26 Oct
2004
26 Oct
'04
9:02 a.m.
On Tue, 26 Oct 2004, Computer Collector E-Mail Newsletter wrote:
I know this has been discussed before, but here's
my two cents... the 10-year
rule is (in my opinion) an obsolete metric. I really think we should be using
at least a 15-year or 20-year metric.
A 15-year-metric would put "vintage" at 1989
-- Windows, but not yet 3.0; and
certainly not the Web.
Windoze 3.0: May 22, 1990
WWW: 1989 Tim Berners-Lee
A 20-year-metric would put "vintage" at 1984
-- the Mac's debut, etc.
Then let's go with 21 years.
Otherwise, we'll soon be talking about Pentiums!
http://www.ox.compsoc.net/~swhite/history/pentium.html
"The first Pentium Processors (the 60 and 66 MHz versions) were released
by Intel on March 22, 1993. These chips contained the equivalent of 3.1
million transistors and achieved up to 100MIPS. Pictured here is the
slightly newer and slightly faster 75MHz version.
The Pentium Processor was Intel's successor to the i486 chips, and used
features such as pipelining and larger L1 caches to significantly increase
the performance of the chips when compared to the i486."
If we are going to re-adjust the number of years to include/exclude,
then let's just scrap the entire concept of a fixed number of years,
and declare that classic computers ran until August 10, 1981 (the
day before the IBM PC announcement).
--
Grumpy Ol' Fred cisin(a)xenosoft.com