[HN Gopher] Why use old computers and operating systems?
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Why use old computers and operating systems?
Author : hutrdvnj
Score : 85 points
Date : 2021-03-19 08:26 UTC (1 days ago)
(HTM) web link (john.ankarstrom.se)
(TXT) w3m dump (john.ankarstrom.se)
| brabel wrote:
| All software is bound to keep changing forever unless people stop
| using it... even after it's past its "perfect" place in terms of
| usability and benefits it brings to its intended audience (I am
| not saying perfect in terms of having no bugs - though that may
| also be the case)... because we can only know that in hindsight
| and we have no way of measuring this objectively.
|
| Some old Unix tools are perhaps the closest we have to that. (ls,
| cd, tail...) but in terms of UI, I can't think of anything. As
| the needs of users change, so does what the "perfect software"
| for such users looks like... however, I would think there's
| usually a decades-long period in which some software could stay
| just as it is without there being possible improvements one could
| make to it.
|
| I think it would be really interesting if we could find a good
| way to tell when that "perfection" is reached and tried to
| intentionally stop changing what is literally already perfect
| (though that will never happen in a commercial product, for
| obvious reasons).
| hx2a wrote:
| A reason to use old computers that I don't see mentioned here has
| to do with accessibility. People in the US usually have current
| hardware such as the latest Mac laptop, but that is not the case
| in all other countries. Current hardware is a bit of a luxury
| that we don't fully appreciate.
|
| I have an open source project with global users, and one person
| in Mexico contacted me looking for help. He was trying to create
| 3D visualizations of MRI brain scans and was running it on an old
| computer that hardly anybody in the US would consider using.
| Happily I had done testing on an old laptop and much performance
| tuning during my development. I was able to help him get his
| project working. It was still slow, but at least it was usable.
| It wouldn't have been if my code only worked on current hardware.
| reaperducer wrote:
| A couple of the web sites I maintain have a primary audience of
| poor, largely immigrant, people with a fifth-grade education
| and only rudimentary English.
|
| The server logs show most of the connections come from people
| using what people on HN would consider toy or throwaway
| convenience store phones. The high-end is people on Windows XP.
|
| (The sites are in the healthcare space, and if one of our
| clients is really so desperately poor that they can't even
| afford a smartphone, we'll give them either a laptop and a
| hotspot, or a smartphone, so they can access the web sites. We
| pay for their connection.)
| jcelerier wrote:
| my personal rule of thumb is that my software must be useable
| at -O0 with address sanitizers on my desktop - so far that has
| meant that at -O3 it stays useable on raspberry pi-3 level
| hardware.
|
| A few months ago I tried to make a build which targetted
| ivybridge-level CPUs, it took no more than one day for a few
| users to report that it didn't work on their machines, turns
| out a lot of people still rock some old AMD Phenom or Q6600-era
| machines
| heavyset_go wrote:
| I've still got some SandyBridge-era computers running.
| offtop5 wrote:
| Technically, couldn't he install a very lightweight Linux
| distribution.
|
| I have a few Raspberry Pi zeros and I actually enjoy coding
| within the limitations of said hardware, when you know you only
| have 500 megs of RAM on the device you have to solve problems
| differently
| pjmlp wrote:
| My first computer was a Timex 2068.
|
| With 500 MB the world is boundless.
|
| If you want to experiment with constraints get a ESP32.
| jimktrains2 wrote:
| For some reason I find "only have 500megs of RAM" very
| amusing. Many/most modern laptops only have 8-16 times more
| RAM than that. I'm genuinely curious what problems you're
| working where that "limitation" is your bottleneck and not
| the processor speed (which at 1GHz is still pretty speedy for
| many/most tasks other than pure computation (e.g. machine
| learning training and processing large datasets for
| statistics)). I'm also assuming you're treating it as a
| dedicated tool, and not doing tasks while running a DE and
| web browser at the same time.
| offtop5 wrote:
| Ram tends to create issues when you're building stuff
| locally.
|
| I used ram as an off hand example of something which is
| limited.
|
| I actually did go out and buy a Raspberry Pi 4 8gb since I
| want to start processing some machine learning, and the 512
| on the Zero won't cut it
| inetknght wrote:
| Browsing "modern" websites for one
| jrockway wrote:
| I think if you require users to bring their own computer,
| you can be insulated enough from hardware costs to not
| really care about memory usage, and that's mostly fine. I
| have worked on set top boxes at an ISP. We designed and
| manufactured the hardware; if we could get away with 512MB
| of RAM instead of 1GB of RAM, that was basically pure
| profit for us. So some attention was paid to memory use,
| because it had a real dollar cost associated with it. (I
| guess I'll point out that the engineering samples had a gig
| of RAM, and someone got the idea to write the UI in Dart
| running inside Chrome instead of the very legacy Java that
| we had on the previous hardware generation... so the
| production models did not ship with 512MB of RAM.)
|
| To some extent, being careful about memory usage is not the
| only way to make the business work -- you could, after all,
| charge more for the service or make people buy the CPE
| outright. But, being an ISP mostly involves getting enough
| people to buy the service to make it worth digging up a
| neighborhood to run fiber; you don't want to sour the deal
| by costing more than the competition with less able CPE.
| Doubling the RAM available to software engineers may
| improve the user experience by more than 100%, but nobody
| picks their ISP for the software than runs on their TV box,
| so it's probably wise to be careful.
|
| My point here is that some programmers do have to care
| about memory usage. If you include a computer as part of
| your product, you will someday be looking at the BOM cost
| of the bundled computer in an attempt to turn cost into
| profit.
| lostlogin wrote:
| There is something special about the Pi that makes an "oh
| well, time to reflash and start again" a non-disaster.
|
| They are great and hacking about with them is fun, even when
| disaster strikes.
| prox wrote:
| My version control on the Pi is different SD cards, I just
| copy the stable versions over and rotate. It's fun :)
| offtop5 wrote:
| What's the best way to backup the actual sd card. I plan
| to store it on the cloud. I tried using Windisk 32 and it
| didn't work .
| lostlogin wrote:
| I've used Pi Baker on the Mac.
|
| It kind of hurts that the image is the same size as the
| SD card when the card might be pretty much empty, but it
| does make recovery easier.
| MaxBarraclough wrote:
| Related to this: one of the very few good reasons to offer
| unencrypted HTTP is that in some parts of the world, old
| devices are in widespread use, and support for modern HTTPS
| cannot be taken for granted.
| grawprog wrote:
| >I think the only solution is to stop expecting every computer to
| be general-purpose
|
| Why? Computers are general purpose. The software we put on
| computers may have specific purposes, but computers are general
| purpose.
|
| As for 'computer powered appliances' plenty of those exist and
| the general trend does seem to be to abstract the computer away
| inside some kind of locked down appliance.
|
| I hope general purpose computers never go away. They're one of
| the most powerful and amazing tools ever created by humans. It's
| really too bad more people don't seem to understand or appreciate
| that.
| cpach wrote:
| NB: He wrote "I think the only solution is to stop expecting
| _every_ computer to be general-purpose" (my emphasis). He
| didn't write "I think the only solution is to stop expecting
| computers to be general-purpose".
| agilob wrote:
| >He wrote "I think the only solution is to stop expecting
| every computer to be general-purpose"
|
| Which is a bit ironic, as his website doesn't load on my
| Firefox (disabled HTTP-only connections), and after I added
| exception, it still looks like crap with DarkReader [1]
| because the website forces white background, and now I have
| grey font, with my sight problems, it's just too bright to
| read. Maybe it's time to stop expecting every website to be
| even displayed on every browser?
|
| https://darkreader.org/
|
| edit: 99%+ website work fine with darkreader
| thomastjeffery wrote:
| I think a lot of people get turned off from general purpose
| computers because they are using proprietary operating systems
| and software that mitigate the "general purpose" aspect.
|
| The most "general purpose" software most people interact with
| is a browser.
| grawprog wrote:
| Computers are general purpose in that they are capable of
| doing anything possible by a Turing machine with limited
| memory.
|
| Software built on top of that can be whatever we want within
| those limits. Even most proprietary operating systems are
| relatively general purpose. On windows and Mac os, you can
| generally acquire a wide range of software capable of doing
| many things and can create your own with relative ease.
|
| Smartphones get a little less general purpose, again above
| the level of the actual computer though. In the case of
| smartphones and consoles and such, the extra software
| thwarting the general purpose nature of the computer is
| buried a little deeper as firmware flashed onto rom chips.
|
| Then with computer powered appliance type devices, the only
| software is whatever is flashed onto the rom chip buried
| inside there that you can't really touch without some
| hardware modding.
|
| In the end, computers have never stopped being general
| purpose, and likely never will. It's just the software
| separating the user from the computer is getting deeper and
| deeper into hardware.
|
| I realize there's good security and user friendliness
| arguments to be made for this kind of thing, but it's a
| worrying trend. It'll create almost a pseudo class system
| with the people who have real computers and can use them to
| make money and do things and the people who have toys that
| suck money from them and feed them consumer garbage.
| akiselev wrote:
| I'm having a hard time coming up with anything that a
| modern OS on a modern CPU can't do - they're about as
| general purpose as can be for any nontrivial but nuanced
| definition of "general purpose." The _only_ exception I can
| think of is real-time IO, which we offload to specialized
| chips with buffers and queues through PCIe and other
| busses. However, that's a physical limitation since these
| peripherals would be impractical to implement in software
| until FPGA tech improves and gets significantly cheaper.
| seniorivn wrote:
| run a technologically secure code, with root of trust in
| cryptography/security model your software uses
|
| On modern pc/server/mobile computers it's impossible,
| your root of trust there is manufacturer and their
| microcode/embedded security modules with separate
| operating system etc
| grawprog wrote:
| Yeah...even 'general purpose' computers are shipped with
| hardware level 'software' that's beyond access from
| users. Intel and AMD have their management engines,
| Microsoft's got their in with uefi. I'm not sure if there
| even are any modern processors available with the kind of
| access allowed by 8 and 16-bit CPUs...
| b06tmm wrote:
| I recently inherited a 32-bit laptop that runs Vista, any
| recommendations of what version of Linux to try?
| squarefoot wrote:
| 32 bit aren't a problem, RAM however could be. I've run Debian
| on 32 bit Atom netbooks with 1 Gig RAM without problems. Using
| light desktop environments such as XFCE or smaller ones would
| allow also 512MB RAM or even less. Years ago I successfully run
| Debian + LXDE desktop on one of those toy Win-CE Chinese
| laptops with just 128MB RAM. CPU was a WM8505 clocked at a
| whopping 300MHz. And then there's ELKS Linux which would work
| on 8086 CPUs too which I successfully run on a industrial PC
| many moons ago. https://github.com/jbruchon/elks
|
| Extremely small systems aside, it can run fine on decently
| equipped laptops or netbooks. Surfing the web with a full
| featured browser such as Firefox or using heavy apps such as
| LibreOffice without having the system swap too much would
| likely require no less than 2 Gigs or more, but if you do
| network maintenance using command line tools, even the smallest
| netbook with half a Gig RAM becomes an useful tool to keep in
| the bag along with bigger laptops.
| pomian wrote:
| Mint has all sorts of versions that work great.
| jsyedidia wrote:
| Debian with Raspberry Pi Desktop
| https://www.raspberrypi.org/software/raspberry-pi-desktop/
| cookiengineer wrote:
| Which CPU model do you have exactly? If it's a core 2 model,
| they are actually 64bit capable (32bit extended) and can run an
| x86_64 linux without issues.
|
| Rather than that I'd recommend Debian or Mint with MATE if you
| want an easy and stable distro. Otherwise if you are willing
| enough, go for archlinux32 to have still the benefits of AUR.
| silentsysadmin wrote:
| I would load up Slackware 14.2 on that bad boy.
| lelanthran wrote:
| > I recently inherited a 32-bit laptop that runs Vista, any
| recommendations of what version of Linux to try?
|
| I'll have to check to be sure that it is 32bit(l/top is
| downstairs and I'm lazy), but I do my personal projects on a
| 2008 Asus that came with Vista and 2GB of RAM. I literally use
| it daily using:
|
| 1. Emacs 2. Vim + every plugin you can think of for development
| 3. GCC + all the devtools for C development 4. Standard gui
| tools (browser, some solitaire games, dia for diagrams, etc).
|
| I am pretty certain I am using this:
| https://www.linuxmint.com/edition.php?id=255
|
| Once again, I might be wrong (although "pretty certain" covers
| that), but you can give it a try.
| phito wrote:
| Sounds like nostalgia to me.
| spideymans wrote:
| >On this blog, I write about the various computers I use and
| about the operating systems I use on them. Apart from Windows 7,
| which is relatively modern, these include Mac OS 10.6 Snow
| Leopard, which at this point is quite old
|
| Completely nitpicking here, but both operating systems are the
| exact same age. I agree that Snow Leopard feels significantly
| less up-to-date than Windows 7 though, which speaks to how
| quickly Apple's operating systems are obsoleted (and this isn't
| necessarily a bad thing).
| accrual wrote:
| For others who love old software and hardware I'll share two of
| my favorite sites, an excellent retro PC emulator, 86Box [0] and
| a clean and well-maintained software archive, WinWorld [1].
|
| These two sites together have provided me hours of exploration
| into old hardware, BIOS screens I'd never otherwise see, and
| plenty of interesting software scenarios.
|
| [0] https://github.com/86Box/86Box
|
| [1] https://winworldpc.com
| lioeters wrote:
| > Error establishing a database connection
|
| Archived:
| https://web.archive.org/web/20210319083317/http://john.ankar...
| dcminter wrote:
| At the time of writing the answer appears to be "Error
| establishing a database connection" which tickled me as, well,
| accessing my childhood 8 bit computers never involved database
| errors!
| prox wrote:
| Syntax error!
| rany_ wrote:
| Repost: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26506812
| 0xCMP wrote:
| I agree with the idea that old computers and OSes might still be
| useful and that they have a lot of ideas we simply don't even get
| to experience today.
|
| However the final points of learning to accept that general
| purpose computing isn't needed or something is not well worded
| and in it's current version I completely disagree with. Old
| hardware can be kept and used for specific, non-general purposes.
| And new hardware could be made which is locked down for security
| and maintenance reasons (think... routers or IoT bridges...). But
| a world where we resign ourselves to machines which are not
| general computing devices is not one I think we should be moving
| towards.
| chasil wrote:
| Let me give you a more concrete reason to maintain legacy
| systems.
|
| We run a major set of COBOL applications developed under
| VAX/VMS, running under ACMS, utilizing TDMS. Please note, I can
| barely spell some of these things, let alone grasp what they
| do.
|
| The application software that my predecessors wrote for these
| systems supports thousands of users, and is a vertical wall of
| technical debt.
|
| I am far from the decision-maker, but I run the corporate-
| mandated communication gateways. I just switched my bastions
| from stunnel-telnet to tinyssh-telnet. At least my keys don't
| expire now, and the crypto is strict DJB.
|
| We make due with what we have. I do the best I can. I respect
| the work of those that came before (and it signs my paychecks).
| madpata wrote:
| I am not GP ng to clutter my home with old, bulky and single-
| purpose computers.
|
| > and the computers needed to run them are cheap
|
| Old computers aren't always cheap. Retro PCs get expensive quick.
| TedDoesntTalk wrote:
| > imagine if spreadsheet programs like Microsoft Excel stopped
| being developed and eventually just disappeared - that's the
| level of significance that HyperCard had.
|
| I often hear similar claims about the significance of HyperCard.
|
| But if HyperCard was so significant to so many people, wouldn't
| it have been ported and/or rewritten over the years to still be
| available today? Even if not by Apple, then by someone else?
|
| That's happened to Excel and other programs. So why not
| HyperCard? (Serious question)
| the_only_law wrote:
| There's LiveCode (https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/LiveCode)
|
| Which is the modern evolution of HyperCard to my understanding
| ajarmst wrote:
| At my institution, our students take a series of courses on
| programming a simple microcontroller (and were doing so long
| before IoT/Arduino made that fashionable again). We worked with
| the HC11 until a few years ago when we moved to the 9s12. They
| even worked for a while in Assembly Language until quite recently
| (we now use C exclusively). In this case it wasn't nostalgia or
| joy or anything subtle: modern computers are too complex to
| permit a useful mental model of how they operate. These 'older'
| systems (and their modern simple cousins) are a fantastic way to
| learn how a computer actually works with sufficient insight that
| it gives you a much deeper feel for how more complex descendants
| work. As one example, pointers and indirection are always a topic
| that students learning programming struggle with. Explaining that
| topic is much, much easier to a roomful of people who've worked
| directly with address registers and offsets.
| ajarmst wrote:
| My father believed strongly in this. I first learned to program
| in my early teens (at the time there were precisely two
| computers in a 300 km range of where we lived, my father was an
| operator on one of them). The 'computer' I learned on was made
| of cardboard, and I was the CPU:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CARDboard_Illustrative_Aid_to_...
| jstanley wrote:
| That looks great, I'd love to have a play with one. I wonder
| what's the easiest way to get one, perhaps a modern replica?
| It almost looks like it might be possible to implement as a
| PDF that you just have to print on some card and cut out?
| BallyBrain wrote:
| Enjoy!
|
| https://www.instructables.com/CARDIAC-CARDboard-
| Illustrative...
| benlumen wrote:
| Anyone else in the UK thinking what a fine thing it would be to
| designate the space for a dedicated "HyperCard" machine?
|
| I practically operate a one-in, one-out policy for retro stuff
| like this.
| sleavey wrote:
| It's fitting that this post is written on a blog running the very
| old (original?) default theme from WordPress 1.0.
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