ElectroSoldier wrote on 2024-02-08, 22:58:
Bracketed by era... Thats a good one.
Bracketed by industrial differences... Maybe architectural in our case. Thats another good one... Can anything x64 be considered vintage yet?
That's a much easier way to do it in vintage Macland than here (where you literally have an architecture switch one day and all software from before that day runs in emulation), though, in part because... PC hardware is so backwards compatible and the eras are so blurry. Is, say, a 486 that always ran Windows 3.1 a 32-bit system? Is a C2D that always ran 32-bit XP an x64 system? Arguably, yes, but at the same time, those machines were not actually used for that ability.
Two people could have gone down and bought some C2Ds in mid-2007. Person 1 was an adventurous early adopter and bought a Vista machine, possibly in the brave new 64-bit land. Person 1 bought a Windows 7 upgrade two years later, continued using it for a long time, then was quasi-forcibly upgraded to Windows 10 for free around 2015. Person 2 heard that Vista sucks, picked 32-bit XP. Kept using XP until they heard XP was going to stop being supported around 2014, at which point in 2013 they went out, bought a Haswell with Windows 7, and put the C2D in the attic for 10 years.
I'd suggest to you that person 2's computer "feels" more retro/vintage than person 1's, even though they are identical hardware.
ElectroSoldier wrote on 2024-02-08, 22:58:
Collectible or desireable... Well they all are in their own way. But I doudt anybody will be in a rush to snatch up an E6700 (or its AMD equal)
One thing that I've observed is that over time, everything becomes collectible or desirable to some degree. It's true of cars, it's true of computers, I think it's true of everything.
Basically, you have things that are initially collectible/desirable. Things that are recognized roughly at the end of their 'natural' life, if not earlier, as being significant, often in part because what came after is very obviously worse from a collectibility perspective.
Over time, the supply of those things drops, especially as the surviving units all land in the hands of collectors. If the item happened to be unusually unreliable, then the number of survivors will drop even further. Try to buy, say, a 1GHz titanium PowerBook G4 today - good luck, the few surviving units in good conditions were snatched up by collectors/YouTubers a long time ago. You might as well try to buy a numbers-matching muscle car from the best year in the late 1960s in pristine condition at Barrett-Jackson.
And so, over time, people start to become more interested in the next best thing, whatever's still available, and so on, until eventually... all the surviving items end up being collectible.
One place that one sees this with computers is how large-OEM systems seem to now be valuable. No one would have wanted those a decade or two ago, but I think the supply of high-end, enthusiasty hardware from the pre-P4 era is just... really low, so people will take the Compaq with on-motherboard graphics that spent 15+ years in someone's attic because no one dropped it off at an e-waste place.
I think you see it with AGP video cards too - the Voodoo 3s and 5s are priced off the charts, the more desirable other options like GeForce 4 Ti4600s are probably as expensive today as they were when they were new (not counting inflation), etc. I think there will likely be a day when a GF4 MX will be big money.
ElectroSoldier wrote on 2024-02-08, 22:58:But when you think about slot 1, Im not really sure why Intel released the 1Ghz PIII on slot 1 because it was already dead by that point because of socket 370.
Socket 370 was originally largely for celeries on i810 boards and I think there may have been a prior low-end chipset too. The high-end boards, especially from the large OEMs like Dell, were all slot 1 - both the 440BX/100FSB and the i820/RDRAM/133FSB boards. Although it looks like a later revision of Dell's i820 XPS B systems switched to socket 370.
At some point, enough decent socket 370 PIIIs became available that the usual Taiwanese suspects started making socket 370 440BX boards, but I think large OEMs only really embraced socket 370 on the high end with the i815 chipset.
Also worth noting according to Wikipedia - they launched 4 1GHz variants the same day. Socket 370 100MHz FSB, slot 1 100MHz FSB, and socket 370 133MHz FSB and slot 1 133MHz FSB. So a full lineup that would accommodate everybody's existing and upcoming board designs. My guess is that Compaq and friends probably shoved a lot of those 100MHz FSB socket 370 flavours in the "flagship" versions of their i810 systems... although maybe not at launch, not with a $1000 price tag...
