For me after the windows XP area.

XP was the start of the heavy-handed policies

When I started to understand the PC's, until then it was all like magic

UCyborg wrote on 2024-07-23, 21:24:

https://techcrunch.com/2023/02/28/gamers-are- … ver-by-hackers/

A copy of that article without the cookie demands/corporate anti-GDPR protests https://archive.is/ndqrF

It is true that PCs never had a soul, but at one time people did "bond" with a computer
But at one time it was more fun than it is now
Tinkering has been done away with, PCs are a commodity, disposable, and the entire industry is becoming dominated by a shrinking number of players

I've lost the touch somewhere around Celeron 300A and Windows 98SE.
My previous PC was slow enough (Cx486SLC2-50, Trident 9000, 350MB hdd) that I could feel every aspect if its workings, I felt tiny delays, the patterns in sounds system makes.
I did recognize the virus (unknown to me at that time Win.CIH ) by unusual hdd stepping sounds just prior the boot messages, and had to search for antiviruses to dismiss suspicions.
After upgrade it all became just a raw performance/throughput, I couldn't tell how PC is feeling anymore, jitters and latencies are gone, nothing that indicates what's exactly going on...

For me, all computers after 386 are soulless. There is something touching, puppy-like about 386. It is already trying to bark, but its paws are still buckling. The earlier ones are still blind and not very sociable. 486 and later ones are too stubborn and bite painfully.

vstrakh wrote on 2024-07-29, 05:43:

I've lost the touch somewhere around Celeron 300A and Windows 98SE. My previous PC was slow enough (Cx486SLC2-50, Trident 9000, […]
Show full quote

I've lost the touch somewhere around Celeron 300A and Windows 98SE.
My previous PC was slow enough (Cx486SLC2-50, Trident 9000, 350MB hdd) that I could feel every aspect if its workings, I felt tiny delays, the patterns in sounds system makes.
I did recognize the virus (unknown to me at that time Win.CIH ) by unusual hdd stepping sounds just prior the boot messages, and had to search for antiviruses to dismiss suspicions.
After upgrade it all became just a raw performance/throughput, I couldn't tell how PC is feeling anymore, jitters and latencies are gone, nothing that indicates what's exactly going on...

that makes sense, it was around that time that computers performance and the operating systems opened a gap between what the computer was doing and what the user could 'feel'

i still liked PCs, still do, they never became just a device to me - but the above is a a kind of demarcation in the pc

Windows 8 and higher, its when it was no longer a skill to install them at all and windows update did everything for you.

I don't think I ever thought of a computer as "having a soul"...

But I came into this business with lots of very low-level "fun things" to do,
I build my first computers (before the PC was even a thing) - tried all kinds of different
processors types (my fav is probably still the 6809).

PC's were initially just bigger and better mostly the same .. I built lots of hardware, added
lots of my own design peripherals, had a good stack of prototypeable ISA bus cards,
all the while being able to just crank-out "simple code" to talk to it all ...

So, for me the "fun" disappeared a lot around the era of WinNT, 2K, XP ...
these effectively turned off the ability to just control hardware without having
to figure out and fight-with a myriad of special drivers and other OS restrictions.

For me, like others, it's life after XP when I started to lose interest in keeping up.

Windows 95/98 and XP are my favorite versions, but it's less about the operating systems and more about the hardware and overall PC landscape.

By the time we were into the Win 7 era, advancements felt painfully incremental. Generations of hardware could easily be skipped. We moved into an era of refreshes instead of new releases. Fewer and fewer hardware choices meaning less competition, stagnating innovation, and higher prices. Complete "fanboy" mayhem where people ripped on users for their hardware choices. 24/7 online DRM. Needing an account for everything.

It's rare I find any new PC tech exciting these days. I'm far more excited about modern "retro" tech, things that let me use older hardware with modern conveniences. Hardware emulators, adapters, FPGA creations, and full on retro modern systems like the Commander X16.