First post, by rkurbatov
I remember how I piled some old hardware back in 2006-2007 to try some 'retro'. There were some gems as for today like Voodoo 1 adapter, Dual Socket A motherboard (where ordinary Athlons could be used), Matrox Myllenium. Or how I sold my old 486 in 2001 to get new shiny Duron thinking 'who can use this old crap'.
The question is - when retro becomes retro? How this old dusty hardware becomes popular again and what defines its value? Will ever something that is sold for nothing now - like Socket 478 boards and CPUs, old Core 2, DDR2 memory - become retro in a while?
Like personally I am interested in ten years from 1990 to 2000 (maybe a year or two to either sides). There is an 8-bit computing I'm also digging in, but for a different reason - that's the platform that can be fully understood by a single person, every chip and every CPU command, when you can create your own computer and make code for it. But for hardware of x86 era I'm again just a user with a little bit of nostalgic feelings and little bit of curiousity - trying old expensive stuff that I could not afford that days.
Something earlier - and it's simply useless, like 8086 or 80286, not much variation in software and hardware and too slow equipment to try something interesting. Something later - and it became boring thing of two concurrent designs. Technically, I can have only one XP compatible PC to play everything from 2002 to 2012 and the modern one with Windows 11 to play everything else. On the other hand, variety of software and hardware of this Golden Decade allows me to have plenty of builds where a year could change everything. I bought my Ryzen 9 3900x two years ago, it was advanced CPU then, not the best one but very good one. I was surprised seeing that AMD announced the new Ryzen family only ysterday - technically my CPU is on the same level in the same niche. It will be sufficient for at least two more years for my work (or probably even more, because it was working on lower frequency - I chose too small case for such a heaty). And my good old Phenom II from 2010 is technically the same PC but a slower one. I still can use it for lots of games and ordinary tasks (and even for work if flow and tests were not so demanidng). My Am486DX4-100 that was bought in 1997 became ABSOLUTE CRAP in early 2002, too slow for Windows 98, so I missed it completely, switchig to XP.
So will my Phenom become retro PC, an interesting one for future me? Or my Ryzen? Or they miss that important charming part that we search for in much older machines?
486: ECS UM486 VLB, 256kb cache, i486 DX2/66, 8MB RAM, Trident TGUI9440AGi VLB 1MB, Pro Audio Spectrum 16, FDD 3.5, ZIP 100 ATA
PII: Asus P2B, Pentium II 400MHz, 512MB RAM, Trident 9750 AGP 4MB, Voodoo2 SLI, MonsterSound MX300
