I still lurk but rarely post these days.
I've still got my old rigs but they don't get taken out of the cupboard very often. Since having a son and buying an old fixer-upper house I don't get a whole lot of free time.

I'm sure I'll catch the bug again and pick the hobby up once I find the time for it.

appiah4 wrote:

Caluser2000 wrote:

Had a bit of a hiatus for 4-5 years due to health issues. Being back on vogons I seem to have come through some sort of time warp whereby computing history of the late '80s to early '90s had been turned on it's head with some sort of revisionist account. It'll take time but I think we can correct that.

I would love to hear what opinions you found to have changed for the more inaccurate..

I'm curious too.

I'm sure there's some rose tinting, but I remember my Win95 days being pretty solid. The first year was a little touch-n-go maybe, because IIRC, I was trying to run it on like 8MB of RAM. I visited a neighbor with 16MB and couldn't believe how quickly Explorer would open. (Just the file manager -- not IE.) But, once I had more memory, things ran pretty well AFAICR. I would leave my computer running 24/7, dialed up to the ISP and automatically reconnecting if it lost carrier, and I would reach in from school via a comprehensive mIRC script that could send files or run commands remotely.

I got a Win98 beta (no, not "first edition" heheh -- an actual beta) and it was a bit of a disaster, so I stayed away from 98 until well into 99, when I finally needed better USB support.

I used ME for a while until some time after XP was released. Contrary to most, I found the OS itself ran fine and relatively stable as well, but I did have issues with games around that period. Games would often lock up or crash.. not sure if that was driver-related, a symptom of the junk PSUs that would often ship free with cases I used, developers (game, OS, and driver) not quite having a handle on the still somewhat young Direct X thing, or just that I tended to put my hardware through some stuff back then. (I never had the case closed, tended to use a spare Molex plug to power electronics projects or the occasional car amp...)

The DOS days were a bit rough, but that was a different time. Some programs might not get around to exiting cleanly.. but you could just turn the PC off like it was a console. The driver situation was definitely dicey.. If you didn't have the disk that came with your hardware specifically, you're going to be in for a rough ride. But PCs were still kind of an experiment at that point.

So, with that bit of mental archaeology, and consideration of what I see going on around here these days... not much has changed, really. What's the delta?

When I was a kid I enjoyed retro computing a lot. I treasured every piece of hardware my dad used to bring home or the ones I somehow acquired. I still have a crappy generic hercules card that I got as a kid. I was so happy when I got it because these things were almost unreachable for a kid with no money.
As I grew older and got a job the whole thing started to become a transaction instead of a hobby that brought joy. Collecting is not much fun when you can actually afford anything you want to buy. It may sound stupid but it isn't: when you have to work for weeks to get an item you appreciate it more. When you just put everything in your virtual shopping cart and buy it the whole thing becomes dull and uninteresting. I want something, I buy it, I do something with it then onto the next purchase. In the end I enjoyed bidding and buying more than the actual item. When it finally arrived I quickly lost interest. Retro computing is more like a business now and 99% of the people selling these don't know anything about computers, they just sell them for profit. You can't even ask a simple question about the hardware you want to buy.
Another thing is the sheer number of junk they sell as OK and working and I hate getting scammed. It's also too much hassle to deal with dishonest sellers who want to get rid of their bad stuff so they sell them AS-IS even when they know full well that all of those are faulty.
So I got rid of my inventory and kept only a few memorable configs.
I'm into old cars now I can work on.

I can understand someone getting burned out, but did you sign up on a retro computing forum just to post about how you're disenfranchised with retro computing? 😉

money cannot buy happiness

Depends on what type of happiness you're looking for 😉

Maybe not buy but renting is a real possibility 😀

Last year I set up a cave in storage facility. This allowed me to actually have a couple beige boxes and CRTs setup and have the apartment clean of hobby stuff. I love it. I only go there once in 1-3 weeks depending on how busy I am with work and life and play with parts, play with softawre, and set up the space (shelving, rearranging retro paraphernalia etc). I rarely spend more than 3 hours there. But the excitement and pleasure I take out of this is so worth the money spent on the hardware and storage rental. Glad I got the stuff out of the apartment and cleaned my daily combo home+work pc of the gaming stuff. Hobby was never so awesome and rewarding for me as it is now. I don't do it often, but when I do it's alway a joy.

oeuvre wrote:

money cannot buy happiness

but money can buy you things that make you happy 😀

alexsydneynsw wrote:

Last year I set up a cave in storage facility. This allowed me to actually have a couple beige boxes and CRTs setup and have the apartment clean of hobby stuff. I love it. I only go there once in 1-3 weeks depending on how busy I am with work and life and play with parts, play with softawre, and set up the space (shelving, rearranging retro paraphernalia etc). I rarely spend more than 3 hours there. But the excitement and pleasure I take out of this is so worth the money spent on the hardware and storage rental. Glad I got the stuff out of the apartment and cleaned my daily combo home+work pc of the gaming stuff. Hobby was never so awesome and rewarding for me as it is now. I don't do it often, but when I do it's alway a joy.

That's interesting. I feel like I would have to be way more organized with my time to make something like this work. I've filled my little man-cave office to the brim, and I'm leaking at the seams into a few other places, but I value being able to pop down there for an hour after I get home before the Mrs. shows up. We eat together, and then sometimes go our separate ways to get some "me time" each. I'll often be in my cave til bedtime. Would be a lot more difficult if I had to leave house.

I love my cave, and there is probably no one place I would rather be at any given moment. It is a bit chaotic and always "working toward" being organized while never quite getting there. So, I can also see the benefit of having a minimal living space that does not accumulate clutter, and confining the explosion of interests and hobbies to a place that can be tucked out of sight and mind.

imi wrote:

oeuvre wrote:

money cannot buy happiness

but money can buy you things that make you happy 😀

Who knows. I'd think the concept itself of "to be happy" is a false modern creation and many people confuse "to be happy" with "having what they wanted and feeling they reached their goal having it until the next one".
It should be replaced the false concept of "to be happy" with a more correct "to be serene" that's it's a whole different thing and more like gravitate around a center of stability between good or bad aspects of life that's doesn't always depends on ourself.

Real happiness comes from within.

oeuvre wrote:

Real happiness comes from within.

As said above, maybe the word itself (and more along with the word "Real") doesn't relate to the human life. I think to remember a philosopher already said some thousand years ago that people should better stay distant from "happiness" just as much they usually does from "unhappiness".

386SX wrote:

Who knows. I'd think the concept itself of "to be happy" is a false modern creation and many people confuse "to be happy" with "having what they wanted and feeling they reached their goal having it until the next one".
It should be replaced the false concept of "to be happy" with a more correct "to be serene" that's it's a whole different thing and more like gravitate around a center of stability between good or bad aspects of life that's doesn't always depends on ourself.

that's a concept that in our society only people with enough money have time to think about :p

I can never truly be happy with the way the world is, quite the contrary I am suffering from depression because of it, I cannot change the world, I can only live in it, so I'd rather be happy with the things I have, and obviously things I can buy with money do have a lot of impact on that.

do I wish it were different? you bet.

Pure existence. Nature doesn't care if you are happy, sad, etc.

However, nature does care if you're running Windows 95.

Like most hobbies, it's really about maintaining that fine balance between collecting and hoarding, and being enthusiastic but not to the point where you start focusing on the minutae and getting disappointed by the minor details. That's when you feel that sense of malaise.

I'm not enough cultured to discuss more than just humble own experience opinions on such complex subject, I wish I've read more books in my past but about the modern expectations of the word "happy" to be something that "must exist" cause decades of movies and ads around it; realistically that kind of "happy" should be just a random unexpected moment lasting few seconds in the middle of many other longer moments without which, that single "happy" moment would not even be existed at first.
Some instead would claim that being "happy" must be a sort of continuous infinite series of that single moment where the "amount of happiness" simply increase and never decrease. That's impossible like try to bend the spoon in The Matrix.
Some modern expectations are so generally absurdly high that even those rich people probably are less "happy" than most and many are also healthy people. My health is not that good and usually when talk to friends can't believe some expectations of their ideal concept of "to be happy".

Though my activity here have reduced substantially, my interest in classic computing remains the same. My bedroom is still surrounded by shelves lining the classic game boxes.

After the advent of 86Box with more stable releases now, I have been "tinkering" with it instead. It's like playing around with classic components anytime, anywhere, with a reasonably powerful core i7 laptop.

i7 486 DX4 MMX HT

This stuff keeps your mind busy.