First post, by aries-mu
People, modern IT is killing retrocomputing twice. Not only the world and the products have changed, but the darn plague of centralization is impacting everything: not just hardware or software, everything is being destroyed, even the very concepts of ownership, fundamental human rights (private property is one of those)... It started with the digital (no owned box or support) video games and software scam (not my fault. When Steam was born, I was living bare feet with a sackcloth on my self in a 3x2 meters wooden cabin with no electricity in a forest for years. When I returned, I found out videogames weren't being sold [and owned] with the box, Floppy or CD or whatever, manual and everything anymore...).
Then it got even worse with scams like the software 'as-a-service' or rental-software, paid subscriptions (as if monthly bills weren't enough).
Adobe docet. They're even DISABLING regularly PURCHASED programs bought by people with their own money BEFORE these scams were initiated.
Not to talk about the horror of a product that you paid for which, at some point in time, stops working (like a videogame) because something happened into somebodyelse's place (eg: server shutdown). Heck imagine if Steam fails!!! The money lost! The work, the love... What if there is a war, a global economic crack... NOTHING WORKS ANYMORE WITHOUT SHJTTERNET, everything stops, become a doorstop. Things YOU PAID FOR! And I worry about games and retro passion... services will stop! Distributions, transactions, everything! People will die by the millions (even way more). Elderlies, babies will die without services! But I digress...
What if I wanna an offline home and play games, you can't even buy them. What if you wanna a cottage on a mountain and go there and relax with a computer and some games, you can't, cause no intershjt.
As if all this (and more) weren't enough... even HARDWARE wasn't left out of the scam and total-control-fetish!
Indeed, one might think, heck! They can't touch my hardware. How could they ever digitalize it? It gotta be physical and gotta come inside a box!
Nope.
Abominations such as the drive-less PS5 (not talking about the optical drive, but the internal drive! Only remote games!), or the Microsoft-Intel total-control-freak-operation (il gatto e la volpe - the cat and the fox - typical Italian colloquialism), where combinations such as the UEFI/secure boot curse + Windows 11 ultra curse can make a whole computer useless. De facto, you do not OWN it anymore. Even curse in the curse, modern computers even lacking legacy boot bios support. so basically if you wanna buy it to install ... whatever OS or even to use it as a retro machine with retro OSs, you simply cannot!
Imagine freaks being able to shut down your fridge for good! Well that's what they do.
Anyway, all this rant to say, they're killing retrocomputing twice, thrice, and more with all this shjtto!
Assuming money wasn't a problem (dreaming here), do you think it could be possible to found a full-stack production factory from scratch, to remake everything, from motherboards to video cards... all the specs... ISA, EISA, MicroChannel, PCI stuff, CPUs, RAM, HDD (tho I wouldn't mind to hybridize everything into SSDs), etcetera...?
It wouldn't require ultra modern expensive production tech such as 7 micron stuff and similar. I would hope with modern advancements in production, making those old cans would be a piece of cake... but I am neither an engineer nor an electronics guy... any opinions here too?
Thanks
They said therefore to him: Who are you?
Jesus said to them: The beginning, who also speak unto you
Computers should be fun inside not outside! 😉 (by Joakim)