Excel.
I put way more hours on my CRTs with my modern boxes (i5-2400/i5-6600K) than I ever have with my older hardware, and that isn't looking to change as I look for a second 19" CRT and a good DisplayPort to VGA adapter that'll output 10bpc video from a Radeon RX 570 (and, in the future, a Pro W6600) at at least 240MHz. Haven't found one yet so far but I'm still looking. This isn't really for nostalgia per se, more just that I think CRTs look better than any of my flat panels, both in colors and refresh rate, and the closest contender I've seen yet is the 2021 MacBook Pro's Mini LED display. Shame about the notch and the lack of touch bar, but the ARM is still compelling -- I'm looking into the M2 13".
In my head, I tend to think of GPUs as matching with CPUs two years older. Voodoo feels like a Pentium Pro card, GeForce 2 feels like a Pentium II card, Rage 128 feels like a PowerPC 750 card, Radeon 8500 feels like an Athlon card, but both Voodoo3 and Matrox G400 escape this; I don't know why for the V3 besides just having it being a '99 card memorized, but for the G400 I think it's because of the massive performance scaling. I think it's because of these cards mainly being intended for people who already have completed systems and just want an upgrade, and so they're trying to be the best GPU for already existing CPUs, leading to people building out systems nowadays (and then as well) to go for them instead of cards from the year it was bought. I mean, how many people pair GF4Tis or FX 5x00s with Pentium IIIs? In any case, it leads to me seeing people talk about "period correct" builds that have GeForce 2 GTSes and Thunderbirds or Coppermines and it just feels like such an underpowered card to pair with such a stout CPU.
lawyerpepper wrote on 2022-02-21, 04:16:
I don't consider Windows pre-NT to be an operating system. I'll put up with 98SE to run some games, but even 'back in the day' I never considered it for real work. DOS -> OS/2 -> NT
I didn't used to, either, but then I thought about all the different subsystems, API, and even a kernel for Windows 3. I think that the 16-bit Windowses are kind of just a unique kind of OS that piggybacks off another for a few of its features, almost but not quite like a really primitive sort of virtualization.
Anyway, final confession for today: I have no real nostalgia for any of the systems I own besides a small handful I've personally owned for years -- the Dell OptiPlex GX1 I've had since I was 13, the Acer Aspire One I've had since I was like seven, and having been away from it for a few years I think I'm developing some for the i5-2400. I don't think nostalgia should be quite as all-encompassing of a factor as it is; I think "I'm interested in it" should be a good enough reason to justify wanting to use any piece of hardware, whether it be a PDP-11, a Sears Electronic Scholar, an Altair... Not to say it isn't a great thing to have, but I wish it wasn't so omnipresent that kids born in, like, 2006 or 7 call vaporwave "nostalgic" because it's old and different and they like it because of that.
Okay, final, final confession: I just hate vaporwave in general. It's dead now anyway, but I always thought it was cheap and felt like pandering to kids about something that looked nothing like what it's portrayed as -- albiet as someone that just barely slipped in the time frame to have daily driven Windows 2000 on hardware of the time, used Real Player/Real Arcade, and went on Geocities. I suppose I can't exactly talk.