why the hell would the National Security Agency give two shits about a retro vintage computer hardware/software/gaming fourm lmao

theelf wrote on 2024-09-16, 12:43:

Im argentinian living in Spain, from my point of view, vogons is super nice to share/find data about retro computers, but fail in two point for us, first, english, is a big barrier, second, is pretty common in spanish forums to talk/share abandonware, maybe because we dont care, or our laws are differents, i dont know

I often post in retrocomputers/consoles forums in spanish, and i do a mix of info and abandonware, i really miss this in vogons, and thats why i post few here, beside writing/reading english is difficult

thats the thing that surprises me about vogons, there are a lot of people like you from countries where english isn't the native language, but you still type very good english, if you hadn't of said you weren't from an english speaking country i wouldn't have known otherwise, i'm english and it looks like you type better english than i do.🤣.

i've noticed theres at least a couple of people here that use a translator and sometimes its hard to make out what they mean, but its enough to get the jist of it, i think op's one of them. i read alot of foreign tech forums some french, italian, russian and japanese, i read a little french enough to get by, but without chrome translate page the rest would be impossible.

I also don't use translator while English is not clearly my first language but I usually do my best to write as fast as I can even with some errors that I usually find later reading my own messages a second time later. 😀

But this forum helps me a lot to have an opportunity to give opinions in English I'd not have in real life easily in a subject like retro hardware I really like.

I would like to think that the intention of the OP is to really find out if there are users from other areas of the planet, it seems that most of us are from America or Europe and there also seems to be quite a few users from Japan, Taiwan and China. If I'm not mistaken, one user on this forum with the largest collection of Nvidia graphics cards is from China.
No need to look for a political tone to the discussion.
I think that some hardware that in some areas of the planet is considered obsolete or even retro, in others may become the opposite because of purchasing power and other things. If the priority is everyday food, it will be difficult to spend money on collecting old computer hardware that has no use beyond entertainment. And entertainment is not so important if you are hungry.
I guess that's one of the reasons why some countries are not represented in this forum, or even simply because they don't have access to internet.
That's just my opinion, please, I don't mean to offend anyone.

Well I am pretty sure China and Russia have much surpassed GSM level Internet, India is already slowly deprecating H+ so the Internet assumption is poor.

I don't know about other places, but we never, or rarely imported old hardware. What's true is we imported weaker hardware, but period correct. A machine build between 2005-2010 usually had a Core 2 Duo, then most people moved to Pentium. Celeron was a 2nd option for people all the time. Now that people have moved to the Core iS and AMD. In parts of Africa, you would get older vehicles from Asia or Europe or NA, but that's not the case with computer hardwares in my nation, nor even vehicles.

To answer your question, no we rarely have old hardware: hardware not old enough to participate in most of the Vogons discussions.

This forum is PC centric, not really computing generalist, and PCs were not all that common to use recreationally in the US prior to 1990, in the rest of the world where the US exchange rate seemed doubled on any PC items they were firmly in the boring business necessity niche prior to 1990 also. They all had their local champions, homegrown or adopted. Brazil liked Commodore 64s, so much so that they were still making them into the 1990s for Brazil, so a Commodore 64 forum in Brazil is where all that nostalgia will be playing out, not here. Likewise, Europeans liked Commodores, Amstrads, Sinclairs at the beginning of 80s, and many cottage industry peripheral suppliers sprung up around those systems in Germany, UK, etc. So strangely enough, they all have forums that discuss Sinclairs, Amstrads, C64, Amiga, some in English, some in German, some in French some in Italian....

Since searches are hampered by AI assistance these days and since language models have all the understanding and nuance expected of a toddler, google might dump you here on a search for old computers, but just because it does, we don't owe you anything.

Hoping wrote on 2024-09-17, 13:12:

If I'm not mistaken, one user on this forum with the largest collection of Nvidia graphics cards is from China.

yjfy (acronym of 硬件风云). His collections have been certified by Nvidia.

BEEN_Nath_58 wrote on 2024-09-17, 13:43:

Now that people have moved to the Core iS and AMD.

Is "Core iS" just plural, or those models with -S suffix and lower frequencies (e.g. i7-3770 has -K, vanilla, -S, and -T models, from fastest to slowest)?

BEEN_Nath_58 wrote on 2024-09-17, 13:43:

To answer your question, no we rarely have old hardware: hardware not old enough to participate in most of the Vogons discussions.

So where do those Core 2 Duo builds go when they retire? They are still capable WinXP platforms.

BitWrangler wrote on 2024-09-17, 14:06:

This forum is PC centric, not really computing generalist, and PCs were not all that common to use recreationally in the US prior to 1990, in the rest of the world where the US exchange rate seemed doubled on any PC items they were firmly in the boring business necessity niche prior to 1990 also. They all had their local champions, homegrown or adopted. Brazil liked Commodore 64s, so much so that they were still making them into the 1990s for Brazil, so a Commodore 64 forum in Brazil is where all that nostalgia will be playing out, not here. Likewise, Europeans liked Commodores, Amstrads, Sinclairs at the beginning of 80s, and many cottage industry peripheral suppliers sprung up around those systems in Germany, UK, etc. So strangely enough, they all have forums that discuss Sinclairs, Amstrads, C64, Amiga, some in English, some in German, some in French some in Italian....

Taiwan, famous for foundries and motherboard makers now but copycat and piracy in 1980s, had a rather narrow path of "local champions": Apple II clones and IBM PC clones, period. We had few Z80 computers like Acer (then Multitech) Micro-Professor MPF-I but they were not mainstream; Acer/Multitech switched to MOS 6502 in the successor model MPF-II, an Apple II clone. Many computer makers shifted to PC compatibles in mid- to late-1980s; existing MOS 6502 production lines marched on towards Nintendo FamiCom/NES clones, yet no or very few clones of other MOS 6502 family computers (specifically, Atari and Commodore) or even advanced models of Apple II. Same applied to Amiga and Apple's 68K and PowerPC lines. Apple's market share in Taiwan was very low ever since the late-1980s "shift" and limited to graphic designers (mostly due to PostScript supports) until the rise of Intel-based MacBook, when its fashionable design attracted many Starbucks-dwelling hipsters. Many of them installed Windows on Intel-based MacBooks for broader selection of (unlicensed or pirated) software, similar to installing Windows 11 on Apple Silicon today but with no support whatsoever.

Compared to US, modem was another device that received very little attention in Taiwan before mid-1990s. High landline application fee (~US$200 per number; that was half of monthly income of a typical middle-class) and no flat rate in 1980s limited userbase; a "pirate island" with no phreaking culture at all. 😎 There were few dial-up BBS using Telix but their userbase were limited to hardcore computer enthusiasts; no on-line services or communities like CompuServe, Prodigy, or AOL. It was not until April 1995 when Hinet offered universal Internet service to every citizen (before then, TANet (July 1991) was limited to higher education, while SEEDNet (July 1992) was available only to approved business entities) did modems become an essential peripheral for computer users.

dormcat wrote on 2024-09-17, 18:10:

BEEN_Nath_58 wrote on 2024-09-17, 13:43:

Now that people have moved to the Core iS and AMD.

Is "Core iS" just plural, or those models with -S suffix and lower frequencies (e.g. i7-3770 has -K, vanilla, -S, and -T models, from fastest to slowest)?

Plural. In most systems people tend to have the Core i3s. For people who are trying to get into a hardcore PC sector or gaming without prior knowledge, more likely they are getting shipped with Ryzen 7 or i7

dormcat wrote on 2024-09-17, 18:10:

BEEN_Nath_58 wrote on 2024-09-17, 13:43:

To answer your question, no we rarely have old hardware: hardware not old enough to participate in most of the Vogons discussions.

So where do those Core 2 Duo builds go when they retire? They are still capable WinXP platforms.

Unfortunately, most of the things go to the scrap. A friend of mine owned one of the godowns for those, before they were taken away, but I never got the opportunity to catch up with their whole system.

Remember that VOGONS raison de etre is as the official support forum for DOSBox.

The retro hardware side of things came up as a side-effect, but grew to be the main area of discussion.

SquallStrife wrote on 2024-09-18, 00:27:

Remember that VOGONS raison de etre is as the official support forum for DOSBox.

Don't think so, may have became the official forum of DOSbox, but was more about Glide wrappers at first
http://web.archive.org/web/20030804213944/htt … tafleet.com:80/

I usually stay out of bait threads but...

The reason this forum was started was for getting very old games (mainly PC and DOS/9x) working on new systems (mainly PC and NT) and is still the purpose, so you do the math.

VOGONS origins
VDMSound forum to OGoNS?
Re: This forum..
Re: Confirm a question about this forum

SquallStrife wrote on 2024-09-18, 00:27:

Remember that VOGONS raison de etre is as the official support forum for DOSBox.

The retro hardware side of things came up as a side-effect, but grew to be the main area of discussion.

While I enjoy actual old hardware, DOSBox itself is awesome .

I suspect a lot of people use DOSBox all over the world, including in the places that OP referenced, even if they don't necessarily post in the forum due to a language barrier or simply because DOSBox mostly simply just works for many things with minimal need to reference the docs (which can be machine translated, if needed).

SquallStrife wrote on 2024-09-18, 00:27:

raison de etre

Off topic: I learned the French phrase from the ending theme of Chobits, which was defined as a"computer" in humanoid from factor, rather than a robot or android. The anime is now 22 years old so computers within are old enough to be qualified as "retro." 😉

It's not the amount but the quality that matters.
Rendition Verite and Singapore's Creative 3D Blaster emulators are being made in Sri Lanka
btw Mongolia has twice less people than Singapore 😉 and is smaller than Kingdom of Denmark 😉

but it was big indeed 😉

lithuania big as china, nobody heard about russia 😉

Chinese Retro PC,
needs some soldering.

Did you know that the Kola seed used in soft drinks came from Nigeria, one of the poorest countries on earth? You're barking at the wrong tree you lunatic.

dormcat wrote on 2024-09-17, 18:10:

Compared to US, modem was another device that received very little attention in Taiwan before mid-1990s. High landline application fee (~US$200 per number; that was half of monthly income of a typical middle-class) and no flat rate in 1980s limited userbase; a "pirate island" with no phreaking culture at all. 😎 There were few dial-up BBS using Telix but their userbase were limited to hardcore computer enthusiasts; no on-line services or communities like CompuServe, Prodigy, or AOL. It was not until April 1995 when Hinet offered universal Internet service to every citizen (before then, TANet (July 1991) was limited to higher education, while SEEDNet (July 1992) was available only to approved business entities) did modems become an essential peripheral for computer users.

Was BBSing more of a Windows-era thing in Taiwan, then? I see a lot about "PTT", and the unique ANSI art which developed around it using Big-5 encoding (example: https://www.cambus.net/taiwanese-bbses-and-unicode-ansi-art/). I suppose this is also feasible in DOS, e.g. with the local equivalent of DOS/V, but I wonder about the timeline.

VileR wrote on 2024-09-18, 16:01:

Was BBSing more of a Windows-era thing in Taiwan, then? I see a lot about "PTT", and the unique ANSI art which developed around it using Big-5 encoding (example: https://www.cambus.net/taiwanese-bbses-and-unicode-ansi-art/). I suppose this is also feasible in DOS, e.g. with the local equivalent of DOS/V, but I wonder about the timeline.

Dial-up BBS using Telix or similar software existed before Win95 but were only popular among a small group of enthusiasts. As I wrote in the previous post, TANet was the first TCP/IP ISP available in Taiwan, and college boys in EE or CS majors soon created many not-so-academic BBS for recreational and social purposes. In fact PTT was a late boomer in BBS culture: it was far behind NTU Royal Palm Blvd until late 90s-early 00s, when NTU started to evict one-night-stand seekers using the taxpayer-sponsored BBS. Other departmental BBS slowly died down and more and more netizens moved to PTT. It was sort of similar to CoupuServe and AOL.

We didn't have a direct DOS/V equivalent in DOS era; most people used ETen Chinese System, a wrapper (not a full-fledged OS) that enabled DOS to display and input Big5 characters. Those ASCII art were popular under DOS and, with broadband ISP were not that common until the 21st century, telnet-based BBS were still popular for low bandwidth requirement and real-time response (very useful in chats, as opposed to HTML-based web pages were actually working in offline mode). In modern days many netizens with zero knowledge of telnet would simply install a browser plugin or smartphone app to emulate telnet experience.