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Comment by flatiron | Hacker News Reader

My mid 90s is FreeBSD. Two floppies and a 14.4k on the install. 486 66dx2 with 20 megs of ram and the thing cooked. I used that server up until 2002 as a proxy server (this is before the age of updating software for security). I finally didn’t need it, it simply never broke.

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For me it was late 90s. A friend of the family bought for me Walnut Creek's FreeBSD CD set, with all the stickers and other goodies. They sent it all the way to my godforsaken small town in Mexico. As a 12 year old it was soooo cool. I remember spending hours installing (incluing configuring and compiling the kernel in an ncurses based interface). I printed the whole FreeBSD manual and my mom bound it for me.

Great times!

Would you have been able to get FreeBSD otherwise? Like, mid 90s I remember downloading Slackware from a BBS. Floppy after floppy. Was that available in your area at the time?

I dont think so. BBSs were not really a thing in Mexico... particularly in a city as small as mine. Maybe in Mexico city. But long distance calls were super expensive (mom used to talk to my grandma living in another city only once a week for 30 mins).

I think I might have been able to get something in the local public university computer centre. It was the beginning of the internet (14.4 modems min to connect to the university, which was the only internet provider)

Great fun times!

The printed FreeBSD Handbook with the 2.5 CD-ROM was amazing at the time. An open source OS with a book that was better than some of the commercial OS offerings. We setup the colleges first mail server with that combo.

Remember those times.

Some PCs just last. A 2.4 GHz Core2 Quad I had, I think from 2008, is still going strong and can run most modern software just fine.

It's amazing how little progress there has been in last 13 years. In the nineties you had to upgrade every two years or so just to be able to run current software.

I think 2021 computer has a good chance of being still completely usable in 2040.

My Main-PC is now 11-12 years old, it's a HP Z600 upgraded to the max, buy'd a second CPU for 15$ additional 24GB ram (now 48GB) for like 100$ and a new GPU for 350$ some time ago, and it still runs like a champ.

Also got one HP Z-something (can't remember) PC, a bit later with a Xeon CPU (or two?) with 24 GB RAM. Otherwise great, but it's very power hungry, heats up a room in a hurry.

Intel Q6600 I presume? Great CPU. PC I a built in 2008 has the same. I recently retrieved it from my parents’ attic and updated it to Windows 10 - still works like a charm.

That is probably the Q6600, I had it as well. Very good CPU at the time and I think I had it for 6-7 years as my main computer. The next time I got an (quite expensive) 6-core CPU. And the difference was mindblowing. Not because of the extra cores but the responsiveness and single-core performance was out of this world.

I'm currently building my next computer, and the difference again is just staggering. And that is not even factoring in that the next one has got 12-cores.

It is not that the progress hasn't been slow (I guess it has if you compare it to the pace of the past), but I think it has more to do with computers back then still being very capable.

You can still fire up some CAD software and do proper work on the Q6600. I mean, right until you want to listen to music or do some very light web browsing. Then it will suddenly become quite painful. The amount of waste in today is incomprehensible. No seriously, properly incomprehensible.

Yeah, also using a recent 8-core Ryzen and the difference is definitely obvious for more demanding tasks. Been considering Threadripper, but I this is plenty fast.

I do think I could still manage on Q6600 with 16 GB RAM and an SSD. Might need to downscale VMs and browser tabs, but manageable in a pinch. Heck, in the early nineties I was happy to have an Amiga with 1 MB of RAM and that thing flew in comparison to C64. :-)

> You can still fire up some CAD software and do proper work on the Q6600. I mean, right until you want to listen to music or do some very light web browsing. Then it will suddenly become quite painful. The amount of waste in today is incomprehensible. No seriously, properly incomprehensible.

I recently set-up my old Q6600 as a station for CNC machinery, that thing flies with LinuxCNC on a small SSD. There's no issue running firefox and a music player at the same time (though I tend to not have other things running when milling something but more by cargo-cult than actual tests of the impact on the real-time behaviour needed for the CNC machine control). Some operations on Inkscape are of course slower than on more recent hardware but otherwise it's still very useable.

Obviously was some hyperbole, but still, running spotify on a 12core cpu with 64 GB ram and a top of the line SSD and an internet connection that is faster both in access time and bandwidth than a harddrive from 14 years ago is still slower than winamp on a machine from 2008.

And of course you can surf the web. But even with 5GHz turbo it is still slower than a fast connection was in the late 90s (on 90s hardware and browser). And it has nothing to do with that progress hasn't advanced in that time (we are talking orders of magnitude).

Spotify’s web app is horrible for performance. Even when idle, it keeps several cores fully occupied. They do not care to fix it either, as it has been this way for as long as I have used them. I even reported the issue multiple times and got nothing but a canned response. They just do not care.

Absolute garbage, and entirely representative of all other consumer class software.

I'm still using an overclocked i5-2500K circa 2011 in my desktop. It does everything fast enough for me (even modern games). I haven't felt the need to upgrade.

I was planning on upgrading my 3570K five years ago. I'm still running it.

I always liked to game and even with running everything on Medium or Low I needed to upgrade my PC every 3-5 years. But now, my CPU is from 2012 and my video card is from 2017, and I'm fine.

Jokes on you. I'm currently using a Q9400 as my daily driver :-) What you say is totally right, and the only thing that feels slow is 1080p 60 fps video decoding in web browsers, because it has to do it in software AFAIK.

Got a Core2 Duo and 8 gigs of RAM since 2009. Added an SSD years ago and a better GPU and the thing remains just as fast as any other laptops (I run Linux so I guess it's lighter on resource than Windows but not sure). I use that computer 10 hours a day for all my stuff (no gaming though). I just hope the PSU won't fry everything when it'll die.

I had a FreeBSD doitall-machine from 1998 to 2006 on some Pentium-ish thing with an AT motherboard. Moved a few thousand miles and it didn't get unboxed, until 2020 when I needed an AT PSU for something unrelated. Prior to cannibalizing it I powered it up long enough to check that it would still send email and run brief X session to hit YTMND in 15 year old Firefox.

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