still had all the old 486's I've owned, which totals up to somewhere about 30 or 40 from 2001 to present - I'd probably be able to get a good chunk of our home down payment selling them off.
tpowell.ca wrote:I think retro hardware such as 2/3/486 and even Pentium I/II/III generation computers have gained importance due to their abilit […]
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I think retro hardware such as 2/3/486 and even Pentium I/II/III generation computers have gained importance due to their ability to run software that newer computers cannot run well, if at all.
Before Windows XP, a lot of software was very hardware sensitive, and speed sensitive. Sometimes just a few MHz too many and the game would crash or be unplayable.
Sometimes games needed very specific hardware to run, this is especially true for DOS-era games.
Today, with Windows 7 and above, I'd say most software is completely hardware agnostic as long as meeting minimum requirements. So other than for sentimental value, I just don't see why one would actively seek an older P4 or Core-generation machine to play games on Windows 7+. And if its to install XP, what games are these that can take advantage of such hardware also won't also run on a modern Windows 7+ machine?
So the question is, are we talking about useful retro? or sentimental retro?
Obviously this is my take, but please enlighten me.
That's a big part of it though I find just about anything Pentium Era or newer I can get to run on Windows 10 properly for some reason. And it still feels retro to me because my modern box is in an ancient mATX InWin D500 case, and it's beige, and has a clicky keyboard (and my 486 is currently sharing it's LCD on the VGA port). But a lot of people want to relive or have that experience they wanted in the 90's/80's now. I tend to consider the "vintage" breaking point to be 20 years.
I remember getting into this hobby in 2001 - all those quotes I posted above - those all happened to me. Imagine my shock in 2008 when I'm on an I.T. project and all of a sudden I'm the "cool guy" because I own a still functioning and still in use Tandy 1000! All of a sudden these "dinosaurs" were "cool" and "vintage" instead of "MAAAAN! Just throw that thing out and buy a Core 2 Duo! What do you do with that? It can't even run PONG!". Back then I had a boss who made fun of me because I had a 286 in my fleet ("My Cell Phone has more power than your 286!") - hah - now suddenly people are like "You'd better hold onto that, it'll be valueable someday" - yeah, that someday is now. I look all the time on E-bay and the stuff I used to go to thrift shops and be paid $5 to take away now costs $200,300, 400? I cashed my chips a little early honestly, 🤣.
And it's already happening. Pentium 4's I'm starting to see fade from the thrift shops and now I'm seeing the places that carry computers are starting to have stuff like what I'm STILL using as my main (I still use a Core 2 Duo for daily work - I don't need anything faster)..which raises a bit of a curve ball for the Core 2 Duo generation and newer....
I work at a development house, a huge one, one of the biggest in the world. We have some of the latest hardware here - i7's with 32-64GB of RAM, 1TB SSD drives, and NVIDIA 1080s - but we also have thirteen year old PC's still in use - if I glance to my left, there's an HP DC7900 from 2009! I go home and my laptop is a Toshiba A135 and I have a Core 2 Duo on my desktop - they all run Windows 10 64-bit no problem and unless you are doing some huge compiling or something fancy, most tasks are still doable at more than comfortable speed. But when I started in this hobby in 2001 - my 486 could not run Windows XP (at least not without trickery, and I'm not sure why one would want to), and what was holding it back the most was a lot of myths and lies about what a 486 could and could not handle. People telling me that 486's can't use modems, can't get on the internet, can't play entertaining games (C'mon man! You can't run Ghost Recon and Halo on a 486!....yeah, like I'd want to), and I basically made an entire website and a tiny web presence for awhile around proving all of those wrong at the time. Nowadays what's the worst thing? TPM 1.2? Can't find drivers for Windows 10 (turn off driver signing and use Windows 7 drivers and turn off automatic updates and use common sense - or just use Linux)? 10 years is not the huge gap in technology it used to be.
And the hilarious part is a 486 is still not that shabby for a lot of things. Nathan Lineback's hacked Seamonkey and Firefox allow me to access all the HTTPS sites through Windows 95 in 2018. I burn DVD-Rs and CD-R's if I just ignore system requirements. VirtualCD allows me to run all my CD-ROMs off the hard disk, like Diablo or Hoyale Card games. IRC, FTP, Website Authoring, graphics.....honestly, if I did not have a love for watching youtube I could probably still use a 486 as my daily driver. I even do digital audio on it (Cakewalk 5). But there's just something special and cool about doing all that and all the old games that run on that era of hardware to me. If you ask me it's obsolete by native software and hardware, but through hardware and software tricks, it's not. Which amuses me to no end. You'd never see me making purchases on one, but the benign stuff where the only risk is some weirdo "Stealing my Monkey Islands" is more than game 🤣 - pun intended.
That's why I think today's hardware will have it's future retro-devotees, but it might not be as big because tablets/smartphones being the dominant devices. I do know people with no computer that just use smartphones and tablets for everything. But then maybe not, those people dont' tend to get attached to their devices so much, and if they do, they tend to keep the old ones anyway.....they're already in the game, it's just the money is not there yet.
And Money is a big part of it. Always was. When people were making fun of me and my 486's back in 2001, the arguement was the worthiness (in $$$) of my bro-in-law's comic book collection or the worhtiness (in $$$) of my sister's beanie babies. In a way, all the disposal of these "old pieces of junk" lead to their worthiness now because you don't just wander into the local Salvation Army and see stacks of AT clones anymore. Back when there was - they were paying me to take them away as they had sat there for months.
Another fine example of this is RE-PC in Seattle. I'm pretty sure around 2001-2005ish, RE-PC probably had a good pile of used 286/386/486 hardware they sold for pennies on the dollar at the time. Because it was old junk, and they wanted to get rid of it, then sometime around 2005, what use would that have been to someone? So all the old "beige" stuff got scrapped I'm pretty sure - then I come into Tukwila this year and what do I find? No less than four boxes of 286, 386, 486, Pentium, Super Socket 7, Slot 1, and AMD Athlon boards from the eras we are discussing here, some over $100 based on their e-bay prices, some as cheap as $15-20 (I paid $20 for my PC Chips M919), with $25-45 being the average. And bins organized full of disk standard adapters, old ISA cards, and so fourth.
The life of a PC Generation is typically this - > Cutting Edge->Mainstream->Old But useful->Total Junk/E-Waste->Hey I remember that!->Vintage