> I have been interested in retro hardware for a long time.
Retro.
1997.
Cries in 8088.
Retro.
1997.
Cries in 8088.
But even a few short years later everyone was on Windows 98SE or XP and the DOS machines began to look seriously retro.
In that case, the distance from 1979 to 1997 is much longer than 1997 to 2022.
Then in the late 90s I remember RAM doubling every year.
From about 2010 onwards, things have gotten slower.
The time between the 8088, 286, 386, 486, Pentium spans nearly two decades.
Now intel churns out a dozen new SKUs a year. Granted they are all variations on the same silicon as the process improves, but it is far more accelerated than in the past.
because on this trend, such a world where all computing is through 'smart' devices is a world in which we have even less individual power than we do now.
The merchants repeatedly find that once smart dust (tiny swarms of nanomachines) are developed, governments inevitably use them for ubiquitous surveillance, which inevitably causes societal collapse. <https://blog.regehr.org/archives/255>
WinXP, released in 2001, is full-on retro :-P.
It might sound weird if you grew up to think retro as machines like ZX Spectrum, Atari 2600, Commodore 64, Apple 2, etc but time does move forward and with it also does the concept of what is retro :-) (and those machines are retro too of course :-P).
It was a long lived OS which is why it's debatable.
It might have been long lived but the overall user experience didn't change much between the original release and the very last release. You can see a screenshot or even a video of the original WinXP and the last WinXP patch and they'd look and feel almost the same.
On a similar note, when people play around with 90s retro PCs, they often install software, patches and drivers released in the early 2000s (or even late 2000s or sometimes recent stuff) - that doesn't make these machines any less "90s PCs" either.
And yeah, sure, a machine running XP in 2014 (or later, people didn't stop using WinXP because Microsoft officially dropped support) isn't really retro, but the original argument was "WinXP era" machines which at least i'd put them into the early to midlate 2000s, when WinXP was the mainstream OS, before Vista started being used by the mainstream.
PCs are very backwards compatible and unlike a ZX Spectrum or Commodore 64, they are highly modular, so using edge cases (like WinXP being supported until 2014) isn't really that representative - by 2014 people had moved on to Win8.x and Win10 release was just some months away. Meanwhile almost every PC from 2003 or so, which originally would run only WinXP, can run Windows 8 - but aside from curiosity, nobody would really do that in practice.
But still despite this vagueness, people do see those older PCs as retro. Even personally, despite growing up with XT clones, i cannot see the Athlon64 PC i bought in 2003 as anything else than a retro PC, even if it can run some modern indie games (at like 2 FPS :-).
For me they are all 'retro', but I tend to think of the interesting stuff to be the things from my childhood - so the Commodore, TI, Amiga, Atari, IBM PC, Televideo, etc.
It is interesting to see the enthusiasm of people building 'retro' XP machine. For some of them it represents the platform they grew up with. For us old folks it is more like that OS we were using for work some time ago.
I did just build up a reasonably authentic Pentium 100 machine in a configuration that was very close to the Pentium 100 machine I used when I worked at Intel during that processors release. Fun times.
Everything before the iPhone is “retro”.
> Tupac, a rapper from the 1900's
https://github.com/jbruchon/elks
http://elks.sourceforge.net/ (old Sourceforge page)