New Vint Age (was Re: Latest addition: A bondi-blue iMac)

[Tomasz Rola]

On Fri, Jul 01, 2016 at 07:54:42PM +0200, Liam Proven wrote:
> On 1 July 2016 at 18:48, Ian Finder <ian.finder at gmail.com> wrote:
> >
> > Likewise there are Packard Bell X86 older than that iMac, that
> > would qualify by most age limits I'd expect to be imposed, but
> > that I'd cringe at seeing discussed here.
> 
> 
> This is one of the things I find a little odd about the Facebook
> Vintage Computers group. The kids get all excited about random beige
> boxes. Cheap nasty generic clones are prized if they have the
> original stickers, and they often want help doing very simple stuff
> like attaching CD-ROM drives.

Yeah. I was someone like this twenty years ago. Still too undeducated
to do what you hardcore guys do, i.e. building mind inverters (or do
you call them oscilloscopes when in public) with old radio lamps and
asking them those strange questions, like "what ya mean by 42".

:-)

Well, ok. At least *now* I can build a peecee when given some parts
and a screwdriver (and screws but if you only hand me nails I might
try too). And I am accumulating my Schwartz to actually buy some
prototyping board and u-controller and stuff like this (but mostly,
this has more to do with lack of time for such plays).

I wonder if some time from now a bunch of vintage fans will pat each
other in the backs upon entering a kilobyte of English (or any other
natural language of choice) via a physical keyboard.

[...]
> But a generic clone 486 or something? Yet people collect
> them. There's one guy who just collects bare CPUs. Dozens, hundreds
> of x86 processors.
> 
> Mystifying.

They might be future jewerly makers. I see how stupid it is, using a
chip with millions of transistors for its light reflecting value. But
the customers are not going to be certain kind of folk. More like lost
children in Mad Max 3.

> But then, I guess to them, what's the point in a 30y old Unix box
> that can't play any game more exciting than Nethack?

I have no idea. To actually use such HW nowadays, and it does not do
Angry Fish or faxbook, so one has to have some other use for
them. Perhaps having a thing that does not want to befriend me against
my will is the point? Very few will appreciate unkindness and go very
far to have more of it.

-- 
Regards,
Tomasz Rola

--
** A C programmer asked whether computer had Buddha's nature.      **
** As the answer, master did "rm -rif" on the programmer's home    **
** directory. And then the C programmer became enlightened...      **
**                                                                 **
** Tomasz Rola          mailto:tomasz_rola at bigfoot.com             **