Yup, I love my modern technology just as much as the old gear. Once you get used to having 4.5GHz of processing power under the hood, there's absolutely no going back. My main PC and its 150 mb/s internet connection rips through bloated webpages much faster than my Pentium II and 1.5mb/s cable modem could display very simple websites back in 1998. People seem to complain a lot about lazy programmers these days, and maybe they're right. But the way I see it is, computers are so fucking fast now that a bit of bloated code really doesn't seem to hurt much. Unless you're still using an 11 year old Athlon X2 as your daily driver.

Completely different subject: what is it with vinyl snobs these days? Yeesh. I mean sure, a pristine record does sound better than a poorly mastered CD, but a good digital source trumps vinyl any day of the week. It doesn't even have to be high resolution audio. A properly done CD sounds insanely good, and without any of that inaccurate "warmth". And today's high end amplifiers, speakers, and subwoofers easily outperform yesteryear's equipment.

Jade Falcon wrote:

I don't understand hd TVs. I mean I understand wanting a 50" screen that's 2" thick.
But a good crt with a good SD video like laserdisc,DVD or over air tv looks just as good if not very close.

Um...no? Even with my terrible eyesight I can still see a world of difference between SD on a good CRT and Blu-ray on a modern LCD/plasma.

I actually have a 34" widescreen CRT TV in my basement. It has a laserdisc player and a progressive scan DVD player hooked up via component. While that TV does an admirable job of displaying 480p DVD content, the picture is nowhere near as good as blu-ray on my 64" F8500 plasma. Hell, even Netflix @ 1080p on the plasma is razor-sharp. Much, much better than LD or DVD on the CRT, and I'm a laserdisc fan!

Standard Def Steve wrote:

Yup, I love my modern technology just as much as the old gear. Once you get used to having 4.5GHz of processing power under the […]
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Yup, I love my modern technology just as much as the old gear. Once you get used to having 4.5GHz of processing power under the hood, there's absolutely no going back. My main PC and its 150 mb/s internet connection rips through bloated webpages much faster than my Pentium II and 1.5mb/s cable modem could display very simple websites back in 1998. People seem to complain a lot about lazy programmers these days, and maybe they're right. But the way I see it is, computers are so fucking fast now that a bit of bloated code really doesn't seem to hurt much. Unless you're still using an 11 year old Athlon X2 as your daily driver.

Completely different subject: what is it with vinyl snobs these days? Yeesh. I mean sure, a pristine record does sound better than a poorly mastered CD, but a good digital source trumps vinyl any day of the week. It doesn't even have to be high resolution audio. A properly done CD sounds insanely good, and without any of that inaccurate "warmth". And today's high end amplifiers, speakers, and subwoofers easily outperform yesteryear's equipment.

Jade Falcon wrote:

I don't understand hd TVs. I mean I understand wanting a 50" screen that's 2" thick.
But a good crt with a good SD video like laserdisc,DVD or over air tv looks just as good if not very close.

Um...no? Even with my terrible eyesight I can still see a world of difference between SD on a good CRT and Blu-ray on a modern LCD/plasma.

I actually have a 34" widescreen CRT TV in my basement. It has a laserdisc player and a progressive scan DVD player hooked up via component. While that TV does an admirable job of displaying 480p DVD content, the picture is nowhere near as good as blu-ray on my 64" F8500 plasma. Hell, even Netflix @ 1080p on the plasma is razor-sharp. Much, much better than LD or DVD on the CRT, and I'm a laserdisc fan!

I admire the speed of current cpus with its incredible complexity, personally don't feel the need of all this power.
About vinyl audio, well. I think it's more or less the same retro nostalgic philosophic feeling. I agree with people that says vinyls actually should last "forever" compared to cd even if I imagine quality can't be compared on a test. But here comes one of the philosofic useless thoughts I was saying above 😁; lately my personal idea on why analogic audio and its technology should be considered better is that it is "natural and not perfect" while digital concept suffer imho from the same fact that is "perfect" in its binary expression and in this way it's not natural at all.
Analogic technology was accepted in that way, imperfect but easy to understand and it could be improved but not that much and probably if today we would have only analog tech, none would need more like instead many seems to ask and need with modern tech.

The main objection I'd have to modern technology is that systems are ever more locked down and intrusive, but beyond that modern tech is pretty amazing. I wouldn't be without a smart phone, it's advanced far beyond pocket PCs, palmpilots, and other PDAs of old.

I still have a CRT projector on my ceiling - whilst there's a case for arguing with response time and colour fidelity it could score over a lot of modern tech, it simply can't manage the resolution or sheer sharpness of modern systems (although it has to be said some HD kit looks artificially sharp).

I've been using computers since the eighties, and I wouldn't want to go back. There's an awful lot of retro kit at home, but you can bet I'm not using it for modern tasks. Even if I'm using a spartan Unix system with a minimal window manager, it's on a modern Unix distribution, using an up to date browser, and usually on top of a virtualised environment..

Well, I was fine with the technology of that time. I wouldn't be depressed if I had to still use it in daily life.
That doesn't mean I prefer a technological standstill or turn back time, though. Some ideas of today are neat (Youtube, Vogons) and
could have been made possible with 90s tech already.

The foundation for everything we have today, be it social networks or multimedia, already existed back then.
Perhaps even before that. Humankind flew to the moon with the power of a C64..

Mixed bag personally, right at the moment I'm bored with vintage computing (especially 80's machines, specifically anything that isn't a Commodore 64 or 128) but at the same time I'm excited for the up coming vintage related projects like Mega 65. Sometimes I think I'd like to simplify and go back to not owning any of this junk and just have a nice simple living area not cluttered up with old tech. But then I do something like I did yesterday and set up a big old CRT in my already mid 90's themed room and play some PS1 games and I'm instantly reminded why I'm nostalgic for this crap. 🤣 I dunno, I can't hold onto the 90's but I just can't let it go either.

So rather than move on and get all new stuff I have a mix of everything, I have my modern tech hidden to make my room look authentically old fashioned but I do own a tablet and a modern digital camera and an i5 computer (in a beige case!) but I still use my 90's stuff every day such as my cassette player and my minidiscs. There are times I wish tech and industrial design would have stopped around 1997 - 98 but then I try to use my Packard Bell running Windows 98 for scanning documents and printing them and I'm reminded how far we've come and really how much of a bother things were then. It's not that you couldn't do it, but it takes so much longer and the results are generally worse, especially where old laser printers are concerned. Modern printing, scanning and image manipulation kicks ass compared to how it was on those old computers. I'd forgotten but when I tried that it all came flooding back. 🤣

As for the trends in modern tech? I fucking hate it. Cellphones suck, the internet eats up too much time and everything looks and feels boring now. Tech has become pretty mundane and locked down, I mean I use linux on all my modern computers but god I HATE modern windows and mobile OSes like android are just a pain. Not a fan of computer integration into everything also, I don't want smart TV's and digital everything. 🤣

Also I should like to point out what others have said, I don't feel the same sort of attachment with modern tech, it just sort of is. Same with modern gaming, it's all so... meh. I haven't been excited for a new game since Deus Ex HR and that turned out to be a huge let down. Console gaming also doesn't feel the same, back with the PS1 and 2 it was amazing and mind blowing that they could do the things they were doing and honestly a lot of those games are STILL awesome, but I've yet to see a modern game that gets me excited or really blown away like they did back then. Sometimes I think it's me, they aren't looking to get my demographic and that I'm probably too old to enjoy games the same way, but then I find an old game I never played before that I really love and I realize that it's definitely not just me. Modern games are just boring and samey, everything seems like payola now. Technically it has everything that makes it a good game but somehow it still lacks anything that would actually make it interesting. 🤣

King_Corduroy wrote:

Mixed bag personally, right at the moment I'm bored with vintage computing (especially 80's machines, specifically anything that […]
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Mixed bag personally, right at the moment I'm bored with vintage computing (especially 80's machines, specifically anything that isn't a Commodore 64 or 128) but at the same time I'm excited for the up coming vintage related projects like Mega 65. Sometimes I think I'd like to simplify and go back to not owning any of this junk and just have a nice simple living area not cluttered up with old tech. But then I do something like I did yesterday and set up a big old CRT in my already mid 90's themed room and play some PS1 games and I'm instantly reminded why I'm nostalgic for this crap. 🤣 I dunno, I can't hold onto the 90's but I just can't let it go either.

So rather than move on and get all new stuff I have a mix of everything, I have my modern tech hidden to make my room look authentically old fashioned but I do own a tablet and a modern digital camera and an i5 computer (in a beige case!) but I still use my 90's stuff every day such as my cassette player and my minidiscs. There are times I wish tech and industrial design would have stopped around 1997 - 98 but then I try to use my Packard Bell running Windows 98 for scanning documents and printing them and I'm reminded how far we've come and really how much of a bother things were then. It's not that you couldn't do it, but it takes so much longer and the results are generally worse, especially where old laser printers are concerned. Modern printing, scanning and image manipulation kicks ass compared to how it was on those old computers. I'd forgotten but when I tried that it all came flooding back. 🤣

As for the trends in modern tech? I fucking hate it. Cellphones suck, the internet eats up too much time and everything looks and feels boring now. Tech has become pretty mundane and locked down, I mean I use linux on all my modern computers but god I HATE modern windows and mobile OSes like android are just a pain. Not a fan of computer integration into everything also, I don't want smart TV's and digital everything. 🤣

Also I should like to point out what others have said, I don't feel the same sort of attachment with modern tech, it just sort of is. Same with modern gaming, it's all so... meh. I haven't been excited for a new game since Deus Ex HR and that turned out to be a huge let down. Console gaming also doesn't feel the same, back with the PS1 and 2 it was amazing and mind blowing that they could do the things they were doing and honestly a lot of those games are STILL awesome, but I've yet to see a modern game that gets me excited or really blown away like they did back then. Sometimes I think it's me, they aren't looking to get my demographic and that I'm probably too old to enjoy games the same way, but then I find an old game I never played before that I really love and I realize that it's definitely not just me. Modern games are just boring and samey, everything seems like payola now. Technically it has everything that makes it a good game but somehow it still lacks anything that would actually make it interesting. 🤣

Personally I found that deciding to have "only" modern or "only" older technology make more sense for me. Obviously it would be difficul to have only 80's tech, but as said older technology up to early 2000's had already everything you would need today.
People seems to care so much about moder tech not for their technical side but mostly about social. As sometime happens to discuss, beside work place, it's already difficult in real nowdays life to have something to talk about that it's worth to spend time talking without ending talking about weather or useless dialogs. I've the feeling people prefer social app interations because it's easy to talk less without any real time eye-eye efforts thinking many times before to say something and generally not being a natural conversation. The difference with old chat systems is that they were used for few time and they didn't replace social life, more it integrated with it.

I tried to go older only but it really just led to all my old feelings and frustrations coming back up, which has made me a little annoyed and bored with owning all this old computer crap. 😒

386SX wrote:

I've the feeling people prefer social app interations because it's easy to talk less without any real time eye-eye efforts thinking many times before to say something and generally not being a natural conversation. The difference with old chat systems is that they were used for few time and they didn't replace social life, more it integrated with it.

Yeah, that's true. I think there are both pros and cons to this.
On a positive side, shy people can finally communicate without fear and make friends worldwide.
It's also easier to explain things, because the other person can read or re-read stuff in their own speed.
In an eye-to-eye conversation, someone has to be concentrated and has to confess that he/she doesn't understand the matter that's been spoken about right now.
The negative thing is, that all this freedom also results in a more distant form of dialog.
Though you see lot's of smileys (sorry, "emoticons" now), but don't sense someones real feelings (ie, you can't read between the lines).

King_Corduroy wrote:

I tried to go older only but it really just led to all my old feelings and frustrations coming back up, which has made me a little annoyed and bored with owning all this old computer crap. 😒

I know that feel. Most of the things I've got are replacement parts, though. They are boxed-up but still need quite some space.
Funnily, I don't feel like that about old books. I consider not a single one of them to be a waste of space.
Anyway, organizing all the old computer crap may help you to feel better. I'm using cardboard boxes, for example.
But you could also use plastic models, like Phil used. Or just store them in a cabinet. If things are stored in a tidy way, owning all the junk is less of a burdening.

Jo22 wrote:

Yeah, that's true. I think there are both pros and cons to this. On a positive side, shy people can finally communicate without […]
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386SX wrote:

I've the feeling people prefer social app interations because it's easy to talk less without any real time eye-eye efforts thinking many times before to say something and generally not being a natural conversation. The difference with old chat systems is that they were used for few time and they didn't replace social life, more it integrated with it.

Yeah, that's true. I think there are both pros and cons to this.
On a positive side, shy people can finally communicate without fear and make friends worldwide.
It's also easier to explain things, because the other person can read or re-read stuff in their own speed.
In an eye-to-eye conversation, someone has to be concentrated and has to confess that he/she doesn't understand the matter that's been spoken about right now.
The negative thing is, that all this freedom also results in a more distant form of dialog.
Though you see lot's of smileys (sorry, "emoticons" now), but don't sense someones real feelings (ie, you can't read between the lines).
.

Yeah but some seems not to care about distance side without thinking they're talking with people that theorically couldn't care about anything you're saying. The natural eye-eye conversation can be fake up to a certain point but when (for example) a person get sick, the other should theorically have a natural response that can't be replaced with a sad emoticons.
It would be nice to have a statistic of how many people actually have real life discussions in everyday life. At the end, people work more than ever and feel the comfort to have a social life that it's not real.