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I owned a Macintosh Quadra 650 in 2001 -- bought it for C$60 from an outgoing senior -- and it was already long in the tooth when I had it (the original Quadra 650 was released in 1993).

It ran System 7.1. It was a beautiful machine but I couldn't get any real work done on it -- the browser (IE for Mac) was too slow, and ClarisWorks was too simple.

I believe there are pivot points in computer technology. A machine just after a pivot will last a long time, while a machine just one year earlier will age badly.

My main desktop was a Dell Inspiron 530 Core 2 Duo from 2005-2020. The Core 2 Duo was a long lasting chip, and I could watch YouTube, browse the web on the latest Firefox, etc. with no problems at all the way up to the start of the pandemic this year (I recently upgraded to a 2014 Dell i7, which I'll likely keep for another 10 years). If I had a Core Solo, I'd likely have dumped it.

I eventually sold the Quadra (and the Mac II, Mac SE, the Sun SPARCstation 1 pizzabox, and all the other vintage machines I had in my college apartment). They were fun to own for a while, but ultimately impractical to keep around.

I finally upgraded my home machine this year, up from an i7 4770k, ~7 year old processor. The memory was starting to fail, and I figured it was finally due. I've replaced the GPU a couple of times, and upgraded storage but that's about it.

It's a nice boost for certain workloads that thread well, but it's not a huge boost for single threaded workloads except for certain specialised stuff where there are newer instructions to take advantage of.

Contrast that to a roughly comparable time frame: 486sx 60Mhz -> Athlon 1Ghz.

Short of a major revolution, I expect this CPU/Memory will last me just as long.

> If I had a Core Solo, I'd likely have dumped it.

I do note that there was never a Core Solo desktop CPU. There were handful of single-core Conroe Celerons released, but all main "Core" series parts were at least dual-core (i.e. Core 2 Duo or Core 2 Quad)

There was no Core Solo desktop CPU but the Core Solo did exist in Mobile Editions:

* https://ark.intel.com/content/www/us/en/ark/compare.html?pro... * https://ark.intel.com/content/www/us/en/ark/compare.html?pro...

Thanks. I remember that the Core Solo was used on some Apple machines, including one of the first Intel Mac Minis (a pseudo-desktop machine?).

https://lowendmac.com/2006/mac-mini-core-solo/

Correct. I had one. It sucked. But less than my XP machine.

I have the spiritual successor, the M1 mini now.

Pseudo is accurate. Mac minis have always been made with bits from the MacBook parts bin.

Mac mini core solo did exist [1]. My parents owned one.

https://everymac.com/systems/apple/mac_mini/specs/mac_mini_c...

99% of the stuff I was actually doing was collaboration and it's really difficult doing that on vintage computing platforms

Maybe it is, maybe it isn't. Are we talking Zoom or IRC here?

If you need to do the sort of work where you just need to concentrate with no distractions, a "vintage" platform is a superior choice. A few prominent authors swear by their obsolete word processors for example. Many people (myself included) find it hard to focus and resist procrastination on any modern Internet-connected system. But I can get my head down in First Word Plus on my Atari ST (or Word 5.1 on a classic Mac) and upload the file later for formatting in Word and sharing by whatever means.

> Maybe it is, maybe it isn't. Are we talking Zoom or IRC here?

Much as I have fond memories of IRC, collaboration requires the other people to use the same tools as you, and you don’t always get to choose what that is.

collaboration requires the other people to use the same tools as you, and you don’t always get to choose what that is.

Indeed - my point being that whether a vintage platform is viable or even superior for your workflow is very situation-dependent, it's not "all or nothing" nor "one size fits all".

Hell I am reading HN now when there is something I could be working on. I should go into the other room and boot up the ST.

Doesn't slack allow you to email a channel?

Exactly that

Can you really say its rose tinted lens if the author actually did use the system and writes from current-day experience?

Yes. It may be fine for the author, but the article promotes this as possible for everyone, or at least many other people.

> makes it a great choice for some classic Macintosh gaming and nostalgia tripping.

> the machine will always be hobbled by its technical limitations.

> I would never go as far to say that the Quadra 700 should have a place on your desk

And yet you should wonder if the fact that we all think regularly of going back might suggest something.

> Now emulation I can get behind

Makes sense. Other than perhaps latency, if software was truly better in previous decades, you can just run old software on new hardware [1] and get the best of both worlds. Given infinite time, you could probably find a way to boot directly into some kind of hypervisor that runs RiscOS or whatever full-screen. While also running LVM underneath it for online backups. Oops, a new software feature.

It's related to my pet peeve about Gemini: You can just choose to do all the stuff Gemini does with your own safe subset of HTTPS. If you have the political power and dev hours to maintain Gemini, you can also just maintain HTTP/1.1 with TLS.

Running Acorn hardware won't fix software bloat created by anyone but yourself, and running Gemini won't fix HTTP bloat created by anyone but yourself. Might as well run good software on good hardware, instead of running bad protocols or bad hardware out of spite.

[1] I'm on the young end of millennials, so my nostalgia is for Windows XP. But there's a valley for retro nostalgia - It's okay to use modern Linux, because you need security patches. It's okay to use Windows 10 because your employer forces it. It's okay to run an Amiga or RiscOS ironically, because it's cool and funny. But Windows XP? No! Evil security hazard! Deprecation means the software became bad overnight! Why won't you upgrade??

As a fellow young millennial doing red team security stuff professionally, XP is different from the others for a few reasons.

The first is that XP has a tendency to, by default, open a lot of forward facing holes and services that to my knowledge most other "old timey" OSes don't. I'm not familiar with riscos or amigaos, but I do know old versions of OS X ship with basically no attack surface, while XP (IIRC) will enable SMB and guest access automatically.

The second is that unlike those other OSes, XP was and is very widely used, and there are exploits which target XP and a range of other commonly used Windows machines. Unlike basically any other niche retro hardware, Windows is both 1) pervasively networked and 2) very widely attacked, and lacks basically any modern mitigation for exploits, so a simple buffer overflow in a networked service can easily become a RCE.

> and running Gemini won't fix HTTP bloat created by anyone but yourself

No, but it does help building a community of like-minded people. And that is really the core idea of gemini, isolationism is sort of a feature there. I see gemini more like a flag under which people can rally under, the technical aspects are incidental.

(note: I don't use/run gemini so I might be mis-representing them here)

Windows operating systems may themselves represent the 'pivot points' that wenc talks about. Every so often, a version of Windows seems to come along that gives you a genuine improvement over what came before - in my view Windows 98 SE, Windows XP and Windows 7 for example, which may represent the nostalgia valleys. Other intermediate versions seem to at best introduce new problems to replace the old ones.

Of course, it would be great to have the Risc OS experience while doing modern computing tasks, so I'm pleased to hear that the lessons it brought to the world have not been forgotten.

I'm inclined to agree, but I do think that 95 needs to be on that list as well simply because it was such a massive step up from the MS-DOS plus Windows 3.1/3.11 era. 98 itself was a bit of a misstep, but I do agree 98SE was the next major improvement point.

Perhaps I'm a bit biased against 95 as I was happily using Risc OS at the time :) My memory of Microsoft from back then was that the Office apps could be quite capable, but the underlying OS was just something you had to put up with.

I don’t think you can reasonably expect to get useful work done on a vintage computer, although I occasionally use my 512k Mac for writing markdown. Mostly old computers are fun to repair and tinker with, and play old games.

> Now emulation I can get behind because when you are completely fed up of the idea you had it's easier to dispose of it than getting rid of it on ebay :)

Attaboy. I went the other way and realized that I wanted to buy some very modestly priced emulator-on-a-SoC for an old gaming console near and dear to my heart. That gave me the best of both worlds -- form factor and tactility of the real console with cost, speed, battery life of a present day android device. I must say, for a $40 Android device, I use it a lot more than I thought I would.

> …I use it a lot more than I thought I would.

I can't help but be curious: What are you talking about?

Doesn't the new Raspberry Pi 400 fit this role pretty perfectly?