I suppose one way to measure it is to see whehter that piece of hardware can still be used to do basic tasks that are expected right now, with an emphasis on doing them well.

if your PC can run Windows 8 smoothly, its probably not retro . I mean , fair enough you could probably get Win8 to run somehow on , say an Athlon 64 or AthlonXP (heck Ive seen people getting Win7 to run on an original Pentium..) , but its not going to be smooth . So its arguable that these 2 CPUs could be considered retro, While the early dual cores like the Core2Duo are probably not.

of course the easier though maybe less nauanced way of doing this is just to say anything made over 10 or 15 years ago

"Before Pixel shader 2.0" is a good definition, because that's when things were still very much a wild west 'bag of tricks' and PS 1.0-1.4 was pretty much a supplement for those 'bag of tricks'

leileilol wrote:

"Before Pixel shader 2.0" is a good definition, because that's when things were still very much a wild west 'bag of tricks' and PS 1.0-1.4 was pretty much a supplement for those 'bag of tricks'

I'd buy that. 😀

PS2.0+ generally will work on modern hardware too, so you don't explicitly need to maintain a machine from say, 2006, to run those kinds of games when you can just install them in Win7/8/whatever with whizbang GTX Titan and such. Whereas if you go back to something like Redguard Adventures, using Glide, etc you're talking about old/outdated hardware from the late 1990s and that fits into "retro" very well imho.

OTOH I think early-2000s hardware stuff is slowly starting to become 'retro' in its own right, not so much because of application support, but because it tends to have a somewhat different aesthetic to modern components.

The thing tips over the line from old to retro when looking at it means conciously looking into the past. 'Looking backward.'

For fun: http://www.etymonline.com/index.php?search=retro
Such a lovely website. Always nice to be reminded where a word has been. This is 'the mud on its boots', as it were.

----

Cars... I fail at this with cars perhaps. A mate's 94 Metro just isn't retro. Given, mechanically it is so similar to what VW was doing with the Golf in 75 that I call it a Coelacanth. But otherwise... just so little has changed between it and any other anonymous cheap econobox on the road, if not the showroom. Here it is revealed perhaps that retro needs to be more of "you don't see that anymore" than a date of introduction.

(Disclaimer: I'm flippin old. Car tech got kinda "new-fangled" in my view somewhere around '85.)

pewpewpew wrote:

The thing tips over the line from old to retro when looking at it means conciously looking into the past. 'Looking backward.'

Here it is revealed perhaps that retro needs to be more of "you don't see that anymore" than a date of introduction.

Something like this imo.

Many people use old stuff simply because it's cheaper that way (like people buying a second hand car instead of a new one). But at some point the really old stuff becomes too expensive to maintain (like a very old car which starts breaking down all the time, making repairs more costly then the car is really worth... in practical terms at least) for the use it gets.
At some point it's use as a cheaper alternative to something brand new will run out and the only people still using it will probably be people who are emotionally attached to it (just like an oldtimer car or for us: a retro computer) instead of simply using it because something newer is too expensive.

Perhaps one possible explanation of "retro" could be the moment when something stops being a cheaper alternative to something that is more expensive to being harder to maintain, making it more expensive compared to something brand new, often requiring the owner to do repairs himself.

I suppose the vast majority of people here repair their own computers. Bringing them to a repair shop would either be too expensive (the repair shop will have a hard time sourcing replacement parts, just to give an example) or would simply refuse to repair said computer "because it's too old".

Above is one possible view of when a computer becomes retro (and not the only thing I consider being relevant), I don't know of any single solid definition (yet).

When it comes to what I consider retro hardware today, I'd say everything Tualatin, Willamette or Thunderbird and older is retro PC hardware. Then theres some kind of gliding scale (a gray area) from s478/Athlon XP to perhaps the pre-Core Netburst chips and s754/s939 chips.

Anything Core or AM2 I definitely don't consider retro (yet)
In a way Athlon XP is older tech then Netburst (I kinda see it as a super Pentium 3)

For me any PC with just AGP\PCI and no PCI-E slots is retro anymore.
PCI-E 1.0\1.1 systems are borderline retro now.

Ancient retro systems for me start at the 486, and older where they start becoming nearly pure unobtainum.

I'm not sure. I think something is retro when the person is incapable to utilize it. It's kind of like a wheelchair; give it to a 25 year old basketball player and it becomes retro.

I tend to go by major changes in hardware and or software you can use. AGP systems are old, EISA, ISA, and VLB are retro. 32 bit systems are getting old, 8 and 16 bit systems are retro. For mac PPC systems are old, anything that can boot OS9 is retro (so is anything 68k, Nubus). heck any system with native SCSI is probably retro, same with an laptop with PCMCIA (not the 32 bit Cardbus which is just old).

My Scale of Oldness.

Kind of Old, but good enough for most casual users:
Core 2 Duo or newer
Athlon 64 X2 or newer

Totally Old, but still useable with some tweaking. Can still handle the modern internet. Can run Win7 well enough with enough RAM. Days of being useful (by modern standards) are numbered:
Pentium D
Athlon 64
Pentium M on PCIe board.
3.2GHz+ P4 on PCIe board.

"Annoyingly Old." Not old enough to be retro, yet painfully slow on some web sites and newer applications. Not old enough to support some older hardware, not new enough to smoothly run Win7/8. Common in alleys. Boring as hell. Can't give 'em away, and not worth enough to try selling on ebay.
Pentium 4 on AGP board
Athlon XP and K7 based Sempron
Netburst Celeron and Celeron D

New Retro. Fun to tinker with. Great for Win98 gaming. A great home for those Voodoo cards. Too old to even consider connecting to the Net:
Athlon
Pentium III (preferably Tualatin or high Coppermine)

Old Retro. Great for DOS gaming and some very early Windows titles.
Pentium II
Pentium MMX

Downright ancient. Fun to own, but using DOSBox is easier.
486 and older.

Just to add: Anything with 3DFX in combination with reasonable period correct hardware to me is very obvious to be retro, dare to deny that 😁

Edit: Another add.
Personally I also put a boundary at AT to ATX systems, even if the rest of the hardware is about the same

If it is affordable: retro
If it costs an arm or a leg: New stuff or VERY retro

If it pisses you off every now and then: the best stuff (because it keeps you busy)

🤣

Darkman wrote:

I suppose one way to measure it is to see whehter that piece of hardware can still be used to do basic tasks that are expected right now, with an emphasis on doing them well.

if your PC can run Windows 8 smoothly, its probably not retro . I mean , fair enough you could probably get Win8 to run somehow on , say an Athlon 64 or AthlonXP (heck Ive seen people getting Win7 to run on an original Pentium..) , but its not going to be smooth . So its arguable that these 2 CPUs could be considered retro, While the early dual cores like the Core2Duo are probably not.

of course the easier though maybe less nauanced way of doing this is just to say anything made over 10 or 15 years ago

athlon XP is boderline on that. Socket 939 is smooth but, it's considered retro but, it's mostly due to age on the 939. it's 8 years headed on 10 years old. not TRUE BLUE retro though.

Athlon XP lacks SSE2, so, IMO, it's pretty much retro.

I don't consider anything ATX retro, with 2 exceptions.
440BX borderline retro, mostly due to the "legendariness" of it.
So Pentium socket 4 till K6-III+ = retro. Pentium II-III slot borderline retro, if fitted with Tualatins, Radeon 9800, 80GB 7200rpm HDD and 512+MB ram for sure not retro. With Voodoo3 and a Katmai, retro.
AMD slotA borderline retro due to being rare. Socket A definitely not retro, one can even find DDR, Sata and USB 2.0 on some later boards!

Vintage? 486 VLB and earlier. 486 PCI borderline vintage, fit it with 32MB ram, PS/2 and a Riva and definitely not vintage.

Maybe I should say: retro = beforce SSE, vintage = before PCI.

Staahp. Retro is a hype word that causes used parts to get expensive, just like "antique."

Standard Def Steve wrote:

*snip*

Great post! Though I would consider a Core 2 Duo still very much usable, in fact the development machine I'm on right now is one. It has aged very well.

MatureTech wrote:

Staahp. Retro is a hype word that causes used parts to get expensive, just like "antique."

🤣 So true... 😢

MatureTech wrote:

Staahp. Retro is a hype word that causes used parts to get expensive, just like "antique."

Actually, not necessarily. As far as computer stuff goes, only rare things actually get really expensive. For example, if I you want an ISA SoundBlaster, no problem, you'll find one online for a fiver. Ask for a working floppy drive for a Commodore 64 and we are in a completely different price range.

retro \ˈre-(ˌ)trō\ "relating to, reviving, or being the styles and especially the fashions of the past : fashionably nostalgic or old-fashioned"

When applied to technology, it retro is usually anything that is nostalgic to a person. So retro will vary depending on what you used in your younger days. For me, it is everything from 1978 - 2001.

I'm not quite nostalgic about anything after 2001, but give it a few years, and I'm sure that window will grow.