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Comment by chongli | Hacker News Reader

This is fantastic. I own a Macintosh Classic that still worked fine the last time I booted it up (about a year ago). I've been afraid to keep it powered on for very long lest the capacitors leak. When I get some time (probably after school) I will look at replacing all of the capacitors with tantalum. Then see about finding a way to connect it to the network.

There's so much classic Mac software out there to be used. It's actually pretty amazing how productive you can be on a machine so many orders of magnitude slower than today's computers. The low latency of the classic Mac UI is a testament to the genius and hard work of Bill Atkinson. [1]

[1] https://www.folklore.org/StoryView.py?project=Macintosh&stor...

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I’ve been thinking several years now practically nothing I do at work on a computer can’t be done on a computer from 1995. The tools have been improved a bit and made worse in other places but the basic work if you’re not in a compute heavy field is pretty much the same.

Lack of support for modern ciphers and secure protocols becomes a deal-breaker pretty quickly if you need to access the internet much (including third-party email servers).

I wouldn' be surprised if you run NetBSD or even OpenBSD on a 1995 computer. There's your modern ciphers and secure protocols.

NetBSD can run on most Amiga's with a MMU and 24MB or better [1]. That's either an A3000 (1990) with memory expansion or pretty much any model with a 68020 + MMU + RAM accelerator board. I don't know if you could get it to run on an Amiga 1000, but certainly on a 500 or 2000. So a 1987 computer... Though most of the accelerator boards that are easy to obtain today are newly manufactured FPGA based ones...

(NetBSD will probably run on older hardware than that too - it's just I remember people running it on Amiga's, so it's the one I'm aware of)

[1] https://wiki.netbsd.org/ports/amiga/

I've always wanted to try NetBSD on Amiga but I sold my MMU-equipped accelerator long ago. It'd be symbolically nice: a Unix clone running on the Amiga and Workbench clone running on the PPC Mac...

There are completely new accelerator boards being brought out for Amiga regularly, so you still can...

Of course at this point most of them replace more and more of the original hardware, so there's not much left of the original that'll still be in use.

That was sorta what fueled the smartphone revolution - everything useful could be done on a computer from 1995, and then a computer from 1995 could fit in your pocket. Then they kept on increasing in power, such that smartphones today are good enough (modulo screen space) to compete with PCs from c. 2013.

Now we're just waiting the newest form factor that you can shrink 1995-era processing power into. Brain implants?

Microcontrollers are already there, at least in terms of processing power, and they open up all kinds of possible form factors. The Cortex M0-based Arduinos can be made extremely tiny (see the Adafruit Trinket M0) and run at 48MHz. RISC vs CISC means it might not be as fast as a 33MHz Intel from 1995, but the new M4-based Arduinos are coming out running at 120MHz with the ATSAMD51 chips. When you have a 32-bit microcontroller at 120MHz in just 49mm^2 and 65µA/MHz power draw [1], all kinds of form factors are possible at speeds meeting or exceeding your average 1995 PC.

[1]: https://www.microchip.com/wwwproducts/en/ATSAMD51J19A

It's something I gripe about a lot. Why is Windows 10 on modern hardware so much less responsive than Windows 95 on a system that has an order of magnitude fewer resources to work with?

Sure, it can't play half the games the modern machine will, but for most other tasks Windows 10 isn't providing me much, if any, extra functionality and it is taking a hell of a lot longer to do it. Why? Are software developers just that much more terrible? Have we put too many abstraction layers in the way? Put too much extra code in place in the name of nebulously effective security? Why must we put up with this?

I don’t know but I completely agree with your gripes.

Fire up Windows NT4 in a vm with office 95... it’s shockingly fast. Apart from NT4 being a security mess we’ve gained what exactly?

I went “all in” on MS with a surface and office 365 but it’s only pushed me to some kind of Librem laptop next time around.

Sadly the situation isn't much better in the OSS desktop world. Aside from my personal opinion that those OSs are designed in such a way as to be fundamentally unsuitable as a desktop, they suffer a lot of the same bloat. Example: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7kvT40umKL8

The capacitors will leak regardless whether you turn it on or not. In fact, they have already leaked, and the fluid is corroding pads and pins and eating through traces. Best to get it recapped before more damage is done.

Is it possible that by preceding the "capacitor plague"[1] they are less vulnerable? I have electronics in the house dating back to the 80s that are doing fine.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Capacitor_plague

Best to store this stuff in a conditioned space, not a humid shed with no air circulation. Got some lyts from 1962 working fine here.

A lot of early surface mount capacitors seem prone to leaking corrosive crap onto the boards they're soldered to. This seems to affect machines from the late 80's to the mid 90s. Older through-hole caps can leak too but are more robust or tend to do so through their tops. Machines made be cheap-ass bastards like Commodore suffer from this a lot.

The capacitor plague is a whole separate event. As bwldrbst explained, this is a specific problem with the SMT capacitors that Apple used in everything during that time period. The through-hole capacitors used for example in the Mac SE and earlier haven't had the problems with leaking. (Speaking only of the capacitors on the logic board... the larger capacitors on the analog board and power supplies are leaking too.)

The capacitors will all fail anyway, whether you power it up or not. Happened to most of my older electronics.

I think OP's point is that the risk of catastrophic failure and damage to other parts of the machine is bigger, if it is powered up when the caps fail.

Tantalum capacitors are not failure proof. Ask around about tantalum failures, usually someone has a memorable story about an old tantalum capacitor that shorted.

If you buy quality electrolytics and don't store the machine in a humid shed/attic they are likely to outlast you.

Indeed. I have a old AT psu of around 200W from early 90's and it keeps working fine.

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