It is PCs that are retro. A personal, general-purpose, stand-alone computer, owned and controlled by the user. The concept is retro.

The current paradigm is disposable devices, tied to a service, tied to a platform, administered remotely, that can do what third parties decide would be sufficiently fashionable for them to do.

Argue about which stop you want to get off at, but it's obvious which way the train is headed.

Here's another perspective: Software and hardware made as recently as 2014 support Windows XP. I spent a few hours today playing the 2013 Shadow Warrior remake on a Geforce GTX 780... in my 32-bit Windows XP partition. Who here would consider that "retro"? Probably nobody, right?

By the way, the 2013 Shadow Warrior remake is awesome and I highly recommend playing it. It's one of the very, VERY few REAL shooters to have come out in the past 15 years, with health powerups instead of automatically regenerating health, a real save/load function instead of checkpoints, and weapon selection using 1-9 on your keyboard instead of two-weapon switching.

Okay so maybe that particular game is retro in its own way... but you get the point I'm making, right?

bakemono wrote on 2021-06-22, 02:30:

It is PCs that are retro. A personal, general-purpose, stand-alone computer, owned and controlled by the user. The concept is retro.

The current paradigm is disposable devices, tied to a service, tied to a platform, administered remotely, that can do what third parties decide would be sufficiently fashionable for them to do.

Argue about which stop you want to get off at, but it's obvious which way the train is headed.

Motherf**kin' truth right there. If you want a real personal computer, you need to use either Linux or a >15-year-old version of Windows.

bakemono wrote on 2021-06-22, 02:30:

It is PCs that are retro. A personal, general-purpose, stand-alone computer, owned and controlled by the user. The concept is retro.

The current paradigm is disposable devices, tied to a service, tied to a platform, administered remotely, that can do what third parties decide would be sufficiently fashionable for them to do.

Argue about which stop you want to get off at, but it's obvious which way the train is headed.

the same is happening all over, any media or connected device (no DVD player and disc for you, just a stream), even cars eventually (self drive ubers, why own a car then?)

it's all 'something as a service'. owning things will be retro eventually!

The mainstream media have been pushing for that in the housing market too lately. There have been a lot of op-eds telling people to just rent for their whole lives instead of buying their own homes.

It's almost like it's all part of a conspiracy to create a society in which the banks, media, and government own everything and the rest of us own nothing.

"You will own nothing and you will be happy." The mantra of the Great Reset. That's some evil BS right there. I still plan to own my own home one day, but I'd like to build my own. I just don't have the money to do that yet.

And yeah, I've been enjoying reading all the responses as well as other threads. I especially like the Vista is Retro thread I just found, because I found other people besides myself that liked it for what it was and have a healthy respect for Vista. I really do want to build a Vista period machine. I just rolled back my 2010 gaming rig back to Windows 7. ........Well.....ok, so Rollback isn't the correct word. I wiped the SSD and installed my copy of Windows 7 again, which means I had to install the SPs, then repair the Windows Update software to even begin to see all the updates. But it works, just as well as it did 7 years ago.

I really enjoy having period-correct systems for gaming - I just don't have enough monitors or keyboard/mouse units for them all to be hooked up at the same time, so to use them, I have to shuffle things around.

FFXIhealer wrote on 2021-06-25, 15:37:

I really enjoy having period-correct systems for gaming - I just don't have enough monitors or keyboard/mouse units for them all to be hooked up at the same time, so to use them, I have to shuffle things around.

You sound like a prime candidate for a KVM

bakemono wrote on 2021-06-22, 02:30:

It is PCs that are retro. A personal, general-purpose, stand-alone computer, owned and controlled by the user. The concept is retro.

The current paradigm is disposable devices, tied to a service, tied to a platform, administered remotely, that can do what third parties decide would be sufficiently fashionable for them to do.

Argue about which stop you want to get off at, but it's obvious which way the train is headed.

So things come "full circle", or how it is called ?

What we have now is shockingly similar to the early days of computing.:

There used to be mainframes, called host computers in their role/function, which did all the computational processing.
Users had to work with dumb terminals or teletype writer machines, which were connected via serial ports to the host computer.

Work was done on a time-sharing basis, wereas computing power was provided by priority.
Important users or important applications became more processing power.

I don't know. Personal computers, when new, were praised for their moving away from this old concept.

As time went on, these Personal Computers became more and more connected, but also incorporated their own intelligence.

The internet, as we knew it, was a symbol for this. It was meant to provide information in case of a failure.
With millions of independant PCs around this world, this concept works comparably well.

But I'm not sure what happens if they all rely on a permanent internet connection;
or worse, a permanet internet connection to servers of a single company.

Edit: That fancy client/server concept from the ~90s is similar the old terminal/host concept, too. 😉

I'm not sure whether Windows 7 will ever be considered retro. Windows 95, 98, ME get that status mostly because there is unique software/games written for it that do not work well in modern Windows due to API incompatibility. You will install Windows XP on retro hardware usually for increased stability. Windows 7 is just too resource demanding for retro hardware and you're much better off with Windows 10 on modern hardware. Therefore I think Windows 7 will follow the footsteps of Vista and disappear completely and become an OS nobody cares about.

It's also connected to value of retro hardware - 86-486 are valuable for their unique feel, for tinkering with real hardware, Pentiums up to Athlon 64/P4 are valuable for retro gaming (Windows 98-XP is valuable here). Later hardware that used to run Windows 7 can be easily replaced by modern hardware and run the same software in Windows 10.

AlexZ wrote on 2021-06-26, 11:03:

I'm not sure whether Windows 7 will ever be considered retro. Windows 95, 98, ME get that status mostly because there is unique software/games written for it that do not work well in modern Windows due to API incompatibility. You will install Windows XP on retro hardware usually for increased stability. Windows 7 is just too resource demanding for retro hardware and you're much better off with Windows 10 on modern hardware. Therefore I think Windows 7 will follow the footsteps of Vista and disappear completely and become an OS nobody cares about.

It's also connected to value of retro hardware - 86-486 are valuable for their unique feel, for tinkering with real hardware, Pentiums up to Athlon 64/P4 are valuable for retro gaming (Windows 98-XP is valuable here). Later hardware that used to run Windows 7 can be easily replaced by modern hardware and run the same software in Windows 10.

Believe it or not, but some of the C64, ZX Spectrum etc fraction did struggle very hard
to accept that these "souless IBM clones" from the Windows 3.1 era *might* ever become retro,
not to mention valuable. 😉

Nowadays, it might be a bit different. But 10 or 15 years ago,
these fan boys still struggled to accept that generic 80x86 to 80586 PCs might finally join their beloved proprietary systems into the hall of ultimate retroness. 😉

To them, in their mind sets, a DOS/Win98 PC was that dirty beige box from the roadside.
That old PC that was good enough to run Star Commander, to interface with the 1541 via parallel port.

Why I am writing this down ? 🙂
- Because I think people are highly individual when it comes to value.
What's wortless to one person, might be a treasure for another one.
So unless theirs some official temporal definition of "retro",
people will continue to be of different opinions.
Which isn't bad per se, I think.

2000 and xp have drivers till 2014 so even Core 2 quads sata 3 PCIE HD video usb3 all with XP and some 2000. What I don't appreciate is how microsoft doesn't allow the community to maintain obselete windows where it isn't profit based. They do however seem to tollerate such behaviour.
CPU multimedia extensions are a gimmick mostly for web based ad animations and stuff tottally abusing the spec!