First post, by Yasashii
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It's easy to point at a Commodore 64 or at the NES and call it retro. But what about the slightly newer stuff? There really isn't one official rule that everybody accepts for when something becomes retro, is there?
I think, first of all, that it depends on the object. For example, I drive a '99 Fiat Seicento. You might say: "Gah! that's very old!", and you might be right, but I wouldn't say that the car is retro. That's because there are still many of those on Polish roads, and if something is still commonly used by the mainstream public, it's not retro enough for me.
Now, if we were talking about a computer from 1999, I would definitely call it retro. Mind you, at that time some people were still rocking the good old MS DOS, counting bytes on their dial-up modems (or at least in Poland they were), and Windows 98 still felt fairly new.
And then it's not like it's just the age that makes things retro, in my view. Take my SoundBlaster X-fi 5.1 Surround USB as an example. It's not a very old piece of hardware. It's still supported by modern operating systems and new games work with it without issues. However, Creative doesn't sell those anymore (they do still sell the PRO version of it, though, I think). Everybody's warranty on that thing expired years ago and Creative doesn't provide tech support on it anymore. You even have to go to the "archived products" section on their website to download drivers for it. So, is it retro? Err... maybe not for me but I bet there are people somewhere out there who would call it that.
And then there is the matter of whether all old stuff is retro or are some things just old? Let's take the example of soundcards again. Soundblasters from the 90s, specifically the ISA ones are very popular among us retro PC enthusiasts. Those things are carefully unmounted from rusty computers and sold online. There are, though, plenty of soundcards which still rot in such rusty machines and will continue to rot until they are turned into scrap metal or are found by archaeologists in the year 3000. I'm talking about the cheap ones from the late 90s and early 2000s, the C-medias, the Pentagrams, etc. which people bought for a fiver because they didn't want to splash out on a SoundBlaster or they were fed up with crappy integrated sound chips. Even I had one of those. They are useless in almost every way except they were a cheap way to play music with decent quality on your PC. The point is, classic SoundBlasters are definitely retro, while I'd rather call the other ones I've mentioned simply old.
So, what is retro for you? How would you define it? What are the criteria?