Considering they got busted for using refurbished parts in new machines, a lawyer might argue that the sticker was telling the truth! After all, what is already obsolete may never become obsolete.
Meanwhile, yesterday one of the top HN articles was on a brand new port of Super Mario Brothers to the Commodore 64. There's more new good software coming out for 8-bit machines today than there was in 1986 when I bought mine.
Depends on what your definition of "obsolete" is, I suppose.
> There's more new good software coming out for 8-bit machines today than there was in 1986 when I bought mine.
Not surprising IMHO. These machines had 30+ years to be thoroughly analyzed, obscure hardware tricks found, undocumented features documented, etc. We have internet now and all this knowledge is relatively easy to access. Back then you had perhaps a magazine, two books and a limited social circle to work with.
Not to mention how much easier everything is when you have a powerful computer to develop on. You can precalculate complex things, there are decent text editors, graphics editors, assemblers, disassemblers, emulators, etc. Compare that to the fact that for a lot of micros in 1980s the edit-run-debug cycle included a pencil and a notebook.
A lot of things! I really liked working with the VIC and SID chips, I really enjoyed how utterly hackable the system was in terms of adding custom-made hardware or modifying the board, and so forth.
But I think what I liked best about it was the memory banking. There was RAM installed in the same address space as the system ROMs. You could always write to the RAM, and could choose whether reading would happen from the RAM or the ROM.
This meant that you could easily modify the system by copying the ROM contents into the underlying RAM and then edit them to your heart's content. Or just turn the ROM off entirely and write machine code utilizing the full 64K.
It was tons of fun.
Also, although this is not C64 specific, I loved the floppy drive because it was a real standalone computer in its own right, which you could program. This let you do multiprocessor stuff back when multiprocessor systems were expensive niche things.
Obsolete is definitely a relative term. I'm from gen-x and there's plenty of systems out there older than me doing critical things. But it's still funny to see not much has changed on the marketing side of the tech industry.
I recalled the MAME thing and the idea of installing a modern PC platform in a retro arcade cabinet, i think and old borked atari cabinet with a harddrive dock in place of the rom port would be a cool looking place for a gaming[mame-ing] PC.
Our Atari 800 is still hooked up and operational. My kids (now all in their 20s) came home with college friends and showed them some of their favorite games on it (like JumpMan! and M.U.L.E.).
M.U.L.E. might be the most well-conceived and well-executed game for replay-ability and enduring enjoyment given the hardware limitations of the 8-bit era. It had/has the advantage of allowing up to 4 human players to participate, which keeps it fresh even today in the same way board games from 40 years ago can remain fresh. Yes, the AI players are easily defeated, but human opponents made M.U.L.E. a true delight.
If you had the XE machines you had to use paddles. The Atari 400/800 had 4 joysticks which was more fun.
M.U.L.E. Is still one of the best games ever made. They had another game called Seven Cities of Gold. It was pretty fun too. I doubt you could make that game today but it was fun to play with friends on the reservation.
Well done. M.U.L.E. is absolutely one of the finest games of the 8-bit era, and the Atari version is superior to the C64 version. If I could spare the cash, I'd buy an old Atari and four joysticks just to have a M.U.L.E. machine.
(Luckily, MAME runs Atari M.U.L.E. beautifully under Linux.)
The Atari 800 is in some ways an ancestor of the ARM platform, realizing that ARM itself adapts wildly in efforts to maintain a dominant position in mobile computing (i.e. the Thumb variable-length "RISC" instruction set, massive 64-bit architecture changes).
> the 6502 was a strong influence on that RISC design.
How do you figure that? The 6502 was itself based on the Motorola 6800, and is a pretty typical accumulator architecture. It could hardly be any more different from the ARM.
The development of the ARM architecture was carried out on 6502-based systems -- but only because they were conveniently available, not because there was anything special about that processor that guided development.
The 6502 accesses memory on every cycle, predictably, so you can have memory that's clocked at the same rate and you're getting 100% utilization. Compare to Z80 and 68000, for example, which access memory only intermittently, and not reliably at any N-cycle boundary. There's a couple of bits about this in this interview with Sophie Wilson, one of the ARM designers: https://www.computerhistory.org/collections/catalog/10274619... (a good read)
I'm sure I read somewhere that the 6502's low interrupt latency was also an influence (the 8-bit Acorn stuff was IRQ-heavy, no DMA), but clearly it wasn't in the above PDF, so I've no idea where this came from :( - but this might not be 6502 influence necessarily, as the Z80's IRQ latency looks OK, maybe just a desire not to fuck it up like the 68000.
ARM SBC is like 6502 SBC, just an ADD with inverted input... so... maybe that counts?!
The 6502 influence is indeed not all that visible in the programming model or instruction set, but I don't think this is a bad thing.
> The 6502 accesses memory on every cycle, predictably, so you can have memory that's clocked at the same rate and you're getting 100% utilization.
On the flip side: it also means that the processor can't run any faster than memory, which is not great.
Anyways, the 6502 uses a rather narrow 8-bit data bus with no cache, so instruction fetch takes up the majority of memory accesses -- in fact, I'm not sure you can get under 50% of memory accesses used for instruction fetch without pathological instruction sequences. It's incredibly inefficient by modern standards; even 68000 was an improvement in this regard.
It sounds like you haven't used an 8-bit computer for a long time. You're missing out. They're all the rage now. There are new games coming out for them every week now.
Quick rant, downvote away but I thought I'd share something that's really going to be important to the future of tech: Obsolescence in technology is a completely broken mental model. As a communications tool it mainly serves the purpose of justifying new development and economic growth. The obsolescence model is based on a breadth-first estimation of technology (what's out there, what's going on, how have things changed out in the tech world, what else is available) rather than a depth-first estimation (what's in here, what can this baby do, wow what a miracle in this way or that one).
By using the word "obsolete," the communicator is being--intentionally or unintentionally--intellectually shallow. Even if the word serves their purpose, they are also wrong in a big way.
The fact is, this machine still does what it started out to do, technically speaking. If you look up the dictionary definition of obsolescence though, you'll find some really terrible news: "no longer useful." An Atari 800 is no longer useful? That's arguable, to say the very least.
The best way to communicate obsolescence with accuracy, precision, and rationality is with a reference point, like a market: "This tool no longer serves its original target market with the efficacy that it once did." This is much more precise. However, it opens the door to another depth question: Which markets or sub-markets might it _still_ serve, and even speak to rather loudly?
IMO the discourse of obsolescence is a curse on modern civilization. We are missing out on some huge _qualitative growth_ lessons until we learn to think in a more nuanced way about how technology serves us all.
As a commercial technology? Sure, read my post again. The obsolescence model works only with a "normalized market" reference point. But this also creates a huge blind spot: There is more value to be extracted. Think even of a simple teaching model. Is it useful to the average Joe off the street--that's the shallow part of the estimation.
> There is more value to be extracted. Think even of a simple teaching model.
Except mercury delay line memory is completely uninteresting except as a footnote to computer history, which doesn't change the fact they're heavy, expensive to run, and quite fragile. And I don't consider "It's a museum piece!" to mean something isn't obsolete.
Keep in mind that this is completely subjective/qualitative and that's the point. Disqualifying a substantially qualitative theory because you found an edge or corner case would in the first place be really silly, as every model is known to be broken in some way, and the point is that in the trade-off you generate value. But in the second--I'll bet if you really got into mercury delay line memory, you'd find some qualitative research gems. You are still referencing your comfortable normalized market, and that's a major point of departure for the thinking I'm describing.
No machine is an island. You can’t send anybody an Atari 800 floppy disk, or bring that floppy somewhere, and expect it to be read. An Atari 800 does not have a USB port. You can’t browse the modern web on an Atari 800. And all of those things are what people do now. The computer did not, by itself, become worse, but the world around it changed, and the computer did not change with the times. The computer is therefore unusable for any normal activity which people want to do, and the normal term for that is, indeed, “obsolete”.
Again, if your reference point is the "normalized" market, that's the only way obsolescence really works as a model. This requires little effort to understand.
What I'm saying is, think about the long tail and the extraction of value from this technology. It's far from incapable. I don't know about you, but I could plan a global economic takeover on an 800; still can. I can also teach someone else to do so. In fact, it's easier to stay focused. There's no malware and comparatively little practical need for encryption.
We waste a lot of qualitative profit as we march forward in search of breadth. Here we are robbed blind by the obsolescence model, which imparts heavy bias to our thinking.
It's obsolete in the way a horse is obsolete. If you have a specific job - getting to the next town, or maybe crossing the continental USA - it will do that job, or at least attempt to.
But it will be painfully slow, unreliable, and potentially expensive compared to more modern alternatives.
No one is really being robbed here - because there's a point where incremental changes in technology mean that a product becomes qualitatively different. Not just faster, but able to do things that an older product can't.
In this example the qualitative differences are obvious. You can't make calls, watch videos, browse the web, develop modern software, play modern games, write modern documents, or print them with a modern printer.
You can still do some very simple programming on it, but you can't share the code without hard-to-find extras.
So - obsolete. It's capable of some extremely limited applications, none of which are particularly useful. And it's quite useless for anything else.
>Until a few years back, I regularly used an old Cromemco System III computer that was built in 1979
Please don't take this as sneering -because I'm genuinely interested in late 70s micros!- but what did you use the system 3 for? Can you tell me about it as a computer? It's not a computer I know much about and I'm interested in what you would've used it for, especially recently.
It was a z80-based CP/M machine. I got it as payment for a software project I did for someone. I used it for recreational/hobby activities.
I forget the system clock speed, but I think it was around 2 MHz. The thing was made of steel, weighed over 100lbs, and contained 4 8-inch floppy drives (combined capacity for all four was about 2.5 megs, I think, but it may have been 5). The one I had contained an insane 512 megs of RAM. If I remember correctly, the one I had was purchased new for somewhere in the neighborhood of $10,000 (1979, which is about $35,000 today). This was, at the time, serious hardware. It even did high-resolution graphics that would (barely) still be considered high-resolution today.
Turning it on literally made my lights dim momentarily and sounded like a jet engine spooling up. It was glorious.
Nothing about it is practical in today's terms, of course.
I had fun doing things like writing compilers and software to use it as the coordinator for a crazy project I was engaging in at the time: I had networked 10 Kaypro IIs together with it and was using the entire combined system as a single multi-CPU computing machine.
What I mostly did with it, though, was to experiment with hardware. The System III was an S-100 bus machine, and did not even have a motherboard as we think of them these days. It had a backplane that you installed cards into to provide all functionality. This made it really fun and easy to experiment with changes that would, in a modern machine, have required altering the motherboard.
> You can’t send anybody an Atari 800 floppy disk, or bring that floppy somewhere, and expect it to be read. An Atari 800 does not have a USB port
Actually, not only you can use an SD card as mass storage without much effort, thanks to the many people who build modern peripherals for the SIO bus, but you can probably telnet and ssh as much as you want from it (smart modem-like network interfaces). If I wanted, my Atari XE (mostly an 800, slightly modernized) could easily be used for light local text editing.
If you buy modern hardware to do modern things, why not also buy a modern keyboard and monitor and cut the 800 out completely? Especially since modern web browsing pretty much requires more pixels and colors than the 800 can produce.
Well, one possible reason that you might not have thought of is that modern hardware (and software!) has so many hidden layers that you never know what you are running. Like PCs have Minix, and CPUs besides the main CPU, and so on. So you might look at something old like the Atari 800 and say, well, I know basically what it is. By comparison, a modern PC is like the horror movie trope of a thin humanoid skin over writhing innards. Because computers are so cheap and tiny that a device has vastly more than you are aware of.
Some people are taking classic cars and converting them to electric power, without changing the fact that they are basically un-aerodynamic deathtraps and without even getting rid of the manual transmission. That may not be what you consider optimum, but it is logical given some peoples' values.
> Some people are taking classic cars and converting them to electric power
This is one of my dreams! I own an awesome 67 Pontiac wagon which is a lot of fun, but after decades of riding in modern vehicles you just can't help noticing how much louder and smellier everything is with an old carbureted v8. It's wonderful to be able to pop open the hood and make sense of what's going on in there, but I'd still trade that engine in a heartbeat for a quiet electric in the same exterior.
If you feel that you could reasonably trust SSD and USB adapter boards, I don’t see why you couldn’t also put the same trust in a minimal computer, like an ARM board or a RPi or similar, both of which are still technically usable for modern tasks. It’s not a binary choice between an Atari 800 or modern Intel CPU, you know; there are other options.
And why not? The expansion bus supported intelligent peripherals with their own embedded computers since day 1. It'd be totally fine to format a floppy, or defragment a hard drive, or backup your entire volume library via a downstream network modem, without the computer being even aware of it.
Think of an Atari 800 as a small cluster of specialized computers each doing its own thing, connected through a serial bus. BTW, other computers of the time, most notably the C64/128, also did that.
I spend my weekdays in front of a computer that has two displays daisy-chained through a serial bus. The hard drives are on other serial buses, just because I have a couple extra ports.
I had an old PowerBook that hadn't been used in years, which had a PowerPC chip, and I had the impression that it was useless, because you need a new web browser to view current websites, and Apple does not provide updates for such machines. However, I did find a distribution of Linux that booted to a GUI, although as usual there seemed to be issues with power management which might have been software or hardware.
So, I'm saying you can't forget that any computer is probably more useful than you think, given suitable software. These days, it should be easier than ever to make an interface for something weird, given the resources for hobbyists like FPGAs. I remember 15-20 years ago, when I had access to a "Fat" Mac 512K which had pretty much no software including an OS, and I wondered if I could do something with it, because I had recently been learning about Linux. I didn't go very far with the experiment, but I copied some minimal hand assembled bootstrap code to the boot sector of a floppy (avoiding any problems with the drive being unreliable at reading large amounts of data) and then I rewired a Mac printer cable to connect it to the PC serial port, and I got the Mac to download an image to its framebuffer. I didn't have the motivation or stick-to-it-ivness to continue, but I had the vision at the time of a Mac as a terminal for Linux.
While I wish I could agree (and being from the demoscene, pushing hardware to the breaking point is just what we do), there comes a time when you really do need a new machine. Many iterations of home computers (VIC-20 to C64 to C128 and so on) were mostly including what was once an expansion card or device as a stock feature. enough iterations and you'll have something nowhere close to the original. Of course it's technically the same computer, but no average Joe could tell unless you pointed it out. Apple ][ evolved into the ][GS, which was so far away from the original computer it might as well been called something else entirely.
This iterative evolution continues to this day on PC with the existence of Bluetooth being on motherboards now instead of being a PCI card or USB dongle you would install.
And there is a great example of going too far in the console gaming space: the Sega MD at the end of its lifespan, with the 32X and CD modules, was a hulking beast with a tangled mess of cables and power cords.
I love making old hardware do new tricks, but I sure as hell wouldn't use it to watch YouTube or debug software on. Not even 'sceners do that.
Can you edit text on it? If so you can win a war with it, you can make a million bucks with it.
Comparisons to YouTube while amusing are more like a smoke screen. Obscures value, sure. But also there's not much to it. It's not a substantially deep commentary on the Atari; it's a commentary on the market reference point. And my point is that you've got to understand the Atari first; the unique market part comes after.
I wouldn't recommend watching YouTube on an Atari either. :-)
If an old computer can be 100% emulated by a new computer using 1/1000th of the electricity then the old computer should be archived as software and physically recycled/eliminated.
If. That makes sense only when comparing very old hardware to new, and only because the new hardware is much more power-efficient. But it's not a good argument for perpetuating absurdly short hardware cycles like we have with phones (1-2 years).
I do tabletop gaming with a group of friends, and have an ongoing debate with one that seem relevant to this.
The debate is that he is of the opinion that tabletop games (particularly ones with complex scoring or recordkeeping) should be computerized. I am of the opinion that they should not, because when you change the form factor, you are changing the game even if all the rules remain the same. We are humans, and as humans, physicality matters to us.
I think that the same thing comes into play with old-school hardware. The hardware itself is important, and no amount of emulation can really replace it.
My friend and I will never agree on this with tabletop games, and that's OK. You and I may equally never agree about old-school hardware, and that's also OK.
At 100% you necessarily include sensory equivalence. Otherwise you still change the experience drastically. Emulators are a fundamental shift in the sensory aspect. Even moving the F-keys around a tiny bit can be enough to drive a user crazy or break a great word processor.
I went to a local video game museum the other day. It was a ton of fun. You simply can't emulate the feel of the Arkanoid controller (a knob which you turn clockwise and counterclockwise to move the platform), or the way games actually looked like on a ye olde CRT (although some might point out that there's decent effort done here and there), not to mention games for vector-based displays.
Your laptop probably draws, what, 15W. Your old computer probably does not draw 15KW! - yes, I'm sure there will be old computers that do, and more, but since this article is about the Atari 800, I'm going to assume the discussion is about that sort of old computer, rather than something the size of a room that required a reinforced floor and your own personal account manager at the electricity company.
Modern hardware that I've got:
1. Mid-2015 13" Macbook Pro, mostly idle, battery charged, screen fully dimmed: 11W (16W with screen at full brightness)
2. My 2011 i7-2600K desktop: ~100W idle (packed away right now - but it's about that)
I happen to have my old Acorn junk set up right now, so here's some measurements from that:
1. BBC Master 128: 12W
2. BBC Micro model B: 25W
And some other Acorn peripherals. Add these figures to either of the above:
1. Acorn 6502 second processor: 5W
2. 5.25" disc drive: 2W (when in use)
3. Ancient early-80s monitor of unknown provenance: 50W
4. Acorn-branded CM8833: 85W
Looks like my favourite Acorn-branded monitor is actually pretty bad :( - however it's not actually drawing a huge amount more than the 2 x 27" monitor setup I have with my Macbook Pro, even though the pixels per watt isn't quite as good.
In fact: the overall power draw for BBC Master 128 setup vs Macbook Pro setup, both period-authentic, both (if not cutting edge for the time) up to the task of a good range of period-authentic workloads, is about the same! - and even if I was certain 1000x was an overestimate, this is still a bit of a surprise...
If you factor in that your MBP could probably comfortably emulate 100 6502s in real time, 1000x isn’t quite as severe an overestimate. Get the GPU in the game and, even with terrible warp utilization and cache efficiency, you still might be able to hit that 1000x for purely academic purposes on a desktop card with HBM (maybe 2500 real-time-emulated 6502s on a 250w system).
Move to the microcontroller world, though, and 1000x is a vast underestimate. The main core in a current project of mine runs at 24 MHz and draws around 1.2 mW without even entering sleep. This system could probably emulate a Master 128 just fine in real time, for about 1/10,000x the power.
My MBP can probably comfortably emulate 150 x 1 MHz 6502s in real time, but your average 6502-based system is a system, not just a 6502, and the Acorn stuff is no exception. There's a lot more to emulating it than just dealing with the CPU.
The Master 128 runs at 2MHz. For each emulated microsecond you need to (broadly speaking) do at least 2 CPU updates, 2 VIA updates, and 16 bitmap bits/1 teletext glyph. 24MHz = 24 cycles per emulated µsec :( - good luck even squeezing the video output into that, let alone the other stuff. Rather you than me!
(This also ignores handling the FDC, ADC, and ACIA. The devices accessed via the VIA will also take a bit of time to emulate...)
I'm talking more raspberry pi range than MBP, which is also 1000x more powerful. (or more; aka could probaly emulate all of the BBC Micros every sold at once)
a raspberry pi is 5W(?) at 100% cpu I think and can still emulate all of these machines with room to spare.
My macbook pro is only drawing 15W because it also includes a monitor and keyboard and happens to be plugged in. Otherwise I can emulate a data center worth of these machines without drawing ANY additional power ;)
The new computer will probably stop working in <10 years. The silicon will self-destruct in 50. The old one will survive the collapse of global civilization.
> which were almost certainly 99% fine, but unrepairable
Repairability is dependent on your skillset and interest, though. Aside from machines that used custom chips and those chips failing (and even then, you can usually replace those with modern tech combined with effort and ingenuity), I can't think of any old-school machines (and very few modern machines) that are actually unrepairable.
The model I'm presenting is not a "go buy an Atari 800" model. It's a counter-model to displace the shallow concept of normalized-market obsolescence.
The best way to understand this thinking is to look at people who already employ it. Look at the people using fountain pens and Gregg shorthand in 2019. And did you hear about the Polish auto shop that was using a C64 well into the 21st century?
We junk really, really good standalone ideas because human psychology determines that they don't fit into an emerging network of systems. This creates literal tons of waste at a personal and individual-business level and forces humans to think in unsustainable ways about what technology is and how it's used. We need new models to help us address the qualitative problems within the tech world.
My point was that, for a complex product like a computer, an individual consumer can't decide this. A shop still using a C64 is lucky that it didn't break -- or that there's plenty of other C64's for sale which broke in different ways, so they could be cannibalized for parts!
I was happy with my C64, but the 1541 drive kept failing (even 25 years ago). As a user, I'm able to ignore network effects for the device's use. That's merely an inconvenience. I can't ignore network effects for repair and maintenance. That will turn it into a fancy paperweight.
It's not like a pen and shorthand. Those I can use even if no company wants to support me. I could even make my own pen, without too much trouble, if somehow all pen companies went out of business next week.
>The fact is, this machine still does what it started out to do, technically speaking. If you look up the dictionary definition of obsolescence though, you'll find some really terrible news: "no longer useful." An Atari 800 is no longer useful? That's arguable, to say the very least.
Obsolete (Adj.): no longer used or needed, usually because something newer and better has replaced it.
It doesn't matter whether the Atari 800 still does something. It's so bad compared to newer options that there is no circumstance where it's the best available option. We live in a world where a 32-bit microcontroller costs about the same as a banana. $10 buys you a single-board computer with roughly the same performance as a mid-00s desktop.
Human effort is worth something. So is energy, so are raw materials. Keeping old, crappy stuff just isn't a good use of resources when new stuff is immeasurably better and ludicrously cheap. Melt down the old stuff for scrap metal, burn the plastics for fuel and use that material and energy to do something more useful.
> It's so bad compared to newer options that there is no circumstance where it's the best available option.
I'm not sure this is true. At the very least, it's not hard to imagine circumstances where it's the best available option for recreational use (hacking on, programming for, etc.)
> Keeping old, crappy stuff just isn't a good use of resources when new stuff is immeasurably better and ludicrously cheap.
It isn't a good use of your resources. But it can be a perfectly fine use of resources for someone else. It all depends on what turns your gears.
"No longer useful" is not a very good definition. I declare that dictionary obsolete!
I would tend to define obsolescence based on the task. (Arguably this is just the "micro" definition corresponding to your market-based "macro" version.) Obsolescence is when another alternative exists for doing the task, that improves on the previous alternative to a sufficient degree that you prefer it, and don't see yourself ever willingly going back to the previous alternative.
Just to pick some random domain, from outside computers: Steelmaking/metallurgical technology at the turn of the 20th century tended to produce a relatively high carbon-content steel, which was more brittle, especially at low temperatures, and could cause a ship to crack, take on water, and sink. As steel tech improved, and new ships were built with the newer steels, those failures started happening less often. Steels that were less "hard" but more "tough" made navigation safer.
On the other hand, and maybe to your point, most of those older ships of the higher-carbon steel, that didn't sink, were still able to serve out their service lives. Maybe if you found a way to put them on routes in warmer waters, you could've extended their lives even more. Which, translating to your conception, would be adapting to the new market or sub-market.
So hey, at least for shipbuilding, your model seems to fit!
The idea of obsolescence reflects an often unquestioned bias toward, or belief in, progress. If that which is newer or came later is always better, and if we're always (or mostly) moving forward in a more-or-less unbroken arc of steady unalloyed progress, then of course older things are obsolete. When in fact it's usually more complex than that. For example when moving to a newer technology, there's often something else desirable that has to be sacrificed, or that gets ruined, in order to get the improvement. So progress is rarely unalloyed (no pun intended given the steel talk above), and obsolescence is also, rarely unalloyed.
I love the quality of the keyboards in these old machines. Is there anyone out there building all-in-one keyboard computers w/ Model M-quality keyboards?
A friend and I were speaking of this recently. The current trend for "all-in-ones" is to have "monitor computers", however practically speaking it would be better to have a "keyboard computer" that you can change every few years and keep the investment in your nice 2k monitor.
Your laptop's keyboard and/or pointing device are/is for use when you aren't at your desk. When you are at your desk, you can put your laptop on its stand, plug in a USB keyboard and mouse, and use it like that.
"just stop using your PC the way you're accustomed to so that you can use my new product", what a winning sales pitch. It's like if instead of making his phone not suck, Steve Jobs had told people to just stop carrying their keys around in their pockets.
I mean, drinking soda and gaming is practically a meme at this point, so goodbye to all those customers. And anyone else who wants a beverage while they edit photos or do their taxes.
What if you installed a $200 monitor on your desk, upgradeable, connected by a standard interface like VGA or HDMI, and on your desk had a $50 keyboard and mouse connected over USB or PS2. You could kept the expensive parts of your computer in a separate (hear me out here) sturdy, formed sheet-steel enclosure. This could go under your desk out of the way, so it could be large enough that average users could open it with simple tools or thumbscrews to remove, replace, upgrade, or add internal components to the computer. Sounds crazy, right? That would never work..../s
In contrast to the IBM-compatible PC form factor, the idea that you'd want to embed the computer into the monitor or keyboard, or replace the tower enclosure with a hockey-puck sized amalgamation of microscopic, proprietary, ESD-sensitive parts held together with glue, is a little crazy.
I admit there's a place for laptop computers, but I don't think that most of those use cases require aerospace-grade thinness and lightness to the extent that it precludes serviceability. Or maybe I'm just bitter over the fact that my high-end E-ATX silent case now houses a mini-ITX board with a single graphics card and onboard M2 storage, and I can't find a replacement that I like for my aging Thinkpad...
I can't even count the number of Microsoft Natural 4000 keyboards I bought over the years because they wore out, or I spilled milk on them.
I've never owned an AIO, and I'm not sure I'll ever "get it." But then I'm just not the target audience for that particular niche market.
I'd even prefer my laptops to be more "upgradeable", but lately they come with LPDDR3 soldered on, and if I'm really lucky, I can maybe install a SATA or M2 drive.
Anyone remember the CW Keyboard from Heathkit? I'm frankly not even sure what it was for, but I have played on a busted unit and the keys and they were sw(ee)t.
It also reminds me of a Brother computer/typewriter/printer I used for a while. Thermal built-in printer and a 3-row LCD display.
With all the brand new tech in the house, whenever friends or kids visit, the first things they play with are the tunrtable and the typewriter that's nearing a century old.
You can still buy brand new IBM Model M keyboards in several configurations from the people who bought the patent. I love this keyboard. It's the best ever made imo and I'll never switch for desktop. Sometimes I dock my laptop just to use this keyboard :0.
Wouldn't the patents be long expired by now? Also, I believe that Unicomp (PC Keyboard) factory is actually the same factory that made the Model M before (previously owned by Lexmark, which was an IBM spinoff).
I'm not sure about that. I know their site used to mention the patents. Their website says this now:
"Unicomp was started in 1996 when we purchased keyboard technology from Lexmark International and IBM. You may recall that Lexmark manufactured the high quality Model M keyboards for IBM computers and terminals prior to 1996. Many of the same people, who in 1995 helped produce millions of keyboards for Lexmark customers, continue to manufacture keyboards for us today. Our goal is to build on our heritage and continue to provide our customers with the highest quality keyboard products."
In any event, I've been very happy with their products. It's like 1988 all over again for me.
I grew up with a 400 in the house. The keyboard was truly awful. Didn't stop me from firing up BASIC, but between the keyboard and lack of storage it sure wasn't my ten-year-old self's primary development machine. (We had a cassette drive, but I don't think it ever worked right.)
My family also had Atari 400. Also had the cassette drive. I used it to program in BASIC. We got it with the Asteroids game and a joystick and that was a lot of fun.
Learned to program on the 400 (with a 48k upgrade) in BASIC and 6502. I still think my preference for mechanical keyboards is a direct result of owning the 400.
The Atari 400 was my family's first gaming console as a kid. We filled the garden with roses in Dig Dug.
The keyboard was terrible, but I am nostalgic for it. Those raised bumps that surround each "key", the on-trend brown and yellow scheme. That thing was built like a tank.
Also, same typing feel as a 2019 Macbook, but with better dust resistance!
On the other hand, I can tell you first-hand that accidentally spilling fruit juice into an Atari 800 keyboard is very bad for the health of the computer.
I remember an episode of Computer Chronicles where a man claimed 8-bit computers should be as relevant today as they were when just released, because "every program is a turing machine, essentially."
His main argument was that the memory and CPU limitations helped curtail software feature bloat. When asked about the possibility of advanced Multimedia features becoming more desired among consumers, he shrugged it off, saying an expansion peripheral would do the job just as well as buying a new machine, without having to learn a new machine entirely.
Now that we have cartridges for the C64 that allow for massive data storage and 32+ Megs of RAM, maybe he was right. We could have all been using C64s or Amigas with a ton of expansion cards/carts installed.
> His main argument was that the memory and CPU limitations helped curtail software feature bloat
I think there's some truth to this - if you have a limited amount of RAM, you can't just throw RAM away and do the easy thing. You have to be careful with it. The flip side of that is of course one man's feature bloat is another man's valuable feature, and some things just _won't_ fit in the limited amount of RAM.
Seems to be the "Usable, Extendable, Efficient - pick two" scenario at its core. I remember very well a word processor on C64 (GeOS Writer I think?) that would use its own disk as swap to get around memory limits. I eventually bought a memory expansion just to get around this, which wasn't cheap in the slightest.
And that's just for text! It's stunning to me how inefficient text can be when every byte counts.
You get bottlenecked on I/O eventually, and that is the factor that creates jumps to new platforms. Even with modern devices, I/O is a huge point of contention: we argue for our serial ports and 3.5mm headphone jacks, but we upgrade for the newest USB or DisplayPort iteration.
When I started viewing computing in terms of connectivity, the device categories and developments made a lot more sense. We were fine with switches and printouts - except that we wanted to input and retrieve things faster, so we ended up with display, keyboard and mouse, storage media and networking, etc. The Turing Machine parts are important, for sure, but they are most important in pushing the I/O to capacity, and only sometimes get to exercise abstract computing prowess.
LOGO on an Atari 800xl at elementary school was my first coding language. I mainly typed in stuff out of a sprial bound book of cool patterns you could make. I can only assume the title of that book was "Stack Overflow"
LOGO (which is really Lisp) on a TI 99/4A changed my life. It was where I had that first epiphany that software is just "castles in the sky." It can be anything you want.
A friend had one of these and his dad tried to convince my dad to buy one. I honestly don't know what my friend did with this thing other than play a few games. I wonder what kind of analysis of the stock market they could even do on this old computer.
I really like the designs of the old computers. They are so interesting. That's why I'm making a libretro frontend that loads 3D models http://vintagesimulator.com
Still have mine. And what I learned from it hasn't become obsolete yet. Those were the days of writing everything in assembly language, trying to cram your program into what now seems like a tiny amount of memory. I recall that memory was so tight that I'd use one byte to hold two different variables. Multi-tasking? Yep. We had vertical and horizontal blank interrupts that you could use. Magic times making that machine "sing"!
On the other hand, I don't know about other people, but I tire of the constant change of things that don't need to be changed. We in society have a large number of issues we need to confront, some that are vital to continued survival of our species. Instead of that, we still find our tools degrading by means that people like Apple claim are not planned obsolescence or software bloat for every update of Android that a once working phone moves to a crawl, etc, etc.
There is entropy, then there are social actors whose material interest clash with a life of sustainability adding to the drama we already must face in society.
On the other other hand, I like smartphones, I like GPS navigation, I like booking a hotel online, I like playing multiplayer games whenever, I like reading what celebrities are saying.
And all of those things you like were available, or could have existed, on phones 10 years ago. Except perhaps multiplayer games, depending upon how pretty you require your games to be.
Go on eBay and buy a Nokia E7 or a Blackberry 9700. It won't cost you much and it'll prove highly educational. Phones from 10 years ago were just terrible. Irredeemably, unremittingly terrible. If you believe otherwise, it's just the rose-tinted spectacles of nostalgia; five minutes with a working device will change your mind.
We’re coming up very soon on the release of the iPhone 3GS, which will be almost exactly 10 years. It was slower, but I don’t think that the 3GS was “unremittingly terrible”.
The iPhone 3G is pretty much the archetype for all modern smartphones, but it's still not a pleasant experience by modern standards.
Contra the "firmware bloat is deliberately making old devices useless" argument, a 3GS on the original firmware is miserably sluggish and laggy. With modern eyes, you become painfully aware of how Apple used animated UI transitions to disguise a fundamentally very slow device. The original iOS 3.0 firmware is also strikingly primitive - at launch, the exciting new feature was copy and paste.
3G connectivity is woefully, miserably slow when you're used to 4G. A 480x320 LCD is visibly pixelated, even when it's only 3.5". It feels like peering through a broken telescope. There's no front-facing camera, the main camera is terrible, the battery life is atrocious even with a new battery, the GPS receiver takes an eternity to get a location fix.
Try one out for ten minutes, try out the cheapest of contemporary Chinese smartphones and I guarantee that you'd prefer to keep the no-name Android phone.
Yes, this is all true... but at the time, it was still amazing! The comparison was not an Android phone, but a flip phone that could barely connect to the web... It was like night and day.
I remember years ago running the original MacPaint, ultra-optimized for the 8MHz 68000, on a Macintosh SE/30, and thinking "this is why the 68030 was considered a mainframe on a chip when it came out" even though at the time the 68030 was generally considered old and slow.
It all depends on exactly what software you're running on what hardware.
I liked the opening of "The Gods Must Be Crazy", in particular when they say "But he didn't know when to stop."
Here's the part of the script comparing the simple lives of the native bushmen of the Kalahari desert to "civilized man":
These Bushmen have never seen a stone or a rock in their lives.
The hardest things they know are wood and bone.
They live in a gentle world, where nothing is as hard as rock, steel or concrete.
Only miles to the south, there's a vast city.
And here you find civilized man.
Civilized man refused to adapt himself to his environment.
Instead he adapted his environment to suit him.
So he built cities, roads, vehicles, machinery.
And he put up power lines to run his labour-saving devices.
But he didn't know when to stop.
The more he improved his surroundings to make life easier...
...the more complicated he made it.
Now his children are sentenced to years of school, to learn...
...how to survive in this complex and hazardous habitat.
And civilized man, who refused to adapt to his surroundings...
...now finds he has to adapt and re-adapt...
...every hour of the day to his self-created environment.
This largely relies on the idea that pre-civilized life was preferable. And, for some groups, it was. All the women enjoying close to 0 sexual freedom and dying in child birth might disagree, though.
You'd be surprised. Longer breastfeeding suppresses ovulation and menstruation, so fertility is relatively rare. Childbirth works better squatting. Humans evolved to be hunter gatherers, most of our history is pre-settled-agriculture, we do fit that lifestyle better.
And patriarchy was never contingent on those things anyhow. It's just a cultural choice that got stuck because it was woven into the form of citified civilization.
So, I guess you're cool with the Darwinian aspect of childbirth, where we just let women bite it on their own, because if they can't survive the birthing process they must've been unfit organisms?
And oh yeah, what about that part where, as part of nomadic life (you know, living in undefended tents, encampments, shanty towns, what have you), guys can pretty much just take what they want when push comes to shove, and inseminate women according to any opportunity available (see also: orangutan mating strategies), like, you know, when it's dark at night and everyone's trying to sleep and no one is looking. And before you retort that such a thing is easier said than done, consider that the definition of success is not living well after the act of conception. As long as the proverbial toilet gets flushed, the pregnancy was mostly a runaway train, with few reliable undo buttons.
How do those aspects of sex differences fit into your world view of the old dastardly, dastardly patriarchy?
While some of it it's true, especially the longer breastfeeding cycles, hunter gatherers were very exposed to natural dangers and groups were very small and vulnerable: a sickness or an accident could whipe them away overnight.
Civilization creates these juggernauts that start moving and when they reach their goals their momentum carries them past need and reason.
How many laws do we need? Do we need more roads (or lanes)? Should taxes increase? in percentage!? Do we need to "add value" to every product ever? Do kids need more homework? Do you need another iPhone?
I'd say that passage says a lot more things than that, and I'm responding to them. It's part of the fairly resilient narrative of "it was better before" that I think is extremely not true. In my view, it is also nonetheless still not good enough, so I don't want it to "stop", depending on what you are defining as "it" here.
Most problems we currently face are not a result of civilization itself. Count of laws or roads doesn't seem very material to me. Adding value treadmills just indicate some failure points of capitalism. But everything else we had before was even worse.
What is the purpose of this exposition? We have many problems to fix, but none of them will get fixed by going backwards.
I never bought my first iPhone. I am however, not at the point at which I feel like the world should stop turning. I'm more like "ok, I am capable of selecting the good things from the bad, and letting go of the novel tech I don't like". Perhaps that is a product of being middle aged and I will feel differently when I am 80.
Douglas Adams wrote:
“I've come up with a set of rules that describe our reactions to technologies:
1. Anything that is in the world when you’re born is normal and ordinary and is just a natural part of the way the world works.
2. Anything that's invented between when you’re fifteen and thirty-five is new and exciting and revolutionary and you can probably get a career in it.
3. Anything invented after you're thirty-five is against the natural order of things.”
I like to look at classic car ads, and I saw one for a car from the 60s or whatever, and I forget the exact phrasing, but it said it had had a modern type of stereo installed, which had AM/FM and a CD player. Which I thought was funny, because that kind of pinpoints the assumed age/generation of a buyer. Going by Adams, someone who thinks car CDs are new, but good, could have been up to 35 in 1985 when the first car CD players came out. Which is exactly the age to remember mid to late 60s cars as desirable as a teenager. But now they are close to 70 years old, and that's why the prices of such cars are trending down.
I'm not sure that it's inevitable that you hate new things as you get older. Maybe it's more that people feel insecure about their ability to choose which new things they like, because it becomes a disorienting flood.
To answer this question we'd need to have the same fundamental believes. Many people apparently want to optimize for stuff like human happiness. Something else looks more relevant to me: Evolutionary fitness. The entire rational might be a bit out of scope for this post, so lets keep it at the observation that we seem to particularly care about what we consider our branch of live. I.e. own children > neighbors children > some fish. In the future probably also something AI related.
Actually, the question is still not easy to answer, even if you'd those same fundamentals. Both because effects of stuff like a $15 minimum wage on evolutionary fitness are incredibly hard to predict and out fitness function is theoretically steady a "1" until the last leaf dies. We have to make guesses based on highly incomplete data. But there are some predictions we can be quite confident in based on life on earth: Improving the ability to accumulate knowledge and manipulate our environment (or even yourselves) seems like a highly effective strategy. We should keep moving it forward as best as we can.
If that is in the form of millions of man hours "wasted" playing computer games and generations of obsolete graphic cards so those cards could become cheap and highly capable, in the process giving mankind tools to boost AI research, then so be it. Even if it makes life more complicated. Even if we need to learn a lot. Even if it requires tons of collaboration. I'm eager to witness all the other stuff we will come up with by mastering additional technologies.
Freezing or significantly slowing down technological progress in the name of what's natural seems crazy to me. I suppose we at least all agree to "only" have like 5b years to get off this rock. But waiting that long and in the mean time relying on subsistence farming doesn't seem like an optimal survival strategy...
I think that it's the same phenomenon as happens in many species, where something like horns starts from a random mutation and then becomes attractive to others, resulting in a runaway selection based on competing for mates right up until it becomes counterproductive enough. It's not something profoundly unique to Homo Sapiens.
Interestingly, I found the following link which mentions that there is a form of tumor in humans (that may or may not be benign) which produces horn-like protrusions. Obviously this is not generally considered attractive, but if it were, society would change!
I have an HP2420dn laser printer. I have had it so long I can't even remember when I bought it, but it has probably been around 20 years. Every 10 years or so it needs maintenance to replace the wear parts. Nowadays I can't find anyone who will do this work because new printers are so ridiculously cheap that the maintenance market has collapsed. So my perfectly serviceable printer is probably going to end up in the landfill. Sometimes I despair at the state of "civilization".
You are confusing so many things in your comment, that it is hard to decide where to start. I'll pick one.
> planned obsolescence
It amazes me that people keep using this term -- which was associated with washing machines in the 1940's -- to rant about buggy software and engineering improvements.
Stop perpetuating the myth. There is zero truth to it. (And before you say it: Slowing down older phones to account for battery decay and balance battery life is intentional and it PROLONGS the device ... exactly the opposite of planned obsolecense).
Apple does NOT plan to make your devices obsolete. I use an Ipod Mini from 2004 when I work out at the gym. It is 15 years old and works FINE. My iPhone 7 crashes weekly. Prior to that I used an iPhone 4 for six years until I kicked it down a storm drain. (Long story.)
> software bloat
OK. Two. This is due to technoculture determining how technology can be used. New features are added before old features are optimized, and software bloats and breaks. This is a result of pushing the boundaries of tech. Some features will survive the evolution, some will not. But it is not intentional, it is a side effect of insanely rapid development and productization due to customer demand.
No one has a gun to your head making you buy they latest tech. As long as people demand the latest and greatest, the industry will rush to provide. This is a consequence of accelerated innovation.
>Apple does NOT plan to make your devices obsolete.
Running on an upgraded late 2008 MacBook and running Mojave, but only thanks to people keeping it compatable as a hobby. According to Apple, this setup is obsolete and incompatable with Mojave.
I don't think there is a strict time cutoff, depends entirely on the hardware.
In this case, they bothered to make this thing with decent build quality and for that I thank them. It is even easily upgradable and the battery is accessable.
However, if I want dev tools to work on it, Apple requires me to use their recent OS, which they claim will not run on this hardware.
Now if they had a good point economically and it was a massive ballache requiring a lot of resources, then fair enough. But the patching utility appears to be the work of one person in their spare time, which in the grand scheme of things, especially since Apple is hardly strapped for cash and resources, does look like Apple have decided to economically obsolete this machine for reasons that have very little to do with it being technically obsolete.
Should they just stop adding features to their operating system because somebody has hardware from 11 years ago, though? More features means more resource usage, more resources aren't something you can fix with software. Hardware today isn't the same as what existed back then.
A laptop from 2008 will still run Windows 10, including the features that are not allowed on but the more modern Macbook laptops like night light.
Sandy Bridge laptops are not supported by Mojave and up, but will probably be softwarematically fine while continuing to get more features while running the latest versions of Linux or Windows. Amazing technologies like changing your wallpaper over the course of the day (GNOME in the '00s onward) or making your screen yellow are all supposedly not functional on macOS on those Sandy Bridge laptops.
If a company X doesn't want to support something, then they should open it (source code, hardware specs, ...) so someone else can continue to support it. Always having to trash something that is working fine is stupid.
For example, I have an old iPad2 (last Apple device I bought) that is working perfectly (the hardware). But I'm not able to install anything "new" on it because iOS 9 is no more supported by applications. Why Apple doesn't open specifications so i can install Linux on it to extends its life for many years to come?
I take an example from Apple but it's applicable to ANY companies.
As a teacher, I additionally see this from an edtech perspective.
The yearly cycle of education means that the next time I do something might not be until a year later. This is plenty of time for link rot or for an edtech start-up to go out of business (or even for a surviving company to break things in incompatible ways). This makes me reluctant to rely of technology in the classroom. Of course, a year is a long time in the tech world so these things are reasonable. In education, though, it feels like “I can’t believe I only used this website twice (I.e. two years) and they already went out of business.”
The core computing needs of the vast majority of people has not changed in the past 10-15 years or so (perhaps even more). Text processing, image/video editing, web browsing, spreadsheets, presentations, etc are all fundamentally the same. Sure, videos are now 4K instead of VGA, and webpages now weigh tens of megabytes instead of kilobytes; but the fundamental, underlying modes of creating and editing are the same. The worst part is that the experience was often better a decade or two ago! This is why you have professionals like GRR Martin using WordStar to do their deep work.
Even for programmers, the fact that many are still living in vim/emacs shows how little the core operations of computing have changed.
I would love an OS that focuses on offering stable, well integrated, well designed functionality and interfaces, and does not change every 12 months because the marketing/design people were bored. Releases would instead focus on stability, performance, and bug fixes. Adding support for new data formats as they appear would be required, but not in a way that needs to change anything on the end user side of things (your photo editor can now open/export HEIC, great!).
I know that most of my family would be happy with something like this, because I hear them complain all the time about how some software update changed where everything was, or even worse - removes functionality they needed.
In a weird way, I think the closest thing to this that exists today is Mathematica - reading interviews with Stephen Wolfram about how he uses it is fascinating. I’d want that, but for everyday users, not geeky mathematicians :)
If an article about an Atari 800 claiming to be the end-all-be-all for personal computers makes you think "There's something that didn't need changing!", I have absolutely no clue what to tell you
I still use my 800. Not every day, but probably three times a week. It's a great personal e-rolodex. I also like to paint with it. The games are just as fun as anything current, and the power usage is low.
The Commodore 64 has better sound and the graphics are more flexible in putting colors in more places and more larger sprites. This is great for games and the C64 would have been just as successful as a game console, and perhaps more successful as one.
The Atari 800 is better in virtually every other respect. It has an actual OS instead of a KERNAL, the SIO bus is what modern USB was based on and is better than the IEC bus as it is not crippled to tape speed like the IEC bus is and supports a tape drive and modem in addition to floppy drives and printers. It has a 256 color palette and more video modes. The 6502 CPU is faster. The DOS is easier to use with a menu instead of arcane commands. The BASIC is friendlier with sound and graphic commands, although slower. It can autoboot from tape and disk.
I had a C64 as a teen but today I appreciate the Atari 800 much more. It's an amazing system and the designers went on to design the Amiga, which was effectively a 16-bit version of the Atari 800 utilizing the same 3 custom chip design.
The C64 was more popular because it was less expensive and better for playing games, but it wasn't a better computer.
Good tech summary. I grew up on Atari 8-bit and loved the technical details that got out. The C64 owners I met tended to hack less. I pretty much learned to code disassembling ROM and AtariDOS and making custom patched versions (and of course games). I would get into the zone with the macro assembler editor like I was meditating and say "I'm in medit" if anyone interrupted me.
Bill Budge's Pinball Construction Set blew my mind and I probably became a programming tool developer because of it.
I once saw a TV commercial for a non-name-brand PC with one of the first x86-64 CPUs. It seemed decent enough but it wasn't that much faster than 32-bit machines of the day, and I doubt it had enough RAM slots to break 4GB, anyway. They repeatedly claimed that 64 bits meant it was "the last computer you would ever need to buy".
Back in those days, claims that a system will never become obsolete were pretty common as marketing nonsense.
I think that particular lie (and it was always a lie) came up so often because technology was advancing at an incredible rate, and it made people reluctant to buy computers because they knew that it was going to be obsolete in less than a year. The old "joke" -- funny because it was true -- was that a computer was obsolete the minute you took it out of the box.
The pace of hardware change has slowed considerably since then -- now advances are more along the lines of "the same thing, but faster and/or smaller". Worthy advances, to be sure, but nothing that makes last year's machines garbage.
So let me think... Things I've used to store data in my lifetime:
Punch cards, Cassette,
Whatever that big, open, orange multi-platter with a plastic, removable cover I think on a VAX in ~1985 (anyone know?),
8" floppy,
5.25 floppy,
Spinning hard disk,
SSD,
Flash drives (many types),
3.5" 'floppy' or hard? SONY,
more I'm sure...
I really like the aesthetics of the Atari 400/800 and not for the logo or the case design but just for the colours. The browns/yellows/oranges are quite inspiring for a bit of modern day UX.
I know they didn't sell these machines for people to steal the colour scheme from 40 years later, but I really like lots of aspects of the design including the colour or the units.
The retro tech scene I find a little weird. It is surprisingly strong and there are Youtube videos of someone changing the capacitors on these things and getting views in the millions. It is as if retro computing is the new model railway hobby or 'Airfix' of our times.
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[ 3.5 ms ] story [ 240 ms ] threadhttps://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pndX0YNA70s
Depends on what your definition of "obsolete" is, I suppose.
I mean, the paintings at Altamira are still admired today, 36 thousand years after they were made.
Not surprising IMHO. These machines had 30+ years to be thoroughly analyzed, obscure hardware tricks found, undocumented features documented, etc. We have internet now and all this knowledge is relatively easy to access. Back then you had perhaps a magazine, two books and a limited social circle to work with.
Not to mention how much easier everything is when you have a powerful computer to develop on. You can precalculate complex things, there are decent text editors, graphics editors, assemblers, disassemblers, emulators, etc. Compare that to the fact that for a lot of micros in 1980s the edit-run-debug cycle included a pencil and a notebook.
But I think what I liked best about it was the memory banking. There was RAM installed in the same address space as the system ROMs. You could always write to the RAM, and could choose whether reading would happen from the RAM or the ROM.
This meant that you could easily modify the system by copying the ROM contents into the underlying RAM and then edit them to your heart's content. Or just turn the ROM off entirely and write machine code utilizing the full 64K.
It was tons of fun.
Also, although this is not C64 specific, I loved the floppy drive because it was a real standalone computer in its own right, which you could program. This let you do multiprocessor stuff back when multiprocessor systems were expensive niche things.
I did that! Got a trip to the International Science Fair for it.
https://bookofjoe.typepad.com/.a/6a00d8341c5dea53ef01a73dea5... [IMG]
I recalled the MAME thing and the idea of installing a modern PC platform in a retro arcade cabinet, i think and old borked atari cabinet with a harddrive dock in place of the rom port would be a cool looking place for a gaming[mame-ing] PC.
M.U.L.E. Is still one of the best games ever made. They had another game called Seven Cities of Gold. It was pretty fun too. I doubt you could make that game today but it was fun to play with friends on the reservation.
(Luckily, MAME runs Atari M.U.L.E. beautifully under Linux.)
The BBC Micro itself was used to design the first ARM, and the 6502 was a strong influence on that RISC design.
https://www.theregister.co.uk/2012/05/03/unsung_heroes_of_te...
The Atari 800 is in some ways an ancestor of the ARM platform, realizing that ARM itself adapts wildly in efforts to maintain a dominant position in mobile computing (i.e. the Thumb variable-length "RISC" instruction set, massive 64-bit architecture changes).
How do you figure that? The 6502 was itself based on the Motorola 6800, and is a pretty typical accumulator architecture. It could hardly be any more different from the ARM.
The development of the ARM architecture was carried out on 6502-based systems -- but only because they were conveniently available, not because there was anything special about that processor that guided development.
I'm sure I read somewhere that the 6502's low interrupt latency was also an influence (the 8-bit Acorn stuff was IRQ-heavy, no DMA), but clearly it wasn't in the above PDF, so I've no idea where this came from :( - but this might not be 6502 influence necessarily, as the Z80's IRQ latency looks OK, maybe just a desire not to fuck it up like the 68000.
ARM SBC is like 6502 SBC, just an ADD with inverted input... so... maybe that counts?!
The 6502 influence is indeed not all that visible in the programming model or instruction set, but I don't think this is a bad thing.
On the flip side: it also means that the processor can't run any faster than memory, which is not great.
Anyways, the 6502 uses a rather narrow 8-bit data bus with no cache, so instruction fetch takes up the majority of memory accesses -- in fact, I'm not sure you can get under 50% of memory accesses used for instruction fetch without pathological instruction sequences. It's incredibly inefficient by modern standards; even 68000 was an improvement in this regard.
By using the word "obsolete," the communicator is being--intentionally or unintentionally--intellectually shallow. Even if the word serves their purpose, they are also wrong in a big way.
The fact is, this machine still does what it started out to do, technically speaking. If you look up the dictionary definition of obsolescence though, you'll find some really terrible news: "no longer useful." An Atari 800 is no longer useful? That's arguable, to say the very least.
The best way to communicate obsolescence with accuracy, precision, and rationality is with a reference point, like a market: "This tool no longer serves its original target market with the efficacy that it once did." This is much more precise. However, it opens the door to another depth question: Which markets or sub-markets might it _still_ serve, and even speak to rather loudly?
IMO the discourse of obsolescence is a curse on modern civilization. We are missing out on some huge _qualitative growth_ lessons until we learn to think in a more nuanced way about how technology serves us all.
Except mercury delay line memory is completely uninteresting except as a footnote to computer history, which doesn't change the fact they're heavy, expensive to run, and quite fragile. And I don't consider "It's a museum piece!" to mean something isn't obsolete.
What I'm saying is, think about the long tail and the extraction of value from this technology. It's far from incapable. I don't know about you, but I could plan a global economic takeover on an 800; still can. I can also teach someone else to do so. In fact, it's easier to stay focused. There's no malware and comparatively little practical need for encryption.
We waste a lot of qualitative profit as we march forward in search of breadth. Here we are robbed blind by the obsolescence model, which imparts heavy bias to our thinking.
But it will be painfully slow, unreliable, and potentially expensive compared to more modern alternatives.
No one is really being robbed here - because there's a point where incremental changes in technology mean that a product becomes qualitatively different. Not just faster, but able to do things that an older product can't.
In this example the qualitative differences are obvious. You can't make calls, watch videos, browse the web, develop modern software, play modern games, write modern documents, or print them with a modern printer.
You can still do some very simple programming on it, but you can't share the code without hard-to-find extras.
So - obsolete. It's capable of some extremely limited applications, none of which are particularly useful. And it's quite useless for anything else.
I'm sure that machine will still power on after in 20 years. Try that with today's flimsy throwaway junk.
I can't think of any modern machines that will be unusable in 5 years. Even my smartphone is 7 years old and still perfectly fine.
Until a few years back, I regularly used an old Cromemco System III computer that was built in 1979 (it has since been donated to a computer museum).
Please don't take this as sneering -because I'm genuinely interested in late 70s micros!- but what did you use the system 3 for? Can you tell me about it as a computer? It's not a computer I know much about and I'm interested in what you would've used it for, especially recently.
I forget the system clock speed, but I think it was around 2 MHz. The thing was made of steel, weighed over 100lbs, and contained 4 8-inch floppy drives (combined capacity for all four was about 2.5 megs, I think, but it may have been 5). The one I had contained an insane 512 megs of RAM. If I remember correctly, the one I had was purchased new for somewhere in the neighborhood of $10,000 (1979, which is about $35,000 today). This was, at the time, serious hardware. It even did high-resolution graphics that would (barely) still be considered high-resolution today.
Turning it on literally made my lights dim momentarily and sounded like a jet engine spooling up. It was glorious.
Nothing about it is practical in today's terms, of course.
I had fun doing things like writing compilers and software to use it as the coordinator for a crazy project I was engaging in at the time: I had networked 10 Kaypro IIs together with it and was using the entire combined system as a single multi-CPU computing machine.
What I mostly did with it, though, was to experiment with hardware. The System III was an S-100 bus machine, and did not even have a motherboard as we think of them these days. It had a backplane that you installed cards into to provide all functionality. This made it really fun and easy to experiment with changes that would, in a modern machine, have required altering the motherboard.
Actually, not only you can use an SD card as mass storage without much effort, thanks to the many people who build modern peripherals for the SIO bus, but you can probably telnet and ssh as much as you want from it (smart modem-like network interfaces). If I wanted, my Atari XE (mostly an 800, slightly modernized) could easily be used for light local text editing.
See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intel_Management_Engine
Some people are taking classic cars and converting them to electric power, without changing the fact that they are basically un-aerodynamic deathtraps and without even getting rid of the manual transmission. That may not be what you consider optimum, but it is logical given some peoples' values.
This is one of my dreams! I own an awesome 67 Pontiac wagon which is a lot of fun, but after decades of riding in modern vehicles you just can't help noticing how much louder and smellier everything is with an old carbureted v8. It's wonderful to be able to pop open the hood and make sense of what's going on in there, but I'd still trade that engine in a heartbeat for a quiet electric in the same exterior.
Think of an Atari 800 as a small cluster of specialized computers each doing its own thing, connected through a serial bus. BTW, other computers of the time, most notably the C64/128, also did that.
I spend my weekdays in front of a computer that has two displays daisy-chained through a serial bus. The hard drives are on other serial buses, just because I have a couple extra ports.
So, I'm saying you can't forget that any computer is probably more useful than you think, given suitable software. These days, it should be easier than ever to make an interface for something weird, given the resources for hobbyists like FPGAs. I remember 15-20 years ago, when I had access to a "Fat" Mac 512K which had pretty much no software including an OS, and I wondered if I could do something with it, because I had recently been learning about Linux. I didn't go very far with the experiment, but I copied some minimal hand assembled bootstrap code to the boot sector of a floppy (avoiding any problems with the drive being unreliable at reading large amounts of data) and then I rewired a Mac printer cable to connect it to the PC serial port, and I got the Mac to download an image to its framebuffer. I didn't have the motivation or stick-to-it-ivness to continue, but I had the vision at the time of a Mac as a terminal for Linux.
This iterative evolution continues to this day on PC with the existence of Bluetooth being on motherboards now instead of being a PCI card or USB dongle you would install.
And there is a great example of going too far in the console gaming space: the Sega MD at the end of its lifespan, with the 32X and CD modules, was a hulking beast with a tangled mess of cables and power cords.
I love making old hardware do new tricks, but I sure as hell wouldn't use it to watch YouTube or debug software on. Not even 'sceners do that.
Comparisons to YouTube while amusing are more like a smoke screen. Obscures value, sure. But also there's not much to it. It's not a substantially deep commentary on the Atari; it's a commentary on the market reference point. And my point is that you've got to understand the Atari first; the unique market part comes after.
I wouldn't recommend watching YouTube on an Atari either. :-)
The debate is that he is of the opinion that tabletop games (particularly ones with complex scoring or recordkeeping) should be computerized. I am of the opinion that they should not, because when you change the form factor, you are changing the game even if all the rules remain the same. We are humans, and as humans, physicality matters to us.
I think that the same thing comes into play with old-school hardware. The hardware itself is important, and no amount of emulation can really replace it.
My friend and I will never agree on this with tabletop games, and that's OK. You and I may equally never agree about old-school hardware, and that's also OK.
Modern hardware that I've got:
1. Mid-2015 13" Macbook Pro, mostly idle, battery charged, screen fully dimmed: 11W (16W with screen at full brightness)
2. My 2011 i7-2600K desktop: ~100W idle (packed away right now - but it's about that)
I happen to have my old Acorn junk set up right now, so here's some measurements from that:
1. BBC Master 128: 12W
2. BBC Micro model B: 25W
And some other Acorn peripherals. Add these figures to either of the above:
1. Acorn 6502 second processor: 5W
2. 5.25" disc drive: 2W (when in use)
3. Ancient early-80s monitor of unknown provenance: 50W
4. Acorn-branded CM8833: 85W
Looks like my favourite Acorn-branded monitor is actually pretty bad :( - however it's not actually drawing a huge amount more than the 2 x 27" monitor setup I have with my Macbook Pro, even though the pixels per watt isn't quite as good.
In fact: the overall power draw for BBC Master 128 setup vs Macbook Pro setup, both period-authentic, both (if not cutting edge for the time) up to the task of a good range of period-authentic workloads, is about the same! - and even if I was certain 1000x was an overestimate, this is still a bit of a surprise...
Move to the microcontroller world, though, and 1000x is a vast underestimate. The main core in a current project of mine runs at 24 MHz and draws around 1.2 mW without even entering sleep. This system could probably emulate a Master 128 just fine in real time, for about 1/10,000x the power.
The Master 128 runs at 2MHz. For each emulated microsecond you need to (broadly speaking) do at least 2 CPU updates, 2 VIA updates, and 16 bitmap bits/1 teletext glyph. 24MHz = 24 cycles per emulated µsec :( - good luck even squeezing the video output into that, let alone the other stuff. Rather you than me!
(This also ignores handling the FDC, ADC, and ACIA. The devices accessed via the VIA will also take a bit of time to emulate...)
My macbook pro is only drawing 15W because it also includes a monitor and keyboard and happens to be plugged in. Otherwise I can emulate a data center worth of these machines without drawing ANY additional power ;)
Machines wear out. If I can't get service manuals or replacement parts, then it's no longer useful, even for its original purpose.
I've thrown out more than a couple pieces of computer hardware, over the years, which were almost certainly 99% fine, but unrepairable.
On ebay right now, I see 6 "Atari 800" machines. 1 is advertised as "working".
Repairability is dependent on your skillset and interest, though. Aside from machines that used custom chips and those chips failing (and even then, you can usually replace those with modern tech combined with effort and ingenuity), I can't think of any old-school machines (and very few modern machines) that are actually unrepairable.
The best way to understand this thinking is to look at people who already employ it. Look at the people using fountain pens and Gregg shorthand in 2019. And did you hear about the Polish auto shop that was using a C64 well into the 21st century?
We junk really, really good standalone ideas because human psychology determines that they don't fit into an emerging network of systems. This creates literal tons of waste at a personal and individual-business level and forces humans to think in unsustainable ways about what technology is and how it's used. We need new models to help us address the qualitative problems within the tech world.
I was happy with my C64, but the 1541 drive kept failing (even 25 years ago). As a user, I'm able to ignore network effects for the device's use. That's merely an inconvenience. I can't ignore network effects for repair and maintenance. That will turn it into a fancy paperweight.
It's not like a pen and shorthand. Those I can use even if no company wants to support me. I could even make my own pen, without too much trouble, if somehow all pen companies went out of business next week.
Obsolete (Adj.): no longer used or needed, usually because something newer and better has replaced it.
It doesn't matter whether the Atari 800 still does something. It's so bad compared to newer options that there is no circumstance where it's the best available option. We live in a world where a 32-bit microcontroller costs about the same as a banana. $10 buys you a single-board computer with roughly the same performance as a mid-00s desktop.
Human effort is worth something. So is energy, so are raw materials. Keeping old, crappy stuff just isn't a good use of resources when new stuff is immeasurably better and ludicrously cheap. Melt down the old stuff for scrap metal, burn the plastics for fuel and use that material and energy to do something more useful.
I'm not sure this is true. At the very least, it's not hard to imagine circumstances where it's the best available option for recreational use (hacking on, programming for, etc.)
> Keeping old, crappy stuff just isn't a good use of resources when new stuff is immeasurably better and ludicrously cheap.
It isn't a good use of your resources. But it can be a perfectly fine use of resources for someone else. It all depends on what turns your gears.
I would tend to define obsolescence based on the task. (Arguably this is just the "micro" definition corresponding to your market-based "macro" version.) Obsolescence is when another alternative exists for doing the task, that improves on the previous alternative to a sufficient degree that you prefer it, and don't see yourself ever willingly going back to the previous alternative.
Just to pick some random domain, from outside computers: Steelmaking/metallurgical technology at the turn of the 20th century tended to produce a relatively high carbon-content steel, which was more brittle, especially at low temperatures, and could cause a ship to crack, take on water, and sink. As steel tech improved, and new ships were built with the newer steels, those failures started happening less often. Steels that were less "hard" but more "tough" made navigation safer.
On the other hand, and maybe to your point, most of those older ships of the higher-carbon steel, that didn't sink, were still able to serve out their service lives. Maybe if you found a way to put them on routes in warmer waters, you could've extended their lives even more. Which, translating to your conception, would be adapting to the new market or sub-market.
So hey, at least for shipbuilding, your model seems to fit!
The idea of obsolescence reflects an often unquestioned bias toward, or belief in, progress. If that which is newer or came later is always better, and if we're always (or mostly) moving forward in a more-or-less unbroken arc of steady unalloyed progress, then of course older things are obsolete. When in fact it's usually more complex than that. For example when moving to a newer technology, there's often something else desirable that has to be sacrificed, or that gets ruined, in order to get the improvement. So progress is rarely unalloyed (no pun intended given the steel talk above), and obsolescence is also, rarely unalloyed.
I mean, drinking soda and gaming is practically a meme at this point, so goodbye to all those customers. And anyone else who wants a beverage while they edit photos or do their taxes.
I'm not trying to sell anything. I'm just concerned for the longevity of your computing hardware.
In contrast to the IBM-compatible PC form factor, the idea that you'd want to embed the computer into the monitor or keyboard, or replace the tower enclosure with a hockey-puck sized amalgamation of microscopic, proprietary, ESD-sensitive parts held together with glue, is a little crazy.
I admit there's a place for laptop computers, but I don't think that most of those use cases require aerospace-grade thinness and lightness to the extent that it precludes serviceability. Or maybe I'm just bitter over the fact that my high-end E-ATX silent case now houses a mini-ITX board with a single graphics card and onboard M2 storage, and I can't find a replacement that I like for my aging Thinkpad...
(I plug in two monitors, keyboard, mouse, ect.)
I can understand needing a standalone, modular computer, if you're actually doing things that require a very powerful computer.
At that point I was thrilled that I could get rid of a KVM.
I've never owned an AIO, and I'm not sure I'll ever "get it." But then I'm just not the target audience for that particular niche market.
I'd even prefer my laptops to be more "upgradeable", but lately they come with LPDDR3 soldered on, and if I'm really lucky, I can maybe install a SATA or M2 drive.
It also reminds me of a Brother computer/typewriter/printer I used for a while. Thermal built-in printer and a 3-row LCD display.
With all the brand new tech in the house, whenever friends or kids visit, the first things they play with are the tunrtable and the typewriter that's nearing a century old.
https://www.pckeyboard.com/page/category/UKBD
"Unicomp was started in 1996 when we purchased keyboard technology from Lexmark International and IBM. You may recall that Lexmark manufactured the high quality Model M keyboards for IBM computers and terminals prior to 1996. Many of the same people, who in 1995 helped produce millions of keyboards for Lexmark customers, continue to manufacture keyboards for us today. Our goal is to build on our heritage and continue to provide our customers with the highest quality keyboard products."
In any event, I've been very happy with their products. It's like 1988 all over again for me.
The keyboard was terrible, but I am nostalgic for it. Those raised bumps that surround each "key", the on-trend brown and yellow scheme. That thing was built like a tank.
Also, same typing feel as a 2019 Macbook, but with better dust resistance!
> I built myself a custom PC inside one of my favorite mechanical keyboards, a dampened Happy Hacking Keyboard Professional Type 2 S
His main argument was that the memory and CPU limitations helped curtail software feature bloat. When asked about the possibility of advanced Multimedia features becoming more desired among consumers, he shrugged it off, saying an expansion peripheral would do the job just as well as buying a new machine, without having to learn a new machine entirely.
Now that we have cartridges for the C64 that allow for massive data storage and 32+ Megs of RAM, maybe he was right. We could have all been using C64s or Amigas with a ton of expansion cards/carts installed.
I think there's some truth to this - if you have a limited amount of RAM, you can't just throw RAM away and do the easy thing. You have to be careful with it. The flip side of that is of course one man's feature bloat is another man's valuable feature, and some things just _won't_ fit in the limited amount of RAM.
And that's just for text! It's stunning to me how inefficient text can be when every byte counts.
When I started viewing computing in terms of connectivity, the device categories and developments made a lot more sense. We were fine with switches and printouts - except that we wanted to input and retrieve things faster, so we ended up with display, keyboard and mouse, storage media and networking, etc. The Turing Machine parts are important, for sure, but they are most important in pushing the I/O to capacity, and only sometimes get to exercise abstract computing prowess.
There is entropy, then there are social actors whose material interest clash with a life of sustainability adding to the drama we already must face in society.
Contra the "firmware bloat is deliberately making old devices useless" argument, a 3GS on the original firmware is miserably sluggish and laggy. With modern eyes, you become painfully aware of how Apple used animated UI transitions to disguise a fundamentally very slow device. The original iOS 3.0 firmware is also strikingly primitive - at launch, the exciting new feature was copy and paste.
3G connectivity is woefully, miserably slow when you're used to 4G. A 480x320 LCD is visibly pixelated, even when it's only 3.5". It feels like peering through a broken telescope. There's no front-facing camera, the main camera is terrible, the battery life is atrocious even with a new battery, the GPS receiver takes an eternity to get a location fix.
Try one out for ten minutes, try out the cheapest of contemporary Chinese smartphones and I guarantee that you'd prefer to keep the no-name Android phone.
It all depends on exactly what software you're running on what hardware.
Here's the part of the script comparing the simple lives of the native bushmen of the Kalahari desert to "civilized man":
And patriarchy was never contingent on those things anyhow. It's just a cultural choice that got stuck because it was woven into the form of citified civilization.
And oh yeah, what about that part where, as part of nomadic life (you know, living in undefended tents, encampments, shanty towns, what have you), guys can pretty much just take what they want when push comes to shove, and inseminate women according to any opportunity available (see also: orangutan mating strategies), like, you know, when it's dark at night and everyone's trying to sleep and no one is looking. And before you retort that such a thing is easier said than done, consider that the definition of success is not living well after the act of conception. As long as the proverbial toilet gets flushed, the pregnancy was mostly a runaway train, with few reliable undo buttons.
How do those aspects of sex differences fit into your world view of the old dastardly, dastardly patriarchy?
> Childbirth works better squatting.
I would like to see citations indicating that these statements are true to a significant degree that modern improvements are of little value.
I can't even find data on maternal mortality before 1800.
The point was "knowing when to stop".
Civilization creates these juggernauts that start moving and when they reach their goals their momentum carries them past need and reason.
How many laws do we need? Do we need more roads (or lanes)? Should taxes increase? in percentage!? Do we need to "add value" to every product ever? Do kids need more homework? Do you need another iPhone?
Most problems we currently face are not a result of civilization itself. Count of laws or roads doesn't seem very material to me. Adding value treadmills just indicate some failure points of capitalism. But everything else we had before was even worse.
What is the purpose of this exposition? We have many problems to fix, but none of them will get fixed by going backwards.
Douglas Adams wrote: “I've come up with a set of rules that describe our reactions to technologies: 1. Anything that is in the world when you’re born is normal and ordinary and is just a natural part of the way the world works. 2. Anything that's invented between when you’re fifteen and thirty-five is new and exciting and revolutionary and you can probably get a career in it. 3. Anything invented after you're thirty-five is against the natural order of things.”
I like to look at classic car ads, and I saw one for a car from the 60s or whatever, and I forget the exact phrasing, but it said it had had a modern type of stereo installed, which had AM/FM and a CD player. Which I thought was funny, because that kind of pinpoints the assumed age/generation of a buyer. Going by Adams, someone who thinks car CDs are new, but good, could have been up to 35 in 1985 when the first car CD players came out. Which is exactly the age to remember mid to late 60s cars as desirable as a teenager. But now they are close to 70 years old, and that's why the prices of such cars are trending down.
I'm not sure that it's inevitable that you hate new things as you get older. Maybe it's more that people feel insecure about their ability to choose which new things they like, because it becomes a disorienting flood.
Actually, the question is still not easy to answer, even if you'd those same fundamentals. Both because effects of stuff like a $15 minimum wage on evolutionary fitness are incredibly hard to predict and out fitness function is theoretically steady a "1" until the last leaf dies. We have to make guesses based on highly incomplete data. But there are some predictions we can be quite confident in based on life on earth: Improving the ability to accumulate knowledge and manipulate our environment (or even yourselves) seems like a highly effective strategy. We should keep moving it forward as best as we can. If that is in the form of millions of man hours "wasted" playing computer games and generations of obsolete graphic cards so those cards could become cheap and highly capable, in the process giving mankind tools to boost AI research, then so be it. Even if it makes life more complicated. Even if we need to learn a lot. Even if it requires tons of collaboration. I'm eager to witness all the other stuff we will come up with by mastering additional technologies.
Freezing or significantly slowing down technological progress in the name of what's natural seems crazy to me. I suppose we at least all agree to "only" have like 5b years to get off this rock. But waiting that long and in the mean time relying on subsistence farming doesn't seem like an optimal survival strategy...
Interestingly, I found the following link which mentions that there is a form of tumor in humans (that may or may not be benign) which produces horn-like protrusions. Obviously this is not generally considered attractive, but if it were, society would change!
https://www.quora.com/How-can-natural-selection-explain-the-...
I have an HP2420dn laser printer. I have had it so long I can't even remember when I bought it, but it has probably been around 20 years. Every 10 years or so it needs maintenance to replace the wear parts. Nowadays I can't find anyone who will do this work because new printers are so ridiculously cheap that the maintenance market has collapsed. So my perfectly serviceable printer is probably going to end up in the landfill. Sometimes I despair at the state of "civilization".
> planned obsolescence
It amazes me that people keep using this term -- which was associated with washing machines in the 1940's -- to rant about buggy software and engineering improvements.
Stop perpetuating the myth. There is zero truth to it. (And before you say it: Slowing down older phones to account for battery decay and balance battery life is intentional and it PROLONGS the device ... exactly the opposite of planned obsolecense).
Apple does NOT plan to make your devices obsolete. I use an Ipod Mini from 2004 when I work out at the gym. It is 15 years old and works FINE. My iPhone 7 crashes weekly. Prior to that I used an iPhone 4 for six years until I kicked it down a storm drain. (Long story.)
> software bloat
OK. Two. This is due to technoculture determining how technology can be used. New features are added before old features are optimized, and software bloats and breaks. This is a result of pushing the boundaries of tech. Some features will survive the evolution, some will not. But it is not intentional, it is a side effect of insanely rapid development and productization due to customer demand.
No one has a gun to your head making you buy they latest tech. As long as people demand the latest and greatest, the industry will rush to provide. This is a consequence of accelerated innovation.
Running on an upgraded late 2008 MacBook and running Mojave, but only thanks to people keeping it compatable as a hobby. According to Apple, this setup is obsolete and incompatable with Mojave.
In this case, they bothered to make this thing with decent build quality and for that I thank them. It is even easily upgradable and the battery is accessable.
However, if I want dev tools to work on it, Apple requires me to use their recent OS, which they claim will not run on this hardware.
Now if they had a good point economically and it was a massive ballache requiring a lot of resources, then fair enough. But the patching utility appears to be the work of one person in their spare time, which in the grand scheme of things, especially since Apple is hardly strapped for cash and resources, does look like Apple have decided to economically obsolete this machine for reasons that have very little to do with it being technically obsolete.
That's why I put more ram in it.
Sandy Bridge laptops are not supported by Mojave and up, but will probably be softwarematically fine while continuing to get more features while running the latest versions of Linux or Windows. Amazing technologies like changing your wallpaper over the course of the day (GNOME in the '00s onward) or making your screen yellow are all supposedly not functional on macOS on those Sandy Bridge laptops.
How long is it reasonable?
One of the reasons I have heard about people buying Apple hardware is that it has great resale value.
So the answer is: Long enough to keep this true.
If Apple keeps its current path, people will stop buying Apple hardware and it will hurt Apple's bottom line.
But yes, I concede they have the money to make mistakes for about 20 years. So they do make the mistakes.
For example, I have an old iPad2 (last Apple device I bought) that is working perfectly (the hardware). But I'm not able to install anything "new" on it because iOS 9 is no more supported by applications. Why Apple doesn't open specifications so i can install Linux on it to extends its life for many years to come?
I take an example from Apple but it's applicable to ANY companies.
The yearly cycle of education means that the next time I do something might not be until a year later. This is plenty of time for link rot or for an edtech start-up to go out of business (or even for a surviving company to break things in incompatible ways). This makes me reluctant to rely of technology in the classroom. Of course, a year is a long time in the tech world so these things are reasonable. In education, though, it feels like “I can’t believe I only used this website twice (I.e. two years) and they already went out of business.”
Even for programmers, the fact that many are still living in vim/emacs shows how little the core operations of computing have changed.
I would love an OS that focuses on offering stable, well integrated, well designed functionality and interfaces, and does not change every 12 months because the marketing/design people were bored. Releases would instead focus on stability, performance, and bug fixes. Adding support for new data formats as they appear would be required, but not in a way that needs to change anything on the end user side of things (your photo editor can now open/export HEIC, great!).
I know that most of my family would be happy with something like this, because I hear them complain all the time about how some software update changed where everything was, or even worse - removes functionality they needed.
In a weird way, I think the closest thing to this that exists today is Mathematica - reading interviews with Stephen Wolfram about how he uses it is fascinating. I’d want that, but for everyday users, not geeky mathematicians :)
The Atari 800 is better in virtually every other respect. It has an actual OS instead of a KERNAL, the SIO bus is what modern USB was based on and is better than the IEC bus as it is not crippled to tape speed like the IEC bus is and supports a tape drive and modem in addition to floppy drives and printers. It has a 256 color palette and more video modes. The 6502 CPU is faster. The DOS is easier to use with a menu instead of arcane commands. The BASIC is friendlier with sound and graphic commands, although slower. It can autoboot from tape and disk.
I had a C64 as a teen but today I appreciate the Atari 800 much more. It's an amazing system and the designers went on to design the Amiga, which was effectively a 16-bit version of the Atari 800 utilizing the same 3 custom chip design.
The C64 was more popular because it was less expensive and better for playing games, but it wasn't a better computer.
Bill Budge's Pinball Construction Set blew my mind and I probably became a programming tool developer because of it.
I think that particular lie (and it was always a lie) came up so often because technology was advancing at an incredible rate, and it made people reluctant to buy computers because they knew that it was going to be obsolete in less than a year. The old "joke" -- funny because it was true -- was that a computer was obsolete the minute you took it out of the box.
The pace of hardware change has slowed considerably since then -- now advances are more along the lines of "the same thing, but faster and/or smaller". Worthy advances, to be sure, but nothing that makes last year's machines garbage.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Disk_pack
I really like the aesthetics of the Atari 400/800 and not for the logo or the case design but just for the colours. The browns/yellows/oranges are quite inspiring for a bit of modern day UX.
I know they didn't sell these machines for people to steal the colour scheme from 40 years later, but I really like lots of aspects of the design including the colour or the units.
The retro tech scene I find a little weird. It is surprisingly strong and there are Youtube videos of someone changing the capacitors on these things and getting views in the millions. It is as if retro computing is the new model railway hobby or 'Airfix' of our times.