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Comment by rbanffy | Hacker News Reader

desktop?

You know... You could hook up VGA and a couple USB ports to a microcontroller, run Linux and call it a desktop computer, but you would be lying.

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Yeah, because how could anyone use a computer without wobbly windows!?

(Go back in time 20 years, and multiuser timesharing systems had lower specs than this. And a lot of good CS work was done on these systems; UNIX written, Emacs written, Vi written, gcc written, etc.)

Well, and then there was Firefox. Which simply won't run on old hardware, at least not in a current version. And not at all to mention YouTube or anything a more powerful computer requiring site. (GMail anyone?)

As much as I love keeping old computers alive using Linux, the nowadays common way using the web puts the spoke into the wheel.

the common way using the web puts the spoke into the wheel

Wheels fall apart if you take the spokes out. Pretty sure this was not the analogy you were looking for.

Using current browsers with fast javascript engines sites like GMail work fine on 300Mhz machines.

> (Go back in time 20 years, and multiuser timesharing systems had lower specs than this. And a lot of good CS work was done on these systems; UNIX written, Emacs written, Vi written, gcc written, etc.)

I was there. That doesn't change the fact people expect different things from a desktop computer these days.

You know... You could run CP/M out of something the size of a coin if you really wanted to.

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