acl wrote on 2023-09-05, 16:25:Yes, games and music mostly. […]
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ElectroSoldier wrote on 2023-09-05, 13:45:
Games...
Why does every computer build come down to games? What games can it play and how well?
Yes, games and music mostly.
But i can't think of someone being nostalgic about Borland C++ Builder, Citrix MetaFrame or MS Works.
IE 5.5/Netscape Navigator, Java Applets, Popups from hell over a V.92 DialUp (with per-second charges)
I remember everything. But not really willing to experience that again 😁
Same with, say, Win98 SE. I remember dearly having to reboot every few hours because "out of system resources." Win98 SE on a ~2000 PIII 700MHz with adequate amounts of RAM was a complete garbage OS for trying to do anything productive. Especially if you had non-dialup-Internet and you wanted to keep one or two IM clients, an email client, etc. running at all times. I will say all day long that when I ordered that Dell machine in 2000, which I often will describe as my first "good" Windows box, the biggest mistake I made was picking 98SE instead of Win2000 for the OS. Ended up switching to Win2000 six months later.
But hey, there are lots of cool games that don't run on Win2000/XP/etc. So Win98SE serves a purpose on a retro system that, say, 2000 or NT4 do not.
Honestly, kids these days who grew up with Mac OS X or Windows XP/7/etc have no idea just how temperamental and unreliable personal computers used to be. I acquired two vintage Macs in the last year or two and have been playing with MacOS 9 and while the classic MacOS is a brilliant, creative piece of engineering, it is also... temperamental... beyond belief. Even, say, opening up an installer that closes all your other software and insists on a restart at the end is something that... is largely foreign in the post-XP/Mac OS X era, but that's how it used to be.
I actually think there might be more of an interest in vintage non-PC systems for non-gaming purposes, e.g. vintage Macs, but that's because, with vintage Macs, a lot more software was left behind in the various transitions. Sure, you have the PCalcs and the BBEdits and the GraphicConverters that started out in 68K in the early 1990s and continue to run on macOS Ventura on ARM today (along with the big name commercial vendors like Microsoft/Adobe/etc), but a lot of unique quirky software was left behind.
But in the Windows world, unless you are the hugest fan of Lotus 1-2-3 or Word Pro, most of the traditional Windows productivity software continues to exist and be updated for modern Windows. Hell, you can buy a current version of The Print Shop "now compatible with Windows 10". Now that's a program that I haven't heard of in 25 years. Other than vendors being greedy with subscription licences and whatnot, there's no really good reason to run a 10 year old version of some productivity software rather than a more current one. And most productivity applications just fly on modern systems - this is not 1995 when I had to add more RAM to a three-month-old machine to run MS Office 4.2 half-passably. And, while backwards compatibility with files was shaky (e.g. it wasn't guaranteed you could open ProductivityApp 3.0 files in ProductivityApp 6.0) back in the day, I doubt WordPerfect or CorelDRAW (which still do annualish releases) have changed their file format in two decades.
Also, there's a lot more backwards compatibility with productivity applications generally. If you want to see something insane, go and get the rare 32-bit version of MS Office 4.2... and you will see Word 6.0c, in all of its glory from 1994, running on your 64-bit Windows 11. But why would you want to? Other than having a pretty splash screen and being the last version of Word with a serious 900+ page paper manual, Word 6.0 is... not exactly that great... compared to the newer versions. Does anybody really have any nostalgia for any version of Word other than Word 5.1a for Mac?