> In fact, for reasons I’m yet to discern, my iBook’s internal AirPort Wi-Fi card can’t connect to modern Wi-Fi networks—they simply confound it.
WPA2 was standardized a year after his laptop was built. The ancient 802.11b card in it wants to do WEP. Getting driver support for a modern USB WiFi on that prehistoric version of OSX is no picnic either. It's a good thing he doesn't want to get it working.
> > In fact, for reasons I’m yet to discern, my iBook’s internal AirPort Wi-Fi card can’t connect to modern Wi-Fi networks—they simply confound it.
there's a huge number of 802.11b and 802.11g devices that simply won't operate at all on a 2.4 GHz radio of a 802.11n/11ac/11ax network that is set to "dual 40/20MHz" channel mode. And definitely not on a 40 MHz channel. Remember that in older wifi systems there was no such thing as a 40 MHz channel.
same thing for old 802.11a 5 GHz band devices, they don't understand anything other than a fixed 20 MHz channel.
And that's before you run into problems with modern usage of WPA2.
I went to a job interview a year and a half ago where part of the interview was to give a walkthrough of my solution to short "homework" problem.
Got there and tried to connect my laptop to their wifi network. No dice. My laptop (2014-15 era) doesn't do 5ghz and they had no 2.4ghz access points. Ended up having to use a cellular wifi hotspot they had lying around to get anything to work.
Couldn't you just use your phone as a mobile hotspot? I do that all the t I'll me instead of relying on whichever local it department coming up with solutions for me.
This sounds like 2012 to me... And even then, with a rooted phone, you could tether as you pleased. I recall using barnacle wifi tether back when my phone didn't offer it natively.
Another way of using it on Android, is to use USB tethering, while your mobile phone is connected to a Wi-Fi access point. That has worked pretty well for me, I sometimes even use that together with a computer to create a wired network from an access point. It could have worked in GP's case.
Yes, obviously I'm talking about carrier-locked phones (typically sold with contracts). A lot of (most?) never even unlock their phone, let alone jailbreak.
The carrier can inspect TTL (or hop limit in IPv6) values which decrease with every hop, so TTL at the point your packet reaches the carrier is typically lower when you are tethering.
Of course it is easy to circumvent by changing TTL on the terhered device from 64 to 65 or something like that, but I guess the solution is esoteric enough that carriers still make money doing crap like this.
> Couldn't you just use your phone as a mobile hotspot?
At the time I had a 2010-era dumb phone which I only got rid of because Verizon said they were turning off the towers for it at the beginning of this year.
I did this until I switched phones. On my old phone the hotspot worked fine. My new phone- exact same plan, nothing changed there- prompts me to buy the hotspot plan addition. No thanks...
I don't know about most, but it seems like many "not very high end" laptops from around 2015 didn't have 5 GHz.
My late 2013 mbp has it and I discovered the other day that it can actually negotiate up to around 1 Gb/s.
On the other hand, I have an HP ProBook 430 G2 lying around the office. I don't know when it was bought, but it has an i5-4210U which according to intel was launched in Q2 2014. So the laptop must be from late 2014. It has a Realtek RTL8723BE PCIe wifi card which doesn't know about 5 GHz. It works acceptably well otherwise.
I bought a new laptop a few months ago that does not do 5GHz. It's a Dell Inspiron 3195, with a Qualcomm Atheros 9565 wireless card. The laptop is still available for purchase. When I purchased it it was on sale for $200. (not sure if the link is my exact model, but all the specs are the same, and this particular model does say 2.4GHz with no mention of 5GHz)
What's wrong with that? I happen to prefer a "lower" resolution on a laptop (and by "lower" I mean the same pixel density as my IPS monitor, which is 1920x1200). Unless I use an operating system that has completely solved the problem of GUI scaling, I don't see the benefit of higher pixel densities, only constant issues with incompatible applications.
It's perfectly usable. (I also have an XPS13 with a 3200x1800 screen) Setting up the infinality font renderer basically negates the downsides of a low resolution screen.
TBH, in the future I'll preferentially opt for ~96 DPI when available. The 3200x1800 on my other system is completely overkill, and doesn't play particularly nice with a lot of websites or Steam.
It's a perfectly adequate screen size for most things.
The only place I run into trouble is if I try to do anything work-related on this laptop because our web design team designed our web app on large, high-density displays.
Every website I actually use at home works perfectly fine.
I don't know whether that is an old card or not. I think the laptop was in the $300-$400 range when we got it. Inspiron 15-3551, came with Ubuntu pre-installed, which has since been swapped out for Debian.
This Dell support link [1] seems to confirm that it is 2.4Ghz only.
Not a laptop, but the Nintendo 3DS was notably first released in 2011 and does 2.4 GHz only. The iPhone 4S was also released in 2011 as a 2.4 GHz-only device, and not discontinued worldwide until 2016.
And you can also buy little ethernet to (client, not access point) wi-fi bridges. They're meant for connecting devices that don't have wi-fi, like printers or game consoles.
From some quick research, one model is the IOGEAR GWU637. I've never used it, so that's not a recommendation or anything, just an example.
Just tape it to the case with a short USB cable. You can even set up a firewall on the thing so your ancient unpatched Mac isn't pulling its pants down and bending over for the modern Internet scan bots. You could even set up a transparent web proxy on the Pi so the ancient root certs on that version of OSX don't break everything.
Then all you have to worry about is the way out of date web browser not being able to handle all of the new web frameworks. Pretty soon you're asking yourself why you didn't go and find a just-as-cheap and much less outdated laptop instead.
I can recommend the GWU637, with caveats. I spent 3 months in a hotel wrapping up a contract and starting a new job where the hotel wi-fi hated my Mac. Phone - fine. Tablet - fine. Mac? Might as well not have existed. It runs pretty hot and there's no 802.11ac support but often when you need this, that isn't an option anyway. There's an undocumented /menu.asp page that you're almost certainly going to need for anything other than a 192.168.1 network.
I also fired up a 2006-era original MacBook fairly recently, running the first Intel version of macOS (I've always had a soft spot for Tiger, its version of Aqua is honestly one of Apple's prettiest interfaces in my mind), while it works with modern-ish WiFi all the certificates are long expired so few things actually connected. I'm not sure how bodge-able this problem is, I never had time to find a solution.
It's a shame, because I'd love to use Tiger as a distraction-free environment. I'd even try and build a controller app for Tidal or Spotify so I could still have modern music streaming facilities. I spend a lot of time SSH'd into servers anyway so the lack of modern compatibility doesn't matter as long as a terminal's available.
I miss Tiger as well. It was very pleasing to look at. It's one reason I dug OS X. If I have to stare at something all day, I want it to look nice. Full screen terminals running tmux do not do it for me. Now everything is literally flat and boring. boo.
There are actually 10.4 drivers for some 802.11n-era Ralink USB chipsets. It’s not ideal since they fully bypass the OSes WiFi stack, but better than nothing
Why not use old(er) Systems when they fulfill your needs? A computer is a tool, such as a typewriter, printing press, paintbrush or hammer. Would anyone argue about the age of a typewriter or hammer if its in good working condition?
In fact, i am using an Atari 520ST as my main computer since my laptop died a while ago. It started as an experiment, but now "it just works". I got network connectivity, email and (limited) internet access through a "Netusbee" adapter, and easy modern media access through a gotek floppy emulator.
A computer is more than a tool, it's multiple tools. No one argue about using an older typewriter, if it still does the job, but if you were to require 1000 copies, well that typewriter will seems a bit outdated and you may need a tool provided by a newer typewriter (like a digital one connected to an external printer).
Buying that adapter and floppy emulator cost more than a whole used computer. I guarantee you, if you just do what that Atari 520ST can do, it will "just works" too ;).
I can't guarantee anything about any others tools that a computer provide, like Teams, but lets be honest, if someone that do everything he needs on an Atari 520ST were to use theses tools, it seems like it wouldn't be by choice.
By the way, using older tools is certainly not a controversial opinion on here, you will find plenty that still works using terminals, vi, etc...
I'm a hobby writer, and as a professional developer also I have a large retro- collection, and one of the things I love most about having a selection of machines to choose from, is that I can write my stories and ideas in peace - no Internet, no distractions.
The Olivetti M10 is a dream for when the ideas need to flow. I can't get anywhere near as much text written on my modern MBP, as I can in an hour on an Oric Atmos. These machines are great for my productivity.
Of course, I still take my MBP with me everywhere I go. ;) But when I'm in my home office, and need to write .. the older machines are great.
Sounds like me. :) My non-replaceable battery is starting to go; otherwise my Windows 10 Mobile Phone is still giving me just enough (maps, weather, music player, MMS, email, web, camera) to get by.
I am a huge retro fan. I go by the motto "Old computers never die, their users do."
Every computer that was ever made, is still just as useful as it was the day it was put into operation, for some reason. Okay, its not absolute: but as a first principle, computers are as useful as the user decides they are. Its just a decision.
I love my old machines. Its so fun, as a hacker and grey-beard developer who has seem some shit, to go back to the great ol' days of .. say .. CP/M .. and sit down and noodle on some code or other.
Or, hack around with tools like "8-bit Unity", which is an attempt to build a high-performance engine for as many 8-bit machines (6502-based) as possible, with modern toolsets. Actually, this is bonkers enough I just have to make sure you know about it, in case you don't already:
You'll run into a lot of non-EE advice from people who haven't run the numbers or accounted for all the costs of electrical power vs modern hardware equivalent costs and given GIGO analysis, their estimate of the financial breakeven point is mere months. When in reality its sometimes never or thirty years or similar when using actual numbers.
Through the 80's and 90's, Yngwie Malmsteen's keyboard player Jens Johansson was programming on an Atari ST. Even though there was so many more modern systems, he liked the ST because everything he needed to do was stable and didn't fail on him. Why throw away a good thing?
I work (apart from my sysop dayjob) as a it-trainer, so i need to design handouts for my students for which i use "Singum!", an old, but really nice DTP software. Normally i print the handout on my Epson LQ-500 dot-matrix printer (which produces really nice prints for an dot matrix printer) and photocopy them in the institute i teach in. I need to maintain attendance-stats, lists of exam-results and other spreadsheets, for which i use "VIP-Professional", it is Lotus 1-2-3 compatible and i have a small tool that converts its spreadsheets into *.csv if i need to send the files to someone with a more modern system. For the normal letter writing etc. i use "Papyrus".
I was thinking to put this whole "using an ancient computer in modern times" thing into an article for a while now, it seems i will have to stop procrastinating on this matter and start writing in the next few days ;-)
I am willing to bet that quite a few more households have at least one hammer than households that have a typewriter. I'm also willing to bet that there are far more houses that have multiple hammers than those who have multiple typewriters. Some tools are so ubiquitous a lot of people have enough of them for a construction team. Flat screw drivers? Scissors?
They are tools, for sure. But some tools aren't so obsolete that today's youth would struggle at first to use them.
One of the things I miss about older laptops is the keyboards. I would love to buy a laptop that is built like a PowerBook G4 or a ThinkPad X61 but with modern displays and modern internals, and with extra bonus points if it has user-replaceable batteries and user-serviceable storage and RAM. I've found the Thinkpad X62 (https://geoff.greer.fm/2017/07/16/thinkpad-x62/) and X210 (https://geoff.greer.fm/2019/03/04/thinkpad-x210/) projects rather intriguing. Unfortunately I missed out on the 2017 ThinkPad T25, which I would have purchased had I not been strapped for cash at the time.
One idea that I have is for a laptop manufacturer to develop a chassis that comes with a high-resolution display and a high-quality keyboard (like those of older ThinkPads), and where the user can supply an Intel Compute Stick or a similar device for computing power. This way the chassis can be used for a long time while the user upgrades compute sticks.
It's not as powerful as most modern laptops (uses an iMX8 SOM, rather than an x86 CPU), but it's got a full keyboard, trackball (!), replaceable batteries, etc.
> One idea that I have is for a laptop manufacturer to develop a chassis that comes with a high-resolution display and a high-quality keyboard (like those of older ThinkPads), and where the user can supply an Intel Compute Stick or a similar device for computing power. This way the chassis can be used for a long time while the user upgrades compute sticks.
I have been thinking about this and I can see this as being one potential path for the future of personal computing, with phones (unfortunately) being the Compute Stick equivalents. If phone manufacturers made them more upgradable, I may even welcome this; however I don't see them jumping at that anytime soon.
The X61t came out of the box with a modern display, a 1400x1050 AFFS-IPS panel that is still respectable. Unfortunately these machines still sell for much more than $50.
Not entirely high res and high quality keyboards, but the NexDock offers that ability as a shell wheee you plugin a compute stick, phone, SBC, rack server, etc.
> Predictably, I’ve found that having a dedicated, internet-free laptop has helped me become more productive.
> Old Mac Games Still Run, Too
Spot the error.
I still have a small-ish Centrino laptop from 2004 that's running Windows XP. It's been airgapped for roughly 10 years (wifi broke and at some point there were no updates for XP) but it's getting occasional use as a portable DVD player. I don't get why you'd willingly buy an old machine to be constrained but I hate throwing out old stuff that still works. And this does.
Innovation through limitation. It can work wonders as the author is suggesting.
Working with old technology also gives you valuable insight into the worlds current latency-poor bloated software. You might be able to run the latest but with latency that is hidden on modern machines now painfully visible, you might think otherwise. This leads to choosing software that is fast, minimal, and effective.
Old games, old productivity software. If they were good when they were new, I've never understood how they become "bad" just because time passes.
It's a weird marketing and social undermining of comfort and control. Sure there is the 'security' argument, and an accretion of various quirks, but people were often happy dealing with these quirks in the day, and as OP says, making interoperability frictionful has an definite upside with all the media and IT giants trying to mine your attention span for money.
I'm not going to argue about old productivity software, but some games do indeed "age badly".
Obviously the game stays the same, but game designed has advanced and, if you are used to play modern games, some problems that are mostly fixed on all games from the last decade become annoyingly obvious.
For me, the main one is controls:
* Once you are used to WASD+mouse for FPS, going back to ctrl+arrow-keys (with some awkward keys to strafe and look up/down) is awful. If you are able to patch the controls to WASD+mouse, some games then become much easier than intended (since they were not designed with circle strafing in mind).
* Controlling the camera in old 3D platforming games is also a pain. It's amazing how long it took to move the camera controls from the bumpers to right the analog stick. The limited ability to control the camera is also partially responsible for it to get stuck in corners a lot.
There are also some level design choices that are arguably bad, but were required at the time, such as loading tunnels or abusing backtracking/repeated assets (e.g. fight all bosses again) to make the game longer.
> I've never understood how they become "bad" just because time passes
Because your needs grow, and you want to able to do more stuff with it.
A great workstation from 00s won't render your 4k video project or compile Chromium from source in reasonable time, or let you mix an entire virtual orchestra with several dozens of Kompakt sample libraries at all. All of those things are just something you couldn't do on the computer in those days with such fidelity and quality, and now you can, and this is awesome.
Slight straw man there. :-) I referred explicitly to games and productivity software.
The problems you cite here, namely 4k video and Chromium are both arguments in favor of retro computing in my opinion -- Both are solutions looking for a problem that succeed only in perpetuating the churn in hardware, no intrinsic value added, like the 100th re-imagining FPS machine gun splatter fest game. Yawn! :-)
To me it seems the big thing 4k improves on is video immersiveness. After all, reality is 210 degrees field of view, not a comparatively tiny rectangle metres away, and it's crisp and sharp, not somewhat blurry-ish like Full HD at somewhat closer range. I like being able to have a considerably bigger rectangle in my face while still getting acceptable quality; 4k at 60fps is a joy, feels real in a way movies usually don't. Besides, on mobile devices and tablets especially, it's really neat to be able to pinch-zoom into a video and still get some quality. That's not possible with Full HD.
As for Chromium (and by extension all major modern browsers), it's played a pretty important part in making the web a platform to reach pretty much everyone with comparably little effort. A lot of the productivity applications I use day-to-day are web apps, and I guess most wouldn't exist in their anything like their current form if there had to be native Windows, Mac, iOS, and Android apps that people would have to download and install and update and secure (and certainly no Linux app – way too few users to even think about).
To my mind that adds a lot of intrinsic value, at the price of much higher resource consumption, true, but I'd rather have that than the snail pace of innovation and still usually questionable quality we had in the "old days"...
> Old games, old productivity software. If they were good when they were new, I've never understood how they become "bad" just because time passes.
So much this. It upsets me when new reviewers take a look at old games and claim things like they are "dated" (usually they mean pixel graphics, which is a whole category of misunderstanding art) or that they were "good for their time".
No. If they were good when they came out, chances are they are still good. One of my favorite games is Microprose's Sword of the Samurai -- to this day I haven't played a better, more artistically sensible, and more comprehensive simulation of feudal Japan. Even the Total War series is not as good.
Conversely, some old games were bad, and we simply didn't know better. But masterpieces remain masterpieces.
Not to mention that a lot of that "old" productivity software is so much faster than its "modern" replacement that running it in a Electron-based VM is still faster.
Normally things do get better and even if its small, it accumulates.
Display resolution
Display colors, refreshrate
Battery lifetime
Weight (x220 is much heavier then my x390)
Thickness
Techstandards like newer/better/faster wifi
USB-C (I love! charging my laptop with the same cable as my switch and my smartphone. Makes travel easier etc.)
If you are happy with it, feel free to keep using it, but i don't get why it is a possitive thing to not update/upgrade anything at all.
90% of the additions are bloat, but modern versions of Word are far more stable than the ones we used in the past, it has a built in thesaurus and you can mouse over the different designs, fonts, etc and see them update the document in real time, which makes it far more straightforward to find something suitable.
Its grammar and spellchecker are also much better.
George R.R. Martin uses Wordstar 4.0 on DOS to write the Game of Thrones novels, he saves his work on floppy disks. Of course, he has a second computer for email and web browsing.
For a TUI program Wordstar seemed much more accessible than WordPerfect. But I guess WP was more aimed at professional secretaries and typists, and people with offbrand printers.
When I was first messing around with Linux, I was (pleasantly) surprised when a WordStar clone popped-up instead of vi. Googling says it was called joe editor.
JOE is one of the most versatile TUI editors out there. It can emulate not only Wordstar, but Pico/nano, and Emacs. It has full UTF-8 support and can display pretty much any character in any written language.
These days I just use nano for simple, quick command line editing, but my writing machine (2000 era Dell Latitude CPx with Slackware) has JOE for long-form writing in Wordstar mode. Like the article author there's no need for internet or other distractions, just boot to terminal, log in, open JOE, and start writing on the fantastic keyboard.
5 1⁄4" floppies in the year 2020? I'd be sweating. I assume he's saving multiple copies.
Still have painful memories of using Fastback, a DOS based backup software. Sitting there feeding floppies into a drive. Stacks of floppies. Twice. Praying the data would restore.
Part of my innovative file sharing solution, aka SneakerNet.
~90% of my 5.25" floppies written between 1992 and 1995 are readable (verified 2 years ago.) As for my CD-R collection from 1999-2005 ~50% got problems reading everything from it.
There was a bit of a fuss over it a few years back. You can find mention of it in the Wikipedia article on Wordstar.[0] Robert J. Sawyer maintains a page on using Wordstar on modern computers.[1]
Authors have been seeking ways to avoid distractions for decades, and it goes well beyond pervasive connectivity. Sometimes the very features that aid them in their work can also hinder them. For example: computers vastly simplify the editing process, yet one of the earliest pieces of advice I saw was to turn off the computer monitor while writing in order to avoid editing prematurely.
I believe the [citation needed] was intended to humorously question specifically whether Martin is in fact still making progress on those books, not to question that he uses an archaic setup.
Ah. That joke completely went over my head since my knowledge of Martin pretty much amounts to him being the author of Game of Thrones and his use of Wordstar.
> one of the earliest pieces of advice I saw was to turn off the computer monitor while writing in order to avoid editing prematurely
I do this by closing my eyes while writing. Makes the writing more descriptive and easier to imagine big scenes with a lot of color and vibrance. Using the 10 finger writing system, I am really fast doing this.
Oh my goodness- yes. I have to shut my eyes and just write. I come back and edit later. It works, and also keeps me 100% distraction free if that's what's needed.
> George R.R. Martin uses Wordstar 4.0 on DOS to write the Game of Thrones novels
A much better modern alternative is the Alphasmart Neo 2.
* It was designed for elementary school children so it's decently rugged.
* It runs a long time (months) on 2 AA batteries.
* To get the text off the device, it impersonates a USB keyboard, making it compatible with basically every computer.
He likes WordStar 4.0. There are people who like WordPerfect for DOS, Word 5.1 for Mac or even XyWrite.
It's fairly easy (not always cheap) to get almost any old computer you could think of in very good condition to run the programs you like without further hassles. This can make a lot of sense because sometimes there are hassles associated to virtualisation/emulation/modern hardware.
Maybe you feel at home using WordStar 4.0 + VGA text mode in a CRT monitor. If that's the case, you can't beat the ease and responsiveness of a DOS computer. I have this conviction that there's nothing wrong with that.
I put together a 'RRMartin' setup on an old laptop - booting into DOS and then auto launching WordStar 4.0. I can see how appealing it would be for focused writing (I'm still trying to find my perfect set up for writing).
I also toyed with releasing the setup as a USB boot image, but the copyright on WordStar is still very much active :(
Maybe "much better" when it comes to distraction-less writing, although I don't think a DOS computer offers more than that, and the portability only enables going to places where there's more going on…
But a predilection towards WordStar isn't just about not having fancy icons and weird ribbons, as author Robert Sawyer[1] pointed out. The "long page" metaphor and a short-cut friendly environment should be somewhat understandable for us programmer people.
You're getting downvoted, but you raise a good point. There's an interesting Medium article[1] on it. Basically just a keyboard with an 4 line LCD above it so you can see some context as you type.
>> George R.R. Martin uses Wordstar 4.0 on DOS to write the Game of Thrones novels
> A much better modern alternative is the Alphasmart Neo 2.
* It was designed for elementary school children so it's decently rugged. * It runs a long time (months) on 2 AA batteries. * To get the text off the device, it impersonates a USB keyboard, making it compatible with basically every computer.
- unquote -
Uh, if all you need is to write documents on an air-gapped machine, it seems like practically anything would do the job. Any Mac of any age whatsoever, a typewriter ...
But the barriers to file transfer get larger the farther back you go.
I have two old Macs that I use for writing: a 1985 Mac SE 2/40, and a PowerBook G4 1.67ghz.
The SE is indeed pretty thoroughly cut off from the world, but this also means that if you want to get your data off the drive, you have very limited options to do so. In my case it means using an SD card-based floppy emulator, writing to virtual floppy, loading the SD onto my modern Mac with a dongle because MBP2019, renaming the virtual floppy file so that Disk Utility will still recognize it, and then finally hoping I remembered to save the file as plain text because nothing is gonna read that shit other wise.
I have experimented with a Wifi232 dongle as well, but found that getting a vintage version of Z/XMODEM to talk to a modern one is all but impossible in 2020 and I failed at almost everything I tried.
So: enter the PowerBook. At 1.67ghz it's actually beefy enough that with TenFourFox you could technically get to some websites, but other than a handful of Mac abandonware sites and the old version of Reddit, almost nothing else will work thanks to JavaScript requirements. So distractions remain minimal and the alt-tab addiction is kept at bay.
BUT, it is still internet-capable enough to be able to connect to modern WPA2 wifi (mostly, I had some compatibility issues with my old ISP router that required working around with an old Airport Express), and that means I still have ways to more directly share the fruits of my labors. Email works just as well as any modern machine of course, USB is there (albeit slow 1.0 speeds), and some of the older sites I post my work on even still work in TenFourFox. More recently, thanks to Tigerbrew, I've got working git, so I can even backup my stuff to Github.
The PowerPC line makes a very nice "bridge" generation. Just modern enough to still by able to connect to the outside world, but old enough to be relatively free of distraction, or at least to keep the Twitter habit out of the way while I work.
My uncle was using a 25+ year old PC running DOS and WordPerfect up until he passed away last year. I think he enjoyed the distraction free environment.
Is there a word for such long-lived computers that aren't hobbies? "Retrocomputing" is people goofing around. A person who drives a 1995 Honda is probably not a "retromobility enthusiast". Maybe at some point in our future it won't seem weird to use a 25-year-old computer.
I still use an old Acer laptop from 2008 as my private laptop. It's more than enough for my needs, but apart from it being good enough for my needs, there's not really any particular reason for using that specific machine (apart from the keyboard being amazing). It simply works fine, and I see no reason to replace it.
I don't know why there would be any specific word for it. I just use it.
Nothing will ever beat the T430. Oh the keyboard, the trackpoint, the disabled trackpad...
Have one at work and doing everything I can to avoid the upgrade-bulldozer-team finding me.
Bought many refurbished in perfect state. I plan to hoard them till I die, one every ten year (worst case). Need to up my battery cell expertise level for that...
Heirlooms maybe.
Oh the glee of taking it /by the screen/, to not worry the thing's gonna break...
Do we need a word for it? I've got a 1996 Toyota van and a 2ish year old Dell XPS, both serve my needs well enough. Some new tools are appreciably better than older ones, others aren't; I generally prefer to not spend extra money/time for things in the second category.
The 25-year-old car still takes a driver's time and some fuel, and moves stuff around just like a brand new one would. There's no hope of using a 1995 computer for compiling a big C++ project from a fancy IDE, while video chatting over WiFi. Remember that a computer from 1995 would've seemed a bit old in 1997 too.
Not great for compiling a big c++ project, but then again that's pretty much the top end of "normal" demands (I haven't had to use c++ in over a decade for example & worked as a developer the entire time).
A top of the line 2008 desktop (especially if it had been occasionally upgraded but even if it hadn't) will still be faster than a low end laptop as described above (the kind you can buy for €200-300 at Lidl) & perfectly good for front end web dev (what I happen to be doing for a living currently).
It would upgradable be something like 3ghz core 2 quad, 8gb ram and reasonably fast (non-m2) SSD. I've certainly done web dev on less than that.
While 25-year-old car lacks many of new tech gadgets it still is likely to have most important conveniences (A/C etc). The most important difference is safety (while not death cages like cars from 50 years ago, 25-year-old cars are still light years behind current cars) and emissions. The latter means that soon those cars might be banned from cities (at least in Europe), which renders "moves stuff around just like a brand new one" invalid.
I would rather be identified by what I use the tool to accomplish, not by the particular (age) tool.
The risk/reward of car travel in 1996 was OK with me at the time... It's great that cities are considering banning vehicles over emissions - I bike, walk, bus, or take the electric car (recently bought a Leaf) when just moving myself. The van is for moving big stuff and/or longer rural trips; it's an example of a tool that still serves my purposes and is not something that I want to be identified by.
I think we could be there already if not for a few niggling details. The first iPad mini has just been vintaged by Apple, and my laptop won't be supported by Big Sur.
There's nothing technically wrong with the laptop either, it's got max RAM, as much as the CPU and logic board will support, the drive, battery and wireless card are all replaceable, you can take out the optical drive and replace it with either one that supports Blu-ray or replace add another SSD, no USB3 ports but it does have Thunderbolt, Gigabit Ethernet, IR for an Apple Remote and an SDXC slot. Apple's just up and decided they're done supporting this laptop from 2012. A few forum posts I saw indicate if you were to force Big Sur on, everything but the wireless card would work. The only major silicon difference between this computer and models that are still supported is the integrated graphics, but without working wireless it's a bit of a non-starter.
I could buy a couple of replacement parts and easily keep this thing going for another 5 years or longer, which I still can if I'm willing to give up on Mac OS X entirely. What I'm probably going to do is keep it going another year or two and replace it once the dust has settled a bit on ARM Macs and Apple has proved they're not going to take their Mac line down a ridiculous direction in the next few years, then maybe replace the operating system and find another use for the machine.
Unless you're pushing the bleeding edge of performance, machines like this are still plenty good, especially if your RAM floor is 16GB. It's not the fastest, another machine I use for work screams by comparison, but there's not really any good reason a 2012 machine couldn't still be ticking along in 2037 if you've parts to service it with. Serviceability is really the only limiting factor at this point. That said most Macs that came after mine lost a lot in serviceability, so that's the caveat.
The problem isn't so much maintenance or performance as interoperability. I used to enjoy old Macs (pre-OS X era models), but gave up on them when sharing data became a chore.
I would actually recommend trying MacPorts first, because it can uninstall cleanly, whereas TigerBrew is a fork from before Homebrew got around to thinking that might be a thing people would want. Which means you won't be able to try MacPorts if TB doesn't have what you want, which is likely IME, as a lot of the builds are broken these days and it's barely supported anymore.
I continue to compile my Audio Unit plugins, to this day, on a 10.6.8 Snow Leopard machine specifically so I can release them as PPC/32/64 bit fat binaries. Far as I know that should continue to hold for everything I've done (not sure if it holds for the Mac VST plugins, though)
So that constitutes new audio DSP plugins for PowerPC Macs.
Though I don't use it day-to-day, I've got an old G3 (?) Mac laptop. It does indeed have a better keyboard than modern ones… and from an audio production standpoint, it may not be up to high sample rates but it's got digital optical in AND out, standard. Just plug an optical cable into the headphone or mic jacks.
because I didn't have a lot of money I was working on a 486 when pentiums were the normal. I used a pentium when most where on pentium 3.
thank god for linux to make my computers workable. Mail: mutt, Editor: vim, actually most like newsgroups, irc, .. all had cli clients. Only netscape was run in a very lightweight window manager like blackbox.
good thing about that in my teens is that I learned a shit load about computers and now 25 years later having a nice carreer thanks to tinkering with that.
Same here. I was using a Pentium 3 Coppermine with a Voodoo 3 PCI GPU running Slackware while all my friends had fancy Athlon XPs and Geforces. The motherboard went bad (back then the capacitor plague was a thing) and after a few months without a computer I said fuck it and just soldered a new capacitor where the old one was bloated. I'm so bad at soldering and it was such an ugly job.
But then it booted! I was so proud of myself. I was a poor kid and computers were expensive and I just had brought my machine back to life.
Of course it's not the same accomplishment as yours, but when I was 15 I found a computer in the trash with all the parts still in it. I took off the RAM sticks and put them in my sister's computer. It got much faster, she was very pleased and I was very proud.
My personal anecdote about this is the time I was a student and a room mate and I were doing the same assignment that involved creating a program for some statistical simulation. I had a 486, he had just gotten a brand new blazing fast pentium of the first generation. Compiling and running the simulation took eight minutes on my computer, three seconds on his.
And in the end we started and finished around the same time. Because while he was iterating quickly, continuously changing something and running it again, I just sat in front my monitor contemplating the problem and my solution. When I finally got the chance to update my program, I was able to make a big, significant change.
Lesson learned: it is not the computer time that is important, but the thinking time. And thinking time is spent best in big blocks, not in tiny slivers.
Fun fact: The latest Linux kernel will still run fine on a 486, and give you a somewhat useable experience. You just need to make sure to pick a distro that hasn't built its packages targetting newer instructions than what a 486 offers.
The AppleWorks UI was kind of an incoherent mess, stuck halfway between the Platinum and Aqua UIs. You can actually see elements of this in the screenshot -- the ruler in the word processor window is a relic of Platinum, with gray controls and bitmapped text, whereas the window frame and menu bars are more of an Aqua thing. (Except for the AppleScript menu, which is a Platinum-era icon again.) Then there's the "Button Bar", which was an entirely idiosyncratic element added to the OS X version of AppleWorks...
Much of this is due to the history of AppleWorks -- it was a Carbon conversion of ClarisWorks, which dated back to 1991. Parts of the UI -- like that ruler -- are essentially unchanged from version 1.0.
For the most part, that looks like it's after the pinstripes were toned down, but before the brushed metal fad took hold. So there's plenty of use of color and enough depth to make it easy to distinguish between UI elements. But as noted by others, there are some legacy holdovers on display, too.
It's probably one of the most "timeless" looks ever used by OS X.
I find flat more aesthetically pleasing but often harder to use, and I've seen data to back that up.
Problem is that people tend to confuse the two and fool themselves into thinking pretty equals usable. Glossy vs matte screens are the classic example. Glossy looks pretty but has way more issues with glare.
It's nice to see old laptops get a new lease on life this way, but it's hard to deny the compromises that come with such an approach. As nice as the old 12-inch Powerbooks/iBooks, T60s, etc were, they leave a lot to be desired by modern standards.
This brings me to wonder how difficult it would be to develop a notebook that is specifically designed to be a focused offline ultraportable, using the most power efficient and cost effective components available along with an extremely lightweight, nearly nonexistent OS (think classic Mac OS) with some modern affordances and high-end touches (USB-C charging, milled single piece enclosure, etc). The imagined result is a machine that costs less than a decent Chromebook while being more responsive, having dramatically better battery life, and being generally more pleasant to use.
How would such a computer meaningfully differ from either a Pixelbook Go or an iPad with a keyboard? They both have stupefying battery life and there's not many ways to extend it because at this point virtually all of the power goes into the screen.
One of the benefits touted by the linked article is the forced offline aspect. The other is the much more restricted scope of apps, which keeps the user focused.
These are technically achievable with an iPad or Pixelbook, but require effort and discipline on the part of the user and on some level directly contradict the design and intended use of both products.
I think there are still significant savings to be had in terms of power usage/battery life. Lower power hardware puts a hard cap on how much any one application can consume and incentivizes efficiency on the part of the developer. The device's screen panel can also be selected for efficiency over density, brightness, color gamut, etc since those aren't priorities.
Arguably, these goals in terms of battery life / efficiency are already heavily incentivized for mobile developers - and by extension the iPad despite having "high end" processors.
For mobile devices, generally, the strategy is hurry back to sleep, IE ramp up the CPU to do a job quickly then put the processor back in the lowest power state, and for many applications this works great.
For the remaining applications, say mobile games, we might be limited more by the users desires (the best graphics, the lowest latency, the best colors, the most immersive sound) rather than this sort of hardware not being available.
All this to say, I agree with you that such a device could still exist, I'm just saying we might be that far from it.
It depends on what kind of sacrifices your willing to make, but if you really focus on low power you can build a laptop with multi day battery life. The upside of this is you end up with fewer charge cycles which increases battery lifespan in year 3+.
I'm using a T60 somewhat regularly and you'd be surprised how useful it still is.
Of course, a shitty "modern" website will perform exactly as you'd expect, but I try to avoid those even on my workstation so no big loss there.
Aside from that, it's perfectly usable for things like writing code, reading/writing emails, chatting on IRC, browsing lightweight websites like HN, reading documentation... you know, 99% of the stuff I use a computer for.
I have more powerful laptops as well, but I often reach for the T60 anyway, because it makes little difference for these kinds of tasks, and I love the 1600x1200 screen.
I seem to recall Ubuntu Mate being the OS of choice for PowerPC users back in the day, but I lost track of what they all switched to when Ubuntu dropped 32-bit architecture.
Las week I brougth an old G4 the poped up in the marked. A rare thing to occour here, since they where super expensive when new.
I paid something like 20 bucks for it.
It came with a busted ide hard drive, but no worries. I went online and brought an ide to sd card adapter, and will now install Tiger in it.
I don't spect to take any serious workload, but It will problably be fine to run Starcraft and Diablo II in it. Will see.
You're unlikely to get support for modern high speed SD cards in these sort of adapters. CF has a better shot of supporting UDMA and even if not PIO mode 4 will get you 16MB/s which will likely outperform a typical SD slot in these devices.
I run a T43 for doing serious single threaded programming. Not that anyone would want to, but its surprisingly productive for pumping out clean work. I mean, its SO slow that firefox can't even open reddit or facebook without having a heart attack.
I’ve recently revived a boxy, suitcase 386 and the biggest thing that jumped out at me was the lack of distraction and the similarity to an old tool. I blogged about it a bit recently:
I mean, yeah, it’s not _capable_ of a whole lot, but it’s a refreshing perspective to look back at computing from then and to think about how much we did that wasn’t sitting at the computer as a nerve center of our lives.
I used to have an old Windows 2000 laptop without onboard WiFi that I called "Deadline" and used for the same purpose. If you have work you can do without connectivity for extended stretches I recommend it.
why not set a timer and disable wifi/network for the duration of the time you are setting aside to work without distraction. Or, maybe just close the tab/app with the distracting alerts? lots of way to achieve the same result without limiting yourself to such ancient hardware. Modern Macs have Do Not Disturb mode. I use this frequently
Why would using older hardware be limiting yourself any more than you just described? It just happens to do it by it's nature of being old instead of you deliberately limiting modern equipment.
As long as it works, why not use the hardware if you have it and it's still operational? Older desktop PC's have a certain power usage issue compared to modern ones, but laptops usually tend to keep power consumption down.
I run photoshop, after effects, premiere. Those tools are absolutely not going to run on older hardware. Anything media related would just a joke. Even tools like FFMPEG, ImageMagick would run like a turtle processing the media I'm processing on a daily basis. Just because I'm coding something doesn't mean that code isn't doing some heavy lifting that older hardware would be suffice.
If you need to do some heavy work then an older system obviously won't do. Editing files with Vim, on the other hand, works just fine with something like a Core 2 or Pentium M.
Everyone's use case is different, but in many cases, older hardware simply isn't a limitation.
Absolutely, I just used Deadline for writing and light diagramming. As a bonus I actually liked Win2k, it was stable and didn't get in my way. The only thing it was missing was font smoothing.
If it were a '69 Camaro, 'vette, or Mustang, sure, the older hardware would be exciting. However, they would not be very good daily drivers. Their fuel efficiency is crap, their safety features are non-existent, but they do look cool. If all I did was boring text based code work, then maybe an old hunk-o-junk could suffice, yet it's fuel efficiency (battery life) would also suck. I do get the fact that they might be dirt cheap, but you better buy 2 of them because anyone with an old car that runs has a junk car to get parts from to keep the other one running.
I literally spent the weekend setting up Debian on a Mac Mini. While I had trouble getting anything more modern to install (certain dependencies are hard to find), I was able to get Arctic Fox working, and found that it was fairly snappy given the fact it’s running on a G4 processor.
I wish I had something like that, but I never got into PowerPC Macs, I bought into the ecosystem with I think the second generation of plastic Intel Macbooks (which, looking back, were quite terrible), and while there's still an early 90s Schneider home computer somewhere in the basement, I fear it won't work anymore and not be any joy to use anyway; that thing was incredibly primitive. It took almost a whole afternoon for my dad to make it play a really simple child's tune for little me. I don't think I appreciated it properly at the time.
I wonder if a Pi 4 would have the horsepower to run a PowerPC emulator with OS 9 properly. If it did, the biggest difficulty might be finding a decent small-ish external screen.
I have a lot of vintage Apple tech. Much of it still works...
I have a 2001 PowerPC G4 Quicksilver tower. Haven't booted it in a while, but it worked fine last time I did. If you can find these local to you, you can often get them very cheap. Shipping is expensive though, so buying them on a place like eBay is kind of a non-starter. I recently found a sealed old copy of Cubase VST available online for about $10. Bought an old M-Audio PCI card a long time ago for this machine too. At some point I may set it up as a Digital Audio Workstation.
I found a pair of old (2001) PowerPC iBooks on eBay a while back. They're good for running kids games and software - useful if you want an inexpensive, air-gapped machine for a young child you don't want on the open internet. Or typing / writing. These can be had very cheaply, I think because many schools bought them and eventually liquidated their inventory to replace with newer equipment. I had no problem finding inexpensive new batteries for these on eBay, and bought a couple extras.
More regularly, I use my old mid-2007 black macbook to run the original Starcraft. I'm running it via the OS X Installer (it's originally a PowerPC OS 9 game). I'm not much of a gamer these days, but Starcraft can be fun once in a while... like when PG&E in California shuts off the power for days and you want to conserve your main laptop's battery for work... And it's cool to have games that actually support local lan multiplayer, which Blizzard moved away from over time.
For anyone looking to delve deeper into this topic, here's some recommendations (off the top of my head) on what version of OS X to settle on for a given machine:
For older Intel Machines, I recommend 10.6 Snow Leopard. This is the last OS to support Rosetta, which allows you to run PowerPC OS X software. Note: PowerPC OS X software, not PowerPC OS 9 / Classic software.
For older PPC machines, I recommend 10.4 Tiger. This is the last OS to support running OS 9 applications via the Classic environment. Or of course, you can just install OS 9 and forego OS X altogether.
I'm on a Dell Precision M6400 - it's 12 years old. When it came out it was a $3,000 laptop. I bought mine for about half of that on a fire sale a year later. Still love it, although I do have a 10 year younger ThinkPad, I prefer the much older Dell.
For me the the issue with upgrading is that when you buy a piece of hardware, specifically DJ gear (Serato), mixers/interfaces, etc; the latest and greatest often doesn't support it. Then you are hoping and wishing for the company to create drivers to support your expensive hardware on the latest Catalina OS upgrade. That's why when you see interviews with many musicians that have home studios, the computers aren't the newest. Once you have a stable situation that works, why change all the time?
I enjoy the nostalgia of booting up and using old machines. After the first sentence this article came off as disingenuous. There are easier ways to stay productive without needing to break out a 17 year old Mac. It’s almost like the author is trying to convince himself this is a good idea. Turning off WiFi and using apps in full screen seems much easier.
The author mentions Slack. I’ve been using Mattermost for about 2 years now. I’ve found that having a mandatory offline schedule is important. I’ve been vocal about that with my team. Usually I’m offline from Mattermost for about 2-3 hours a day. Which allows me to focus on my work.
Depends on the platform, but I used to run AmIRC on an Amiga with a modest 68030 @ 50 Mhz :-) I think it did run ok also on a stock A1200 with a 14(!)Mhz 68020 processor and a couple of MB's of RAM.
I see your 386 and raise you an 8088 at 4.77 MHz and 256K of RAM (or less, I'm not sure what the actual requirements of ircjr is if you want to push it): http://www.brutman.com/mTCP/IRCjr.html
Really, it's just text, it doesn't matter. Literally any general purpose computer will run IRC if it can do TCP/IP and someone bothers to write a client.
Most ISA network cards are for the 16-bit bus, XT class machines only have 8-bit slots. This doesn't necessarily mean that the cards will not function, but you also need a packet driver and they very often use 186/286 instructions and will not run at all on an 8088.
The Intel EtherExpress 8∕16 will work, so will the 3Com 3C501. You may also have some luck with generic NE1000/NE2000 clones.
I was running IRC on a Palm (IIIe IIRC), then a colour Sony Clié SJ-30, tethered via serial to a Sony Ericsson t68i phone that could do GPRS (Later had a W850).
> By 2006, Apple had transitioned away from IBM’s processor designs.
Wasn’t the initial PowerPC architecture and designs done by Apple, IBM and Motorola, with Motorola and IBM also working the fabs for processors used by Apple during that time (before the switch to Intel)? When did Apple stop being involved in the design of specific processors used in its systems?
There is a histerish cafe in Sofia, Bulgaria, that has one of those Macs in every room and allows customers to play/select music from it. I think they never updated those machines as they just work and make the vibe of the cafe even more interesting as time passes.
I used to run YellowDogLinux (now famous for “yum”) on my last (17”) PowerBook G3 and had triple boot with ClassicMac emulation along with MacOS X Lompoc. F’ing mainboards blew several times on all of my non-plastic PowerBooks and MacBookPros, except for the latest, which just had its keyboard and screen replaced (and its second keyboard is going out again). Some of the machines had broken DVD injectors, memory sockets that would come short (the real reason they solder it now), lots of them have had power supply issues. They always want us to buy the next one which is supposed to fix the thermal or mechanical or whatever.. My favorite was the MBP+LG UltraFine 5K that would reboot when a shortwave operator keyed up the mic. The guy from HP who specializes in Chinese supply chains and runs Apple now is an iPad Pro power user and it shows. Just buy iPad Pro —if you develop for them, then switch to Flutter and add an Xcode-server to your network.
One of these days I’m going to dig up my PowerMac 6100/60 with the DOS Compatibility Card and my LCII with the //e card and 5-1/4 inch drive from my mom’s house. All of my disks are in a bedroom so they might still be usable.
He calls it an iBook but I’m pretty sure it’s a PowerBook 12”. I got one of those when they were released and it soon earned the pet-name of ‘sparky’ because when charging it wasn’t very well grounded and would regularly give me shocks.
Well, yeah? I'd be shocked if any supported browser can run a modern SPA. That's not even necessarily because of resource limitations, it's just very, very different from the techniques of the era.
"I have a completly outdated system with internet connectivity because i'm not using what an average user is doing at all and now i'm writing an article about it"
I have upgraded from a X220 to a X390 for a single reason: YouTube Videos, which i like to watch on my laptop, started to put the x220 under high load.
I'm just not writing an Article about it.
Ah and one generic reason for not having something with is 20 years old: You do wanna have security updates.
Sry i'm a software engineer, i like hardware and i don't have any issue upgrading my laptop to be able to just watch a youtube video on my browser without any manual hardware optimized workaround.
I'm not trying to be a downer, but there is absolutely no reason to do this. For $50 you can do so much better without really trying all that hard.
Now I fully appreciate the draw of doing something like this as a hobby or something, but this article is talking about productivity. This is not an investment for productivity.
Yeah. I understand the desire for a new fondle-slab. I've personally made a hobby of rebuilding a collection of every computer I've ever owned. There's no need to justify it. They feel good. They look good. Industrial design was a whole different ballgame back when losing a percentage of display area didn't get you whipped by your manager.
Also, I'm like why a laptop? Why not an old desktop?
I personally don't enjoy writing with a laptop-sized monitor for long periods of time (ergonomically speaking). It's much more comfortable writing on a 24" LCD.
That one doesn't include a hard drive, has several missing keys and mouse buttons, and doesn't include a battery or power adapter. The PPC Mac looks like the better value.
For approximately 10x as much ($500 USD), you can get a pre-retina Air, which has a much improved keyboard, working wifi, flash storage, and a modern OS and browser. It also happens to be way lighter.
To me that’s more than a 10x improvement over the setup the author describes. There’s relatively little you can’t do on such a $500 machine.
Except get security updates that are only ever packaged in newer OS releases, for one thing.
I get where you're coming from, but this is the fundamental problem with network-connected devices. I'm an Apple fan, of sorts, and my whole family is part of the Apple ecosystem, but the company has a nasty habit of strategic obsolescence and doubly so around transitions.
I'm giving this an upvote, because I have a MacBook 1,1 from 2006 that runs Windows 10. That's 14 years of support & security updates from Microsoft, and they didn't even make the device.
WPA2 was standardized a year after his laptop was built. The ancient 802.11b card in it wants to do WEP. Getting driver support for a modern USB WiFi on that prehistoric version of OSX is no picnic either. It's a good thing he doesn't want to get it working.