The Old Computer Challenge | Hacker News Reader

The Old Computer Challenge

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On a similar vein, I just installed Windows 2000 + all updates on my Thinkpad T42 with an Intel M 1.8GHz single core, 1GB of ram and 160GB of spinning rust. The ultimate goal was to set up an Embedded Visual C++ 3.0 development environment so I could try out coding for Windows CE devices (shout out to NCommander and his nethack on Jornada video).

The biggest surprise came after I got it fully updated with Legacy Update, installed all the drivers and finally got my head around wireless supplicants by stumbling onto the Boingo client - my 5GHz SSID was in the wireless networks list. This prompted a full recheck of my router config (that came up correct), then some confused googling until I found IBM's Press Release touting the 5GHz prowess of the Intel 2915ABG card in my laptop: https://www.ibm.com/common/ssi/cgi-bin/ssialias?infotype=an&...

early on 802.11a (5GHz) was really, really business-focused feature.

And Thinkpads are nothing if not business focused.

I'not sure if Cameron Kaiser of Floodgap is around on HN but he enabled me to survive a real life version of this challenge when I had to use an Powerbook G4 due to computer trouble. For almost a decade he singlehandedly enabled Firefox on PPC macs natively, and I am very grateful.

He is! Yes, his browsers have made quite a large number of older systems usable again. His work is amazing :)

I am! And thanks for the very kind word. I do have a few security updates to drop in the next couple weeks.

Just wanted to say you're generally just super awesome!

It's enlightening to see what can be made to work on modest hardware and what can't (or, rather, shouldn't). For instance, if my slightly older laptop can't load a web site without taking many seconds of billions of instructions per second processing and a quarter of a gigabyte of memory, there's something wrong with the site.

My primary computer for many years until just a few months ago was a 2008 Core 2 Duo MacBook Pro. I remember trying to visit Discord using it quite literally could not navigate, nor could I practically use my laptop for other things when the site was open. I do hope it has changed, but that showed a fundamental problem with their site.

Interestingly, this indirectly led to using my DNS resolver to block a number of sources of gratuitous and abusive Javascript, particularly from ad networks. This sped up many sites, not just the worst, and made my computer feel so much snappier overall.

A happy side effect is that lots of ads simply don't show up. While similar to the purpose of a Pi Hole resolver, I'd rather block the Javascript that loads ads than simply block the ads. I'd be interested to know if the people making block lists for Pi Holes note this distinction.

Running older hardware, observing the results and sometimes doing something about them can go all sorts of good :)

How much memory does your MBP have? I imagine it's a 2GB machine and therefore is swapping like crazy. I have the same issue when trying to load modern web apps on my 2GB netbook. Setting up zswap improved performance a bit but then CPU became the bottleneck.

I have a 2008 C2Q Q9400/8G/SSD machine which is still used often, running Linux with Q45 IGPU. CPU load is low and it still has enough grunt to perform reasonably. I used it as a daily driver for many years and have never had an issue with web sites and basic office/dev work.

It has the maximum of 6 gigs and a nice SATA SSD. It really does most things well, and I continued to use it for so long in large part because I didn't have anything better, and in part because it has a good amount of screen real estate (it's a 17").

Newer macOS is surprisingly not bad, even when you install a newer OS (Catalina) on to an older MacBook Pro that doesn't directly support it.

Hmm maybe it's a Mac thing then, as Discord works fine on my (newer) 4G Linux machines. Though I'll definitely agree that the site is very bloated.

I do this too, and I run my mindmap software on it too. About a year ago, I used a netbook with Ubuntu 13 on it as my daily driver. I felt justified in having used Perl and stable/traditional HTML/JS for most of my code, because I could run it almost without any modifications on that laptop, and it helped me track down performance bottlenecks.

I think there are many huge benefits into putting thought we put into backwards compatibility, including being able to reuse older hardware instead of throwing it away, which itself has many resulting benefits, not least of which being lesser environmental impact, but also the pleasure of using a well-made device while it is still working.

Another great benefit is the Lindy Effect. The more backwards-compatible you build your software, the more forwards-compatible and resilient it is likely to be in the future. I personally prefer software which I do not have to maintain as much, and I like offering a repo which doesn't require a lot of fiddling with package managers and dependencies in order to get running.

I like this idea. My developer machine until 2008 had only 512MB of RAM and for bloat I used to run Eclipse (by running JDT and some tweaks).

I started off with a RIVA TNT2 (32MB) and ended up with a GeForce FX (256MB) at the end of 2008. Anyway, the deal is that I would take this up when I can.

A few months ago I resurrected my old P4 machine. I should be able to run it and tell how it goes.

I have never experienced a lack of performance from my Pentium 4 machine while surfing Internets in Chrome.

>if you have more (memory) it's not a big deal, if you want to reduce your ram create a tmpfs and put a big file in it

Way too ugly a method (there's better, check kernel-parameters if you're gonna be using Linux).

But even then, use ramfs! It's the same as tmpfs, but it ensures that RAM is used, as latter will also use swap.

I've been using Raspberry Pi 400 as the main desktop for a few months. The idea was that I'd be more productive without youtube and games. That's not as extreme as the OP setup, but the slowdown and freezes unfortunately outweigh the focus benefits.

The iBook G4 was a really cool looking laptop, was a big fan when it came out. I hope they bring back this aesthetic at some point. The current options for laptops are pretty homogeneous and uninspired.

Yeah it was great. Unfortunately mine had a (quite common IIRC) fatal failure: the IDE port for the hard drive ceased working (it could still be used with a Firewire disk but...).

I love old computers, but I also admit that there is a reason that we’ve all moved on to newer machines. This challenge may make us all appreciate our new hardware a bit more.

The biggest issue I see with this (for most of us) would be the RAM limit. The article did say that more RAM was “okay,” so perhaps this would be doable. The primary roadblocks in my case would be communication tools and websites required for work (JIRA, Slack). There is a JIRA cli tool I found on github, and a cli client for Slack. I could probably get those running in Cygwin on Win2K or WinXP. KMeleon is still around with a Goanna version, so I may be able to get the rest of my web needs met. Email is email, so no worries. An older version of Notepad++ could serve as my IDE, but maybe something like Scintilla or even JOE on Cygwin would be better. I may do it… the question is, do I got for early AMD64, a p3 or p4, or do I really punish myself and go back to a p1 with win98 and kernelex?

For those curious, I wouldn’t actually recommend trying Linux on an older machine unless you’re willing to custom compile your system. I do a lot of retro computing, and modern Linux is just kind of big. You can make it smaller, and there are distributions custom built for the purpose, but they do not (in my experience) deliver the kind of performance that vintage OSs do on vintage hardware. If anyone knows of projects that do, please let me know!

You could use Ripcord as your slack client and save a bunch of ram.

https://cancel.fm/ripcord/

Not everyone can financially afford new machines. Also not everyone can accommodate the changes in modern machines. Many moved to smartphones, but they have small screens and are always online, which might not suit everyone.

Having played with a lot of old hardware just for nostalgia, I do not recommend going back to a P1 with win98. It doesn't support modern encryption, which means even if you can get a modern-ish browser working (KMeleon 1.54 is the last version that supports win98), most of the web will be unusable.

It's still nostalgic fun to boot win98 (or win95c, which was the first build to offer usb support) on an old workstation, but it's nearly impossible to use it for anything beyond offline writing, nostalgia, and vintage games.

> For those curious, I wouldn’t actually recommend trying Linux on an older machine unless you’re willing to custom compile your system, I do a lot of retro computing, and modern Linux is just kind of big.

I don't follow. Win2K is ok on older machines, but for Linux it must be a 'modern' one? I can assure you that a Linux distribution of the Win2K era will run at least as efficiently on such hardware as Win2K. I wouldn't necessarily recommend going on-line with either though.

If one absolutely must run current software on museum-piece hardware, then I'd recommend NetBSD for which time moves much more slowly than Linux.

> then I'd recommend NetBSD for which time moves much more slowly than Linux.

I've personally had success with Arch/Alpine/Void style distro's and a window manager.

Modern Linux doesn't have to be big.

The allowance for RDP/VNC and similar also kinda negates all this, imo.

There is also no frequency restriction. You can (and I did) clock something like a single core Conroe-L Celeron 430 that is normally 1.8ghz to ~3-4ghz (I managed ~4.1 on mine but seems most people probably could only do around 3.5-3.6ghz which is still a gigantic overclock). I guarantee you that would run almost anything you throw at it that isn't gaming or video editing with gusto.

edit

I just realized the Celeron 430 is 16 years old now. Augh. Time keeps on slippin' by.

These challenges always crack me up. Unless you are doing a couple specific things that really stress hardware (higherend graphics work, audio work, video work, that sort of thing) you should be able to do 99% of everything on the listed restrictions with /ease/.

The fact a lot of common things will run like crap on that says a lot about the state of things these days.

Granted, this is an artificial restriction and most software that wont like it was never intended to run on it blahblah...

I still happily can use my Portege 3110ct for daily use and it's a pentium 2 300 w/ 192mb ram, 60GB IDE SSD, 800x600 display. The main issues I have with it are the resolution of the screen and having more RAM /would/ be nice.

The allowance for remote access kinda entirely negates the point of this, too, imo. RDP/VNC/etc to something more powerful is cheating lol. With that allowance you just need a decent screen, input, and a fast enough framebuffer and network for it to not be painting pixels the entire time. Which means you could, conceivably, do everything on damn near anything from the 90s up. And quite a few 80s workstations would give you enough oomph for remote access if you tried hard enough.

Software compatibility is the biggest obstacle. I have a 14-15 year old laptop. There are an increasing number of applications that do not support 32bit machines. Sure, some you can generate it yourself from the binaries. But that seems like a waste of time in most cases. Still works for a lot of things though. For the stuff it doesn't, I use it to remote to a desktop that does if I want to be in a different location.

The die-off of 32bit really is the biggest obstacle to this sort of hobby. There is *plenty of 15-20 year old hardware that is more than fast enough for daily use that is 32bit only, though.

However, x86_64/AMD64 came out in 2003. so there is also a crapload of 15-20 year old hardware that /is/ 64bit. Even the super low end Celeron 430 I mentioned in another comment which is from 2007, single core, 1.8ghz, 512kb l2, 800mhz fsb, supports 64bit.

WTF. The challenge is not about using 'old' things. Any Raspberry Pi will meet these requirements if you disable the additional cores and RAM. Or buy the $8 VPS. What is the real point of this challenge?

Why I'm downvoted here? There's literally nothing in the requirements for using old computers.

Did you read the article? It's called 'The Old Computer Challenge'.

  ---------------------------------
  1. Introduction

The point of the challenge is to replace your daily computer by a very old computer and share your feelings for the week.

  2. The challenge

If you don't have an old computer, don't worry! You can still use your regularly computer and create a virtual machine with low specs, you would still be more comfortable with a good screen, disk access and a not too old CPU but you can participate.

  ---------------------------------

It's mentioned twice, not in the rules, but it's clearly the point.

>It's called 'The Old Computer Challenge'.

>It's mentioned twice

>not in the rules,

>but it's clearly the point.

Challenge remains clear as mud

Not sure about the bit regarding posting to social medias.

I've heard a lot of advices and feedbacks like this, but with no evidences or moneys backing it. The datas just isn't there. You'd end up putting a lot of hard works into your codes, and just battling with your language syntaxes. It would be good work experiences and give you some spaces for reflection, but ultimately it's not your businesses to get such informations.

And yes, this is a rants about the inappropriate plurals of the words medias. Sorrys for the lacks of constructives criticisms.

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