[HN Gopher] Working from home at 25MHz: You could do worse than ...
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Working from home at 25MHz: You could do worse than a Quadra 700
Author : Tomte
Score : 79 points
Date : 2020-12-11 14:24 UTC (8 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (arstechnica.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (arstechnica.com)
| jedberg wrote:
| I was a teen in the early 90s, and was super into computers. I
| remember seeing one Quadra in real life. It was at my friend's
| house -- his dad was composer for TV, and the Quadra was his main
| computer for that work. He ended up getting a couple of Emmy
| nods.
|
| We weren't allowed to touch the computer or even get near it, and
| at the time that really pissed me off, but as an adult I totally
| get it now.
| favorited wrote:
| Damnit. I've been watching some Quadras on eBay, I'm guessing
| more will join me now.
| yellowapple wrote:
| And meanwhile I've been on-and-off watching out for the _other_
| famous computer from Jurassic Park: the SGI Crimson.
| PeterStuer wrote:
| I used to write on a IIcx with an Apple 'Page" display and Word
| 3.0. Honestly, while I have left the Mac platform since the
| PowerPC disaster, that writing setup was very comfortable and
| would still be if you would focus on a pure single tasking word-
| processing task.
| iainmerrick wrote:
| What was disastrous about the PowerPC? Sure, they eventually
| moved on to x86, but I don't think PPC itself really caused big
| problems. Apple was already in serious trouble at that point;
| PPC on its own didn't save them but at least it didn't kill
| them.
|
| The early PPC Macs were good machines, and the brief flirtation
| with licensed clones at least allowed me to buy a Mac-
| compatible computer (Power 100) that I wouldn't otherwise have
| been able to afford.
| OldHand2018 wrote:
| > What was disastrous about the PowerPC?
|
| The G4 was amazing, but right from the start Motorola
| couldn't get acceptable yields on the higher-clock versions,
| and that kept happening. The IBM-sourced G5 was a power hog
| that was clearly not meant to be a consumer CPU.
|
| The first computer I owned was a G4 Power Mac, I ordered with
| the student discount the day after it was announced. I got
| the middle 400MHz version. Apple was forced to abandon the
| high-end 450MHz version shortly after launch.
|
| If Motorola could have manufactured the G4 according to plan,
| Apple probably never would have switched to Intel.
| PeterStuer wrote:
| The transition was the disaster. The first gen PowerPC Macs
| performed significantly less running common user
| applications, while costing a premium. This was a software
| issue, but left a very sour taste and many, including me,
| transitioned to Wintel as a result.
| perardi wrote:
| I doubt there's benchmarks from ye olde days, but are you
| sure? I thought the first PPC machines managed to outrun
| 68040 machines, even in emulation. I fully admit my
| recollection could be wrong there.
|
| But regardless, that entire pre-G3 era was the nadir of the
| platform. Those were dark days.
| therealx wrote:
| I don't remember anything that bad either. They didn't fit
| the thermal requirements of laptops that well, but even the
| G4 with Altivec was plenty fine for many things.
|
| The Intel move still made lots of sense, but that didn't make
| PPC unuseable.
| munificent wrote:
| That Infini-D screenshot is giving me a stronger pang of
| nostalgia than smelling my high school girlfriend's perfume
| would.
| rjsw wrote:
| I run NetBSD on my Quadra 950, found a 100base-T ethernet card
| for it on eBay. It could have 256MB of RAM but I haven't gone
| that far yet.
|
| Original Macintosh software like WriteNow feels really fast on it
| on System 7.
| yjftsjthsd-h wrote:
| > I run NetBSD on my Quadra 950,
|
| > on System 7
|
| Dual boot, or VM?
| rjsw wrote:
| The machine boots System 7, I have some native Macintosh
| applications installed. NetBSD/mac68k provides a Mac
| application that takes over the whole machine, loads the
| NetBSD kernel into memory and starts running it, the only way
| to exit from this is to reboot.
| yjftsjthsd-h wrote:
| Oh, that's really cool. A sensible abuse of the lack of
| memory protections, I assume - reminds me of GRUB4DOS,
| which did much the same.
|
| EDIT: Yep,
|
| > The Booter also will certainly fail if Virtual Memory is
| enabled, so turn that off too while you're snooping around
| in the Memory control panel.
|
| - http://www.netbsd.org/ports/mac68k/booter-
| manual/index.html
| transfire wrote:
| "This computer was released almost 30 years ago. On paper, it
| should be inconceivable that this can at all fit into a modern
| workflow. Present-day computers are gigascale monstrosities that
| should smoke something as old and plucky as the Quadra. And yet,
| they just... don't."
|
| So terribly true. Feel the same way about my old 14 MHz Amiga.
| CountHackulus wrote:
| I had completely forgotten about A/UX, what a blast from the
| past. Has A/UX gotten any recent open-source attention?
| spijdar wrote:
| It's not recent, but there are some pages with "older" open-
| source attention like
| http://www.nleymann.de/appleAUX/AppleAUXMain.htm
|
| I suspect that, like other pre-SysVR4/Solaris-y unixes,
| compiling anything newer than GCC 2.95-ish will be pretty much
| impossible. But, depending on your interest/curiosity, it looks
| like there's some fun stuff to play with.
| flomo wrote:
| Random trivia. Back in the day, Apple was being boycotted by
| GNU, so the open source situation on A/UX wasn't great even
| compared to other weird unixes.
| tzs wrote:
| One feature of A/UX that I'd like to see in current Unix and
| Unix-like systems is Commando. It was a graphical help system
| for command-line tools.
|
| You would invoke Commando from the shell for a command and it
| would bring up a dialog to help you construct the command line,
| which would be written back to the shell.
|
| There's a screen shot of it for ls here [1], and mount here
| [2].
|
| [1] http://toastytech.com/guis/aux3.html
|
| [2] https://retrocomputingforum.com/t/running-a-ux-apples-at-
| t-u...
| hyperrail wrote:
| I wonder if Apple got the idea from IBM's OS for the late-80s
| AS/400 minicomputer line (today's System i servers). The
| OS/400 command language shell used its own rich knowledge of
| each command's syntax to present a full-screen form you could
| fill out to interactively compose a command: https://www.ibm.
| com/support/knowledgecenter/ssw_ibm_i_74/rza...
|
| (Also, OS/400 commands all follow a very strict naming
| convention, such as the example WrkActJob in the link. The
| consistency of the words used and the abbreviations for those
| words were intended to make learning easier.)
|
| You see a bit of this today in PowerShell's command auto-
| completion for built-in commands, PowerShell script files,
| and cmdlets (user-defined commands written as PowerShell
| script functions or .NET CLI methods). The graphical
| PowerShell Integrated Scripting Environment (ISE) even pops
| up windows that let you interactively fill out forms to enter
| command options, just like Commando:
| https://blog.netwrix.com/2018/02/21/windows-powershell-
| scrip...
|
| Regrettably, PowerShell ISE is deprecated, and the
| recommended replacement of Visual Studio Code with the
| PowerShell extension isn't an exact one.
| yjftsjthsd-h wrote:
| What attention would it get? I mean, it's a neat OS, but it's
| an ancient enough unix that porting packages to it would be
| somewhere between difficult and impractical (even if you could
| compile ex. modern gcc for A/UX, it would need more disk+RAM
| than is likely to be on a machine of that age), and I'm not
| aware of any features (or even applications) that would justify
| trying to clone it (beyond the cool factor).
| smm11 wrote:
| I still bail out when a Linux install won't pick up my wifi
| without intervention, yet I put OpenStep on a DEC, LinuxPPC on an
| iMac, NetBSD on a Performa, and BeOS on something I forgot I had.
|
| Had these phones never existed, I'd get around to the Amiga
| that's in the garage.
| walrus01 wrote:
| > Email applications such as Mulberry are still just as useful
| today, just make sure to set up your IMAP and SMTP correctly and
| you're good to go
|
| really? there's email clients for MacOS 8.1 that can understand
| IMAP and SMTP over TLS1.2? Because otherwise you'll be using some
| old thing that only supports plaintext authentication.
|
| the most secure way to do email on such a thing would probably be
| to ssh to another local machine on your LAN and run a terminal
| based email client from that.
| toast0 wrote:
| Assuming you trust your lan, you could probably run stunnel
| with modern TLS to add encryption. Maybe you could get that to
| run locally too.
| wiredfool wrote:
| Want something fast? Mac IIci, 8MB memory, System 6. Word 4
| Screams.
|
| Boots in literally seconds, cold boot is longer due to memory
| check.
| [deleted]
| anthk wrote:
| System 7 is better and not as taxing as 8.
| protomyth wrote:
| I still think Word Perfect on the Mac was the better word
| processor and a bit faster.
| setpatchaddress wrote:
| Install System 7.5 on there and let us know what happens to
| boot time, though.
| wiredfool wrote:
| I had system 7 on an SE, so, yeah... slower.
| natechols wrote:
| It will never stop annoying me that my telephone takes longer
| to boot than the computers I grew up with.
| qayxc wrote:
| Sigh. Bu the computer you grew up with couldn't even handle
| the colour palette and resolution of the screen that you now
| carry around in your pocket.
|
| The computer you grew up with couldn't deal with taking,
| manipulating and storing photos of your phone's camera(s).
|
| Sure, your phone could boot faster, but you also need to
| compare to the capabilities of both machines. Plus there's no
| need to reboot your phone on a daily basis anyway.
| ben_w wrote:
| > Plus there's no need to reboot your phone on a daily
| basis anyway.
|
| IMO this is the only vitally important point. If my phone's
| screen was 640x480 and 8-bit colour, it would still be
| fantastically useful.
|
| The fact that 4G cellular internet is higher bandwidth than
| the system bus on my first Mac (Performa 5200), the fact
| that every image the camera takes us too large to fit into
| that Performa's RAM even when it was fully upgraded, the
| fact that a single Netflix film takes up more storage on my
| phone than my Performa had in total, is an impressive feat;
| but I use most of the impressive technical performance to
| share dumb photos of weird cooking experiments [0], for the
| purpose of social connection with distant friends, and I
| could manage those connections in other ways if the tech
| was not there.
|
| In practical terms, what I care about is the instantaneous
| responsiveness -- the fact that the screen lights up when I
| lift the device, the way the system unlocks with facial
| recognition so I don't have to enter a passcode, the way
| most apps are about a second away from use, that they auto-
| save, that crashes are rarer.
|
| And that is because, as you say, there is no need to boot
| up the phone whenever you want to use it.
|
| [0] e.g. https://travellingcurious.wordpress.com/2020/12/05
| /greenies-...
| anentropic wrote:
| It's weird though isn't it...
|
| > the computer you grew up with couldn't even handle the
| colour palette and resolution of the screen that you now
| carry around in your pocket
|
| the other way of looking at this is that the phone is
| enormously more powerful, can render hi-res full colour
| depth 3D scenes at 60fps that would take minutes per frame
| on a 90s computer, can store and transfer amounts of data
| that would have been unimaginable back then
|
| so why is it so slow to boot up?
| thesandlord wrote:
| A phone needs to reboot like once a month.
|
| A computer from the 80s probably rebooted multiple times
| a day.
|
| How much effort is someone going to put into an event
| that happens once a month vs investing that same time
| into something like optimizing battery life or taking
| better pictures?
|
| Also, in my personal experience with Android/Linux mobile
| devices, phones in 2020 boot significantly faster than
| phones in 2010.
| csixty4 wrote:
| In part...updatability.
|
| Let's say you bought a 100-baseT network card in 1995.
| The features were fixed in metal, and so were the bugs.
| Even if a new revision of the board or ROM came out, you
| still had the exact same card. If a flaw was found in one
| of the chips they used, chances are someone would need to
| program around it. Settings were probably done once using
| DIP switches and never touched again. You probably never
| even knew if a new revision came out.
|
| The wifi card you use today is going to boot up in a
| pretty dumb state. It'll identify itself on the bus and
| not much else. Your computer's kernel is going to poll
| every device on the bus to see who's out there. The wifi
| card driver is going to match the ID of the wifi card to
| one it knows and then upload firmware. Then the card will
| need to briefly reboot into the new firmware and identify
| itself to the driver again. Then the driver is going to
| configure it.
|
| It may take a couple of seconds for all this to happen,
| and it needs to happen for almost everything. Even your
| CPU which booted the machine in the first place might get
| patched microcode uploaded when the machine boots.
|
| Nothing is just a device anymore, and nothing is just a
| device driver.
| yellowapple wrote:
| Thing is, though, there's nothing really stopping devices
| from having a middle ground: have the device persist the
| firmware, and only have the kernel feed the device a new
| version of that firmware if actually needed (e.g. because
| there is indeed a newer version of it).
|
| Ultimately, though, the device enumeration and
| initialization is a tiny fraction of the startup time on
| most computers, be they desktops, laptops, servers,
| phones, tablets, or what have you. Usually the _actual_
| source of long startup times is the incessant need for
| these machines to spin up oodles and oodles of background
| services doing who-knows-what, and it 's remarkable how
| much faster a machine boots when these services are pared
| down to more reasonable minima. And worse, it's these
| background services that often make modern computers feel
| so slow even after they're booted up.
| natechols wrote:
| Yes, the telephone is also superior in every way to the
| computers I used until well into adulthood! But it's
| difficult to break the persistent feeling that while those
| antiques were very limited, the software was much better
| optimized for what it did. Like most Mac users in my
| generation, my word-processing productivity peaked on Word
| 5.1a and everything since then has been a disappointment.
| qayxc wrote:
| I don't know about word processing performance, as I
| never did word processing.
|
| I worked with (3D) graphics and computation intensive
| processing as well as modelling packages and the
| experience was horrible compared to today.
|
| I have particularly fond memories of the workflow we used
| for a film project back in the late 90s. The lab only had
| so many editing stations and they were shared across
| multiple groups. So for each editing session we first had
| to copy the project from multiple CDRs onto the editing
| machine (which took ages on the 4x SCSI CD drives), edit,
| then burn the project to a set of CDs - performing
| various rituals to ensure the ROM image wouldn't be
| corrupted by a butterfly coughing in the corner or
| something - clean up the HDD so the next group could get
| working and hope the CDRs were even readable.
|
| The editing experience itself wasn't great either: forget
| about real time scrubbing or full resolution previews.
| Today you can edit films on a phone much quicker, more
| comfortably and with significantly higher quality. No
| disappointment there for sure.
|
| Same goes for 3D modelling packages, rendering and just
| plain number crunching in Mathematica, Maple or MATLAB.
|
| Word processing is the one area that simply is so
| primitive by its very nature, that it's trivial to reach
| peak-efficiency without throwing tons of compute power
| and tech in general at it. If word processing is all you
| do, you don't need more than a glorified electric
| typewriter.
|
| For many, many other applications - and yes, that even
| includes just taking and sharing pictures in real time -
| today's technology is vastly superior to anything the 80s
| and 90s had to offer.
| natechols wrote:
| I work in scientific computing so I definitely don't miss
| SGI workstations either. My complaint is just that even
| the simplest tasks, like word processing, end up taking
| orders of magnitude more computing power (or just don't
| work very well). The average commercial web page is an
| extreme example of this - I'd rather go back to mid-90s
| layouts and animated GIFs than endure most news sites. (I
| wonder how much of the demand for steady increases in
| computing speed was simply driven by the need to slam the
| consumer with as many advertisements as possible.)
|
| But yes, it is impressive that my $500 phone blows away
| the $50,000 workstations I started on.
| yjftsjthsd-h wrote:
| I don't see why that makes a difference, though. The
| screen... okay, maybe a couple more milliseconds to draw
| the extra pixels, a bit more data for the hi-res
| textures/whatever, but given the CPU speed and dedicated
| GPU (no more rendering all graphics directly from the main
| CPU) that shouldn't matter. The camera isn't even on during
| the boot process, much less in use. On my phone at least,
| the system takes a few seconds after boot to connect to
| network, and I _get_ that. But beyond that, it 's not like
| the system needs to load every app into memory as it boots
| up, so why should the extra capabilities matter?
| gpderetta wrote:
| My 10 year old laptop boots faster than my phone. I think
| they have similar capabilities.
| qayxc wrote:
| I am 100% certain that your 10 year old laptop uses at
| least two orders of magnitude more power to achieve that.
|
| I'm also not quite sure about the capabilities. A 2014
| $150 entry-level phone like the Motorola MotoG G4 has
| eMMC controller, SD-card interface, two separate camera
| systems, WiFi, BT, 4G modem, GNSS (GPS/Beidu/GLONASS),
| USB 2.0 (client), USB OTG (host), accelerometer, gyro,
| proximity sensor, compass, FM-radio plus the usual stuff
| (DRAM controller, GPU, audio subsystem, battery
| controller, etc.).
|
| That's a lot of components that the OS needs to
| initialise and load drivers for on boot. And all that
| needs to happen on 1 GB 533MHz LPDDR2 RAM and 4 Cortex A7
| cores at 1.2 GHz.
|
| Just to give a point of reference: that's less computing
| power than a $35 Raspberry Pi 4 and significantly slower
| memory and storage.
|
| A 10 year old laptop would likely feature a dual core
| Intel Core i3, i5, or Core i7 with 35W up to 75W TDP
| clocked at between 2.5GHz and 2.9GHz, dual channel DDR3
| memory running at ~530MHz with a 4x multipler (i.e.
| 2133MHz effective vs 1066MHz on the phone) and your BIOS
| is most likely set to "fast boot", meaning it'll skip 90%
| of the hardware initialisation anyway. I also doubt your
| 10 year old laptop would last that long on a 2070 mAh
| battery (my own 9 year old model has a ~44000 mAh battery
| - just for reference).
|
| TL;DR yes, even a vintage muscle car is still faster at
| 0-100 (or 0-60 if you prefer) than a 5 year old compact
| car. That shouldn't come as a surprise if you compare the
| specs.
| JKCalhoun wrote:
| Yeah!
|
| No login, no passwords.
| tl wrote:
| Mini vMac https://www.gryphel.com/c/minivmac/ exists for anyone
| who wants to try an office suite that doesn't lag.
| qz2 wrote:
| The rose tinted lens of vintage computing strikes again.
|
| I too fell for this numerous times. In fact I actually went back
| to an Acorn RiscPC 600 for a bit once instead of a modern windows
| machine. It was what I considered to peak productivity for me.
| Built in assembler and programming language, decent quality
| desktop applications and no distractions.
|
| After about 5-6 days it was back on eBay because quite frankly I
| realised what a pain in the ass it really was. 99% of the stuff I
| was actually doing was collaboration and it's really difficult
| doing that on vintage computing platforms. On top of that the
| hardware is almost always like a hand grenade with the pin out.
| It's going to die, but you just don't know when.
|
| I cite this as an example for the comedy timing:
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TU55-7dWMi0
|
| Now emulation I can get behind because when you are completely
| fed up of the idea you had it's easier to dispose of it than
| getting rid of it on ebay :)
| zokier wrote:
| Can you really say its rose tinted lens if the author actually
| did use the system and writes from current-day experience?
| LeoPanthera wrote:
| Yes. It may be fine for the author, but the article promotes
| this as possible for everyone, or at least many other people.
| zokier wrote:
| > makes it a great choice for some classic Macintosh gaming
| and nostalgia tripping.
|
| > the machine will always be hobbled by its technical
| limitations.
|
| > I would never go as far to say that the Quadra 700 should
| have a place on your desk
| Volt wrote:
| And yet you should wonder if the fact that we all think
| regularly of going back might suggest something.
| goatinaboat wrote:
| _99% of the stuff I was actually doing was collaboration and it
| 's really difficult doing that on vintage computing platforms_
|
| Maybe it is, maybe it isn't. Are we talking Zoom or IRC here?
|
| If you need to do the sort of work where you just need to
| concentrate with no distractions, a "vintage" platform is a
| superior choice. A few prominent authors swear by their
| obsolete word processors for example. Many people (myself
| included) find it hard to focus and resist procrastination on
| any modern Internet-connected system. But I can get my head
| down in First Word Plus on my Atari ST (or Word 5.1 on a
| classic Mac) and upload the file later for formatting in Word
| and sharing by whatever means.
| ben_w wrote:
| > Maybe it is, maybe it isn't. Are we talking Zoom or IRC
| here?
|
| Much as I have fond memories of IRC, _collaboration_ requires
| the other people to use the same tools as you, and you don't
| always get to choose what that is.
| qz2 wrote:
| Exactly that
| goatinaboat wrote:
| _collaboration requires the other people to use the same
| tools as you, and you don't always get to choose what that
| is._
|
| Indeed - my point being that whether a vintage platform is
| viable or even superior for your workflow is very
| situation-dependent, it's not "all or nothing" nor "one
| size fits all".
|
| Hell I am reading HN now when there is something I could be
| working on. I should go into the other room and boot up the
| ST.
| wenc wrote:
| I owned a Macintosh Quadra 650 in 2001 -- bought it for C$60
| from an outgoing senior -- and it was already long in the tooth
| when I had it (the original Quadra 650 was released in 1993).
|
| It ran System 7.1. It was a beautiful machine but I couldn't
| get any real work done on it -- the browser (IE for Mac) was
| too slow, and ClarisWorks was too simple.
|
| I believe there are pivot points in computer technology. A
| machine just after a pivot will last a long time, while a
| machine just one year earlier will age badly.
|
| My main desktop was a Dell Inspiron 530 Core 2 Duo from
| 2005-2020. The Core 2 Duo was a long lasting chip, and I could
| watch YouTube, browse the web on the latest Firefox, etc. with
| no problems at all the way up to the start of the pandemic this
| year (I recently upgraded to a 2014 Dell i7, which I'll likely
| keep for another 10 years). If I had a Core Solo, I'd likely
| have dumped it.
|
| I eventually sold the Quadra (and the Mac II, Mac SE, the Sun
| SPARCstation 1 pizzabox, and all the other vintage machines I
| had in my college apartment). They were fun to own for a while,
| but ultimately impractical to keep around.
| zokier wrote:
| > If I had a Core Solo, I'd likely have dumped it.
|
| I do note that there was never a Core Solo desktop CPU. There
| were handful of single-core Conroe Celerons released, but all
| main "Core" series parts were at least dual-core (i.e. Core 2
| Duo or Core 2 Quad)
| RegnisGnaw wrote:
| There was no Core Solo desktop CPU but the Core Solo did
| exist in Mobile Editions:
|
| * https://ark.intel.com/content/www/us/en/ark/compare.html?
| pro... * https://ark.intel.com/content/www/us/en/ark/compar
| e.html?pro...
| wenc wrote:
| Thanks. I remember that the Core Solo was used on some
| Apple machines, including one of the first Intel Mac Minis
| (a pseudo-desktop machine?).
|
| https://lowendmac.com/2006/mac-mini-core-solo/
| qz2 wrote:
| Correct. I had one. It sucked. But less than my XP
| machine.
|
| I have the spiritual successor, the M1 mini now.
| sjwright wrote:
| Pseudo is accurate. Mac minis have always been made with
| bits from the MacBook parts bin.
| slavapestov wrote:
| I don't think you can reasonably expect to get useful work done
| on a vintage computer, although I occasionally use my 512k Mac
| for writing markdown. Mostly old computers are fun to repair
| and tinker with, and play old games.
| yowlingcat wrote:
| > Now emulation I can get behind because when you are
| completely fed up of the idea you had it's easier to dispose of
| it than getting rid of it on ebay :)
|
| Attaboy. I went the other way and realized that I wanted to buy
| some very modestly priced emulator-on-a-SoC for an old gaming
| console near and dear to my heart. That gave me the best of
| both worlds -- form factor and tactility of the real console
| with cost, speed, battery life of a present day android device.
| I must say, for a $40 Android device, I use it a lot more than
| I thought I would.
| CharlesW wrote:
| > _...I use it a lot more than I thought I would._
|
| I can't help but be curious: What are you talking about?
| zokier wrote:
| Doesn't the new Raspberry Pi 400 fit this role pretty
| perfectly?
| ReactiveJelly wrote:
| > Now emulation I can get behind
|
| Makes sense. Other than perhaps latency, if software was truly
| better in previous decades, you can just run old software on
| new hardware [1] and get the best of both worlds. Given
| infinite time, you could probably find a way to boot directly
| into some kind of hypervisor that runs RiscOS or whatever full-
| screen. While also running LVM underneath it for online
| backups. Oops, a new software feature.
|
| It's related to my pet peeve about Gemini: You can just choose
| to do all the stuff Gemini does with your own safe subset of
| HTTPS. If you have the political power and dev hours to
| maintain Gemini, you can also just maintain HTTP/1.1 with TLS.
|
| Running Acorn hardware won't fix software bloat created by
| anyone but yourself, and running Gemini won't fix HTTP bloat
| created by anyone but yourself. Might as well run good software
| on good hardware, instead of running bad protocols or bad
| hardware out of spite.
|
| [1] I'm on the young end of millennials, so my nostalgia is for
| Windows XP. But there's a valley for retro nostalgia - It's
| okay to use modern Linux, because you need security patches.
| It's okay to use Windows 10 because your employer forces it.
| It's okay to run an Amiga or RiscOS ironically, because it's
| cool and funny. But Windows XP? No! Evil security hazard!
| Deprecation means the software became bad overnight! Why won't
| you upgrade??
| zokier wrote:
| > and running Gemini won't fix HTTP bloat created by anyone
| but yourself
|
| No, but it does help building a community of like-minded
| people. And that is really the core idea of gemini,
| isolationism is sort of a feature there. I see gemini more
| like a flag under which people can rally under, the technical
| aspects are incidental.
|
| (note: I don't use/run gemini so I might be mis-representing
| them here)
| smartscience wrote:
| Windows operating systems may themselves represent the 'pivot
| points' that wenc talks about. Every so often, a version of
| Windows seems to come along that gives you a genuine
| improvement over what came before - in my view Windows 98 SE,
| Windows XP and Windows 7 for example, which may represent the
| nostalgia valleys. Other intermediate versions seem to at
| best introduce new problems to replace the old ones.
|
| Of course, it would be great to have the Risc OS experience
| while doing modern computing tasks, so I'm pleased to hear
| that the lessons it brought to the world have not been
| forgotten.
| 1970-01-01 wrote:
| "Apple recommends not running the 700 for longer than 20 minutes
| with the case off, otherwise the passively cooled 68040 processor
| melts down. Not the best design, but it works fine with the case
| shut."
|
| Can you imagine if they tried something like that today? The
| cheese grater will not even turn on with the case removed
| forgotmypw17 wrote:
| should you be interested in including blogging into your
| workflow, you may be interested in a platform which would be
| compatible with that version of netscape. or write your own!
| zokier wrote:
| I imagine that not using web browser for authoring blog posts
| would make most sense. Maybe something like "post by email"
| would work better? https://wordpress.com/support/post-by-email/
| forgotmypw17 wrote:
| My engine supports back to Netscape 2.0, Mosaic 3.0, and IE
| 3.0, among many others. Support for even earlier browsers is
| intended.
| Lammy wrote:
| How about Claris Home Page?
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Claris_Home_Page
| LgWoodenBadger wrote:
| Interesting that he says it struggles with Wolfenstein 3D. I
| spent a majority of my time as a teen playing Bungie's wonderful
| Marathon on my Powerbook 165c, which was a 68030 running at
| 33mhz. In a pinch, it could be played on a IIcx with a 16mhz (?)
| 030, but only with a reduced resolution.
|
| I still have the Powerbook, but it won't boot. I regret ever
| selling my PowerMac 9500 though.
| mrweasel wrote:
| I absolutely love the Quadra 700 case, but getting one here in
| Denmark is almost impossible. I'm also not comfortable getting a
| working or repairable Quadra 700, just so I can attempt to fit a
| mini-itx board into it.
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