Is XP classic/vintage yet?

[+OLD CS1]

In my day, we found some strange spiritual connection or bond with our computers.  Now they are treated as disposable; as cattle.  While the TI-99/4A and the Commodore 64 are both affixed into my history and my personal story, it is the Amiga with which I identify.

 

I read an article back in the 2000s about the advent of server "farms" and how network administrators were shifting attitudes.  At one time we named our machines and servers interesting things, like after the moons of Jupiter, or cities in which we once lived, or ladies we once loved, &c., a new paradigm was emerging.  On these farms we wrangle cattle, with names such as "DFW-WEB-01" or "FILESERVER02", and so on.  Managing these cattle was no longer intimate, and they could be replaced on a whim, and the coming days of virtualization would make them even more disposable.

 

Not entirely inaccurate, as I found it quite easy to dispatch FL-MBX-02 when it went awry and replace it with FL-MBX-04 within an hour, without blinking and eye, and culling the errant server from vSphere unceremoniously.  Almost gleefully, really.

[wierd_w]

Dont forget famous scientists and philosophers.

Saw more than one system named something like Copernicus or Plato.

 

I am young(ish, for this group at least), and have my affinity for early DOS PCs.  Anyone who says they were interchangeable beige boxes doesnt know what they are talking about. Plop them down in front of a Tandy 1000 or maybe something even more unusual, like an IBM PCjr. Let them tell me that is a bog standard beige box. Maybe get them an FM-TOWNS.

 

DOS PCs have warts-- But that is what kept my attention, and made me have to learn a thing or two. Modern PCs are indeed a mass produced commodity, that does not even need real hardware. (Virtual machines an run on anything with a CPU and RAM these days.)

 

This was not always the case.  I remember when it was not so.  Things were different then.

 

 

 

 

[zzip]

On 4/27/2022 at 6:11 PM, Keatah said:

And some webpages are becoming less harsh with less sharp angles and less high contrasts - not only in colors but in shapes. We're not there yet. But it's better than 5 years ago.

I think things are too low contrast these days.    Buttons, Tabs and other UI elements are very subtle and you can't always tell where one ends and another begins.   Overlapping Windows blend into each other, there's no hard border at the edges like there used to be.   This often leads to clicking on the wrong thing.

[zzip]

9 hours ago, wierd_w said:

Plop them down in front of a Tandy 1000 or maybe something even more unusual, like an IBM PCjr.

These machines really were different from the PC standard,  and at that time a lot of clones were not 100% PC  compatible.   I remember compatibility issue with Tandy 1000 as well.  

 

But at some point PCs really did become  interchangeable. 

[Slikatel]

Correct me if I am wrong, please, but this is my understanding.

 

So, Antiques are 100 years old or more. Anything less than 100 years but still "old" (but not less than 20 years) is vintage. Vintage just means the time it came from, think vintage wines. Retro is something less then 20 years old or even a new item modeled after something in the last 20 years, like an Atari flashback. Classic would mean the best of the best from the vintage time it's from, think '57 Chevy car.

So, XP, it's obviously vintage, but classic? I suppose so.

Edited April 29, 2022 by Slikatel

[Keatah]

There was a notable degree of interchangeability beginning with the first 8086/8088 machines. Sure there were some deviations and experiments on the way to setting the standards we have today. Some worked. The ones too far off base, didn't.

 

11 hours ago, wierd_w said:

I am young(ish, for this group at least), and have my affinity for early DOS PCs.  Anyone who says they were interchangeable beige boxes doesnt know what they are talking about. Plop them down in front of a Tandy 1000 or maybe something even more unusual, like an IBM PCjr. Let them tell me that is a bog standard beige box. Maybe get them an FM-TOWNS.

They're not standard BeigeBox machines. They might be referred to as PCs, look like PCs, though most everyone knew not to buy them.

 

PCjr doesn't have normal expansion slots, and its graphics mapping is different. Not compatible with the thousands of graphics cards already in the "upgrade cycle". Connections on the back were proprietary. And there were big differences in the floppy disk controller. So not PC-compatible.

 

FM-Towns was a custom proprietary Multi-Media machine that became more PC-like with successive models. Didn't make the transition to PC standards fast enough or completely enough and fell into the niche category. Like Amiga. So not PC-compatible.

 

Tandy 1000 was, believe it or not, built with the same ideas as the PCjr. It had enough non-standard connectors (and graphics and sound differences) to be a nuisance. Tandy had the idea it could do things cheaper. And it worked for a while. So partially PC-compatible.

 

Important telltales for being PC compatible would be lack of any customized ASICS, and no proprietary back connectors for sound/keyboard/video/mice. Compatibles will have a nice set of ISA slots (fewer in slimline cases however). And then there is the BIOS. No PC-DOS this or that in ROM.

[Keatah]

I count myself lucky for getting into PC's in the 486 era. And how I did (machine choice).

 

We had to "build-in" I/O by way of a Multi-IO card with Floppy/HDD/Serial/Parallel/Game ports¹. Of which there were hundreds, but all worked the same way and were mostly cross-compatible with all peripherals of the time.

 

How various subsystems were executed and manifested was already a standard. The requirements of no custom I/O ports on the motherboard, no built-in proprietary sound & graphics, a clone BIOS, normal power supply, normal & popular formfactor, 8-ISA slots, all of that, all of that was present in the Gateway 2000 I purchased. But I never actively looked for those things. I would come to appreciate those later.

 

Later when I'd waltz into a computer store (with the proverbial chip on my shoulder) and ask if this game or that game would would work. And the box would cite "IBM PC Compatibles". And that's far as I needed to look. Into the bag it went! No worries.

 

One time I had a printer plugged into my parallel port and wanted a Zip Drive too! No problem. I had like a billion ways to solve it. Either get a new Multi-IO board with 2 parallel ports, or another one, or just get a 2nd parallel port card. The last was most cost effective. It was a tiny card. It was a standard card that let me set the settings via an array of jumpers. It even squeezed in by the semi-proprietary memory expansion card, which was specialized in that it just gave more real estate for more SIMS.

 

1) There was a new trend of integrating I/O on motherboards. But usually standard stake connectors were used as well as the same I/O controller chips from the Multi-I/O cards. Same kinds of interfaces. A matter of integration. Ports worked exactly the same. Same UARTs. Same versatility and tedium. This type of "proprietaryness" isn't really proprietary at all. So yes, PC Compatible.

 

It would also apply to graphics. Many motherboards began putting the graphics card on-board. Thus instant built-in graphics! Yay! Free marketing bulletpoint! But it was the same VRAM and same (ATi or CirrusLogic or WDC) chips as on a separate card. So yes, PC Compatible.

Edited April 29, 2022 by Keatah

[+Gemintronic]

I think NT 3.5 is the last "vintage" M$ operating system.  NT 4 can still run actually useful applications.

 

Which reminds me I still have to wrap my head around getting NT 4 to work on the MiSTer.

[wierd_w]

2 hours ago, Gemintronic said:

I think NT 3.5 is the last "vintage" M$ operating system.  NT 4 can still run actually useful applications.

 

Which reminds me I still have to wrap my head around getting NT 4 to work on the MiSTer.

Should work fine on the 386 or 486 cores.

[+Gemintronic]

13 minutes ago, wierd_w said:

Should work fine on the 386 or 486 cores.

There's an easy setup guide that's still a bit to process (for me).

 

The 486 MiSTer has does not have an FPU and the IDE controller is.. barely there?  So 98 on up have a REALLY hard time running and/or installing.

[wierd_w]

Mister 486 core works with nt4 with recent patches.

 

https://misterfpga.org/viewtopic.php?t=4400

 

Fpu not needed.