To me it's something I grow up with and has some nostalgia feeling.

Well that's easy.
When you had an experience with something and got very familiar with it, but after some time you completely forgot about it and never touched it for a few years, for various reasons.
The neurons in your brain related to this experience never fire again...
Until, you experience the experience again and re-fire these neurons, that's when you get nostalgia and all the sweet emotions and memories related to it.
When you get nostalgic you can immediately mark the thing that caused you the nostalgia as Retro.

It's all about the experience, what's retro for you may not be retro for me.

Ah yes, this one pops up from time to time.
Or was it "vintage" the last time?

Anyway, for me it's s370 and before, netburst and A64 (pre-AM2) are borderline, Athlon XP is just kinda a beefed up Coppermine in a way.
Athlon pre-XP is comparable to Coppermine.

And it will be different from person to person, kinda like "do apples taste good?"

James-F wrote:

Well that's easy. When you had an experience with something and got very familiar with it, but after some time you completely fo […]
Show full quote

Well that's easy.
When you had an experience with something and got very familiar with it, but after some time you completely forgot about it and never touched it for a few years, for various reasons.
The neurons in your brain related to this experience never fire again...
Until, you experience the experience again and re-fire these neurons, that's when you get nostalgia.
When you get nostalgic you can immediately mark the thing that caused you the nostalgia as Retro.

It's all about the experience, what's retro for you may not be retro for me.

I kinda like this explanation though 😁.

But still, experience is a personal matter and will differ between individuals.

I do still think that both "retro" and "vintage" shift through time.

Tetrium wrote:

I kinda like this explanation though :D. […]
Show full quote

James-F wrote:

Well that's easy. When you had an experience with something and got very familiar with it, but after some time you completely fo […]
Show full quote

Well that's easy.
When you had an experience with something and got very familiar with it, but after some time you completely forgot about it and never touched it for a few years, for various reasons.
The neurons in your brain related to this experience never fire again...
Until, you experience the experience again and re-fire these neurons, that's when you get nostalgia.
When you get nostalgic you can immediately mark the thing that caused you the nostalgia as Retro.

It's all about the experience, what's retro for you may not be retro for me.

I kinda like this explanation though 😁.

But still, experience is a personal matter and will differ between individuals.

I do still think that both "retro" and "vintage" shift through time.

I consider Vintage to be something from before my time, so for instance if I bought a 386 it would be vintage as its something from before my time, by the time I started using computers the 486 and pentium where common place and the 386 was gone mostly by then (1995)

But retro at least to me means something old but I might have used or really wanted to use at some point that is now affordable. Like a FX 5950 Ultra or an FX 55

if {currentWindows} doesn't support it 😀

James-F wrote:

Well that's easy. When you had an experience with something and got very familiar with it, but after some time you completely fo […]
Show full quote

Well that's easy.
When you had an experience with something and got very familiar with it, but after some time you completely forgot about it and never touched it for a few years, for various reasons.
The neurons in your brain related to this experience never fire again...
Until, you experience the experience again and re-fire these neurons, that's when you get nostalgia and all the sweet emotions and memories related to it.
When you get nostalgic you can immediately mark the thing that caused you the nostalgia as Retro.

It's all about the experience, what's retro for you may not be retro for me.

^ This ^

What makes something retro?

It all depends on who you are asking. Me, born in 1976, will say that retro computing is from between 1981 and 2001.
Other younger persons, might extend it to something as late as 2006/08. Older might say a PDP-11 from the 70's.
It all depends on who you are asking.

Being obsolete (support dropped long ago) and rare which makes you feel sentimental when you see it.

... like a 386! 😀

When it comes to technology to me it's something that has seen a niche resurgence after a period of being considered worthless. Here are the stages a generation of hardware goes through

Latest and Greatest - The most recent 2 perhaps 3 generations of hardware which you can generally still get new very easily.
Mainstream - Not the latest, but still useable for most modern tasks. No one will fault you for having hardware like this but might say you need an upgrade
Junk/Recycle - This is the period where hardware is generally worth less then it would cost to even ship it. Most of the time this hardware is sent to the recycler because no one is willing to spend any money on it and it struggles with modern operating systems.
Retro - After significant amount of recycling hardware is starting to get hard to find and some people are starting to feel nostalgic about the fact that hardware is disappearing. Value starts to increase for a niche of collectors or nostalgic users.
Vintage - Hardware is extremely hard to find and it's value might even be more then it was when it was new.

For instance right now I personally feel like it's Pentium 3 era and earlier for PCs that one can truly consider retro. We are at a point where Slot1/Socket370 systems it's a shame when you see one in the trash because they are starting to get harder and harder to find.

Pentium 4, Core2 and anything in between at a point where you can't hardly even give it away (except for a few particular pieces that were really expensive when they were released) and there is so much of it out there that it's just taking up space and lots of them are just being trashed. Now is the time to hold on to some of these they start to become hard to find. Right now they are basically at the Junk\Trash\Recycle stage.

Core i systems still have value but are valued a much less then they were when they were introduced but are pretty much still useable for any modern tasks including most modern games, assuming you have appropriate GPU. This would be mainstream generation.

More recent Core i systems are still holding their value pretty much even used ones and are still on the cutting edge or maybe right behind the cutting edge. The latest and greatest generation.

My age scale for PC's (for Year 2016) : Cutting Edge - Anything with AVX support (Skylake is Bleeding Edge :happy:) Modern PC's […]
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My age scale for PC's (for Year 2016) :
Cutting Edge - Anything with AVX support (Skylake is Bleeding Edge 😀)
Modern PC's (Nehalem/Phenom and newer without AVX),
Classic PC's (Core 2 Duo/AM2 and newer),
Retro PC's (All Pentium 4's and D's with Socket 939/754 + Socket 370/Socket A),
Vintage PC's (older than Pentium III and Athlon XP).

Source : LINK

It always different from person to person but whatever floats your boat and you are happy that is all that counts 😀

Rhuwyn wrote:

When it comes to technology to me it's something that has seen a niche resurgence after a period of being considered worthless. […]
Show full quote

When it comes to technology to me it's something that has seen a niche resurgence after a period of being considered worthless. Here are the stages a generation of hardware goes through

Latest and Greatest - The most recent 2 perhaps 3 generations of hardware which you can generally still get new very easily.
Mainstream - Not the latest, but still useable for most modern tasks. No one will fault you for having hardware like this but might say you need an upgrade
Junk/Recycle - This is the period where hardware is generally worth less then it would cost to even ship it. Most of the time this hardware is sent to the recycler because no one is willing to spend any money on it and it struggles with modern operating systems.
Retro - After significant amount of recycling hardware is starting to get hard to find and some people are starting to feel nostalgic about the fact that hardware is disappearing. Value starts to increase for a niche of collectors or nostalgic users.
Vintage - Hardware is extremely hard to find and it's value might even be more then it was when it was new.

For instance right now I personally feel like it's Pentium 3 era and earlier for PCs that one can truly consider retro. We are at a point where Slot1/Socket370 systems it's a shame when you see one in the trash because they are starting to get harder and harder to find.

Pentium 4, Core2 and anything in between at a point where you can't hardly even give it away (except for a few particular pieces that were really expensive when they were released) and there is so much of it out there that it's just taking up space and lots of them are just being trashed. Now is the time to hold on to some of these they start to become hard to find. Right now they are basically at the Junk\Trash\Recycle stage.

Core i systems still have value but are valued a much less then they were when they were introduced but are pretty much still useable for any modern tasks including most modern games, assuming you have appropriate GPU. This would be mainstream generation.

More recent Core i systems are still holding their value pretty much even used ones and are still on the cutting edge or maybe right behind the cutting edge. The latest and greatest generation.

Remember socket a is starting its creep up in price with 939

It's true that what a person feels is retro is subjecive. I can't say I agree with P4s and PentiumD's being retro yet. There is just too many of them still available for them.

I think availability in itself has nothing to do with something being retro but more with something being harder to find.

To me, 'vintage' means something that is actually old, from an earlier era.
'Retro' is something that is new, but tries to revive the aesthetic of an earlier era.
For example. My IBM 5160 PC/XT is vintage, whereas our 8088 MPH demo is 'retro'.

There's another type of 'retro' however, which is something that merely looks old, but doesn't actually use old hardware. I think that is more like the current hipster/vapourwave/etc culture.
For example, someone made the game "You have to win the game": http://store.steampowered.com/app/286100/
It looks like an early 80s CGA game. However, it requires a modern PC with a GPU with shaders to run it.
To prove how the game is missing the point, someone re-made the game on an actual C64: http://www.pouet.net/prod.php?which=60890

Scali wrote:

To me, 'vintage' means something that is actually old, from an earlier era.

By this definition, anything running Glide games is also vintage 😁

The literal meaning of a word preceded by the prefix "retro" can also simply mean that instead of playing the newest games (like almost all gamers will want the newest graphics, modern effects, highest framerates etc), a retrogamer is actually seeking to go the other way, back to the past, to play games.

Tetrium wrote:

Scali wrote:

To me, 'vintage' means something that is actually old, from an earlier era.

By this definition, anything running Glide games is also vintage 😁

Erm how so?
The thing you refer to as 'vintage' has to be old.
I guess Glide and the VooDoo hardware can be considered old enough to be 'vintage' by now, as are the Glide games from that era.
But, running some kind of Glide wrapper or emulator on a modern system would not qualify as 'vintage', since neither the wrapper nor the system are old.
I don't see how my definition would match up with your statement.

Scali wrote:

I don't see how my definition would match up with your statement.

I do. And you already explained it here:

Scali wrote:

I guess Glide and the VooDoo hardware can be considered old enough to be 'vintage' by now, as are the Glide games from that era.