rasz_pl wrote on 2023-08-04, 10:37:

doublebuffer wrote on 2023-08-03, 13:01:

If you would write pentium VHDL it would require approximately the same amount of logic

to run whole megadrive by reverse engineering die shots into net lists and compiling that into vhdl

In software there is a concept called "computational complexity", it does away with all technical implementation details, instead dealing only with abstract mathematical notations classifying the algorithm's resource usage. In case you want to read about it, search for keywords: asymptotic algorithm complexity, Turing machine, complexity classes. You are currently arguing about the constant factor of the big O notation which is always dropped and never mentioned because the complexity due to input size is much more defining property, but I understand coming from practical side it seems important. If you only have a hammer, every problem looks like a nail.

What was the topic again? Anyway, I just picked up yet another PS/2 keyboard. Can never have too many spares, right?

(Help me it's become a sickness)

amigopi wrote on 2023-08-04, 12:07:

What was the topic again? Anyway, I just picked up yet another PS/2 keyboard. Can never have too many spares, right?

(Help me it's become a sickness)

Me too, found an old DIN keyboard with a PS/2 adapter from my parents' attic. Very happy of that find. Just for fun I checked how much they ask it on ebay, 50 euros. It probably cost something like 10 a new. Insanity.

doublebuffer wrote on 2023-08-04, 12:28:

amigopi wrote on 2023-08-04, 12:07:

What was the topic again? Anyway, I just picked up yet another PS/2 keyboard. Can never have too many spares, right?

(Help me it's become a sickness)

Me too, found an old DIN keyboard with a PS/2 adapter from my parents' attic. Very happy of that find. Just for fun I checked how much they ask it on ebay, 50 euros. It probably cost something like 10 a new. Insanity.

I weren't so sure about that. Back then when DIN-keyboards were sold, prices were a lot higher than today. I have a price sheet from a German shop from 1991 here and the cheapest keyboard they offer (Noname) costs 66 DM, which is 34 Euro. With inflation that would 60 Euro today. One from Cherry costs 118 DM (60 Euro) which would be 106 Euro today

Keyboards were not cheap things until the Made in Taiwan rubber dome PS/2 models with no metal backplates that basically buckled and creaked as you typed became prevalent..

The way I remember it was, in '93 you were looking for the "cheap" $50 keyboard, in 1994 the cheap $20 keyboard and in '95 the dam kinda broke with $10 and under. Coincidentally or not, due to factors making for a cheap flood of clones, PS/2 systems began to get decommissioned in large numbers around this time and Model Ms suddenly flooded used market at prices between $5 and free if you take the whole load.

amigopi wrote on 2023-08-04, 12:07:

What was the topic again? Anyway, I just picked up yet another PS/2 keyboard. Can never have too many spares, right?

(Help me it's become a sickness)

Yeah, how many spares is too many is a really good question.

ThinkpadIL wrote on 2023-08-04, 14:08:

amigopi wrote on 2023-08-04, 12:07:

What was the topic again? Anyway, I just picked up yet another PS/2 keyboard. Can never have too many spares, right?

(Help me it's become a sickness)

Yeah, how many spares is too many is a really good question.

it is, to answer it you'd need to have some kind of risk of failure, permutations of new build options and room / money / time to do things kind of equation

for me i had bought things on the basis of spares but have found things last a lot longer than i'd have thought - that's partly because of low levels of use though, the more you get the lower the level of use for each thing on average!

HanSolo wrote on 2023-08-04, 13:00:

Back then when DIN-keyboards were sold, prices were a lot higher than today. I have a price sheet from a German shop from 1991 here and the cheapest keyboard they offer (Noname) costs 66 DM, which is 34 Euro. With inflation that would 60 Euro today. One from Cherry costs 118 DM (60 Euro) which would be 106 Euro today

Everything computer related was so expensive back then! Gotta be thankful for the huge volumes of today, my new smartphone cost only 300e and is jam-packed of features.

appiah4 wrote on 2023-08-04, 13:03:

Keyboards were not cheap things until the Made in Taiwan rubber dome PS/2 models with no metal backplates that basically buckled and creaked as you typed became prevalent..

That was the period I started paying for my own hardware 😀 now days I pay again 100 euros for a keyboard (mechanical). Those rubber domes don't just cut it for me anymore 😁

gerry wrote on 2023-08-04, 14:38:

for me i had bought things on the basis of spares but have found things last a lot longer than i'd have thought - that's partly because of low levels of use though, the more you get the lower the level of use for each thing on average!

Same problem here ... On one hand, to buy a whole system for cannibalization of parts is sometimes cheaper than to buy a stock of essential spare parts, on another hand, many times because of a lack of knowledge and experience you simple don't know the weakest parts of the system that you have just bought.

The trend towards cheaper hardware extends to more than keyboards as well. My old boss always used to say that there is no such thing as a well made laptop. That's not entirely true, as you can pay more for something like a Toughbook, and business laptops tend to be decently built. However, at the consumer level, there was little incentive for companies to build high quality machines, as people would just look at one or two specs (usually CPU speed and RAM) and select the cheapest machine.

I am impressed by the build of a used Latitude I got which is a bit over 10 years old. Then a lot of 21st century Acer built machines (Including eMachine and Gateway) that have "turned up" here for cheap are holding up well, dunno if this is just a survivorship bias thing though.

BitWrangler wrote on 2023-08-05, 00:53:

Then a lot of 21st century Acer built machines (Including eMachine and Gateway) that have "turned up" here for cheap are holding up well, dunno if this is just a survivorship bias thing though.

This I find a bit curious, as I've always considered Acer to be... well, total crap, both design-wise and build-wise. But perhaps the ones that were going to fail have indeed done it already; my (only!) VGA display is also an Acer and it, too, is holding up surprisingly well...

Oh I forgot the exception, the Aspire I call the Ass-pyre, because it's a flaming pile of ass. Got it free and broke, determined it had fried it's "legacy support chip" handles all the USB, keyboard and mouse functions. Can't get into setup on it, can't do crap, apart from install an OS that will do a handsoff setup and use a USB card in it's PC Card slot, so I've got this lame duck rigged with the USB card and keyboard as a workshop donkey for quick lookups with Xubuntu on it. Everything that was working when I got it still working though going on 5+ years. Otherwise the other 7 machines are golden, seem to hold up like business class HP, rather than you'd expect like consumer class HP which have been horrible. Two Acer/Gateway (It's owned by someone else now) NE series sandybridge laptops have been day in day out daily drivers since 2014, doing great, even took a 16GB upgrade. Toshibas seem to be doing okay in the two that I've got also, one was physically damaged and I patched it up, the other just had viruses, those cleaned up well and have been plodding along fine.

BitWrangler wrote on 2023-08-05, 00:53:

I am impressed by the build of a used Latitude I got which is a bit over 10 years old. Then a lot of 21st century Acer built machines (Including eMachine and Gateway) that have "turned up" here for cheap are holding up well, dunno if this is just a survivorship bias thing though.

Could be a survivorship bias, as failures are most likely to occur at the start of the product's lifecycle. The crappy ones may have just failed early, leaving the better ones for collectors.

Another consideration is what we mean by cheap. I wouldn't limit cheap to devices likely to fail. To me, a laptop that uses a flimsy plastic case is cheap. If it gets hot or if the screen has uneven lighting, I would also consider it to be cheap. If one of those machines has a low failure rate, I would still consider it to be cheap. Of course, I would expect this type of cheap computer to also have a higher failure rate, but a manufacturer might get lucky sometimes when choosing low cost components. How it was used would matter too. A laptop that just sat on a desk for years would be more likely to last awhile than one that was hauled around when travelling.

doublebuffer wrote on 2023-08-04, 11:57:

You are currently arguing about the constant factor of the big O notation

big o has nothing to do with it. Currently several people are trying to explain to you that you dont translate transistors into LEs when implementing something in FPGA as you suggested:

doublebuffer wrote on 2023-08-02, 23:20:

You're right. DE-10 has 110,000 logic elements. Pentium has 3,100,000 transistors. Althoug a logic element is composed of at least 3 transistors, there's no way a Pentium core can fit to DE-10.

Just say you were wrong so we can all drop the subject 😀 https://xkcd.com/386/ 🤣

HanSolo wrote on 2023-08-04, 13:00:

I weren't so sure about that. Back then when DIN-keyboards were sold, prices were a lot higher than today. I have a price sheet from a German shop from 1991 here and the cheapest keyboard they offer (Noname) costs 66 DM, which is 34 Euro. With inflation that would 60 Euro today. One from Cherry costs 118 DM (60 Euro) which would be 106 Euro today

BitWrangler wrote on 2023-08-04, 13:50:

The way I remember it was, in '93 you were looking for the "cheap" $50 keyboard, in 1994 the cheap $20 keyboard and in '95 the dam kinda broke with $10 and under. Coincidentally or not, due to factors making for a cheap flood of clones, PS/2 systems began to get decommissioned in large numbers around this time and Model Ms suddenly flooded used market at prices between $5 and free if you take the whole load.

Poland computer black market, prices from Bajtek magazine:
1991 keyboard ~$50. Looking at 1991 PC Mags confirms ~$50 for any new keyboard/mouse.
1992 same
1993 keyboard ~$20-30, mice ~$10-40
1994 keyboards all ~$20, three listed - BTC/click/101. Mice "taiwan" $10 , Logitech $40
1995 Chicony $16, BTC $17, MS Natural $140 😮. Mice cheapest Primax $9, Dexxa (google says Logitech made them?) $13, A4Tech optical $38, Logitech trackball $65
1996 BTC $13, Chicony $15, additional ~$2-3 for Win95 versions, MS Natural $50. Mice almost 30 models, cheapest Power Click $7, Mitsumi/Manhattan/Genius/A4tech am-5e $9, WinMouse ps2 $17, A4Tech WT-7P WinTrack Trackball $35
1997 prices stay ~same, looks like market bottomed out.

BitWrangler wrote on 2023-08-05, 00:53:

I am impressed by the build of a used Latitude I got which is a bit over 10 years old. Then a lot of 21st century Acer built machines (Including eMachine and Gateway) that have "turned up" here for cheap are holding up well, dunno if this is just a survivorship bias thing though.

all? Dell Latitudes were build by Compal, Compal also makes Acers 😀 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_l ... ers_(ODMs) With laptops you usually get what you pay for minus wanky brands like Asus/Acer/MSI

You want a crappy laptop? Get yourself a Fujitsu-Siemens. I swear that company had some sort of deep hatred towards the very idea of providing adequate cooling for their machines.

That reminds me, I should probably try to do something with the near-dead Amilo I have stashed in the closet. Perhaps it could be converted into some sort of funky desktop computer... 🤔

A customer of my last boss lost his Fujitsu laptop and got a nice burn on his table, it burned to the point of melting the casing in the area of the dedicated graphics card, an amazing thing, I can't imagine how it could happen. I don't remember the specific model, it was from the time of the first Core processors, after the Pentium M, but I do remember that many failed, although I imagine that they all failed.
Acer began to decline in quality at the time of Pentium M, I still have an Acer laptop with a desktop Pentium 4 2.4ghz and a Radeon 9000m that works perfectly, in these years only the fan failed. But the Next one, which was already a Pentium M with a Radeon x300, didn't last long, the graphics card failed due to lack of cooling. I currently have an Acer laptop running with an AMD APU running as a Router/NAS and I am very happy with it.
In the end I believe that all things fail at times, like the time of the capacitor plague and also the bumpgate, these two failures marked the first decade of this century and sent a lot of hardware to the trash.
My focus is on having things work not just looking at them and I find it hard to trust most hardware from 2001-2009.
And today I think that the biggest weakness of laptops are the hinges that seize easily and end up breaking the casing and sometimes the screen, taking the laptop directly to the trash. It may be that in the future it will be very difficult to get laptops made after 2012, because around here it began to be common to find laptops with broken hinges and shattered casings.
Before that it was not so common for them to end up so destroyed, although you could also see seized hinges.

I'm sure that each manufacturer has had their duds. I worked in IT during the mid 2000s and one of the Toshiba Tecra models had an 150% hard drive failure rate for us. I remember that our seller kept making excuses like you guys must be moving them around too much (as if laptops aren't supposed to be mobile computers). Most of these laptops just sat on a desk all day. Soured me on Toshiba laptops after that.

Last fall I picked up an assortment of parts which included a Soyo K7V, a Soyo Socket 370 board, and a Tyan Socket 370/Slot 1 board. Both Soyos had to be recapped, and the Tyan booted up to a bootblock BIOS screen, so I pulled the chip and reflashed it. In each case, the amount of satisfaction I received after getting all three working made the time and effort investment well worthwhile for me.