I don't understand the fascination with obsolete commodity hardware on HN.
What would be fascinating would be if modern software could run as fast as 1980s/1990s software with the same functionality...!
What would be fascinating would be if modern software could run as fast as 1980s/1990s software with the same functionality...!
It's pretty simple - on the emotional side there's nostalgia, and on the rational side there's the fact that old hardware is typically much easier to understand.
A modern CPU has so much technology that there's probably no person in the world who can understand all of it: cache coherency, out-of-order execution, branch prediction, TSX instructions, the list goes on.
In contrast, a dedicated person could feasibly understand all the logic in an old CPU and keep a good mental model of how all of it works.
The old hardware is also more trustworthy -- perhaps as a corollary to said easier comprehensibility, or simply thanks to unwitting limitations-as-a-feature. There weren't computers all the way down, each with its own bugs, security issues, modes of surveillance/exfiltration, and ability to poke memory with impunity.
I think we also marvel at how much the early programmers/hardware guys were able to do with such limited resources. Useful applications could be written that take kilobytes of RAM, and the optimizations to get there are reasonably easy to understand.
Older hardware had (obviously?) more restrictions and less to no documentation to current one. That ignited creative and search activities that are lower or non-existant now. For example, now GPUs are more or less blackboxes while before you should study some basic linear algebra to modify and display objects in 3D.
So, like before, then?
(But for some people, that was a whole lot more fun than building games in Unity or Unreal Engine...)
Interestingly enough, when you advocate, or even worse, try that, the efforts are shunned with "no business value" & "hardware is cheap, anyway" label.
However, working with snappy software makes life more livable and enjoyable.
Like, I brought my first 386 SX-25 Mhz home from college campus when vacation arrived and so replaced the ZX-Spectrum that my younger brother was using. Arrived home late in the evening, my brother was nearly delirious with excitement but didn't have much time to play with the PC coze parents demanded he goes to sleep, afterwards what big deal, there's plenty of time to do whatever in the morning (parents sensitivity never changes).
He told me he barely closed an eye that entire night, checking the clock every half hour waiting for the dawn. When I woke up it was day outside and my brother was typing on the PC keyboard.
Today (almost 30 years later) he tells me nothing in the World can replicate that experience. You could offer him the most preposterous Windows gaming machine or ridiculously expensive Mac, he'd check it for like 5 minutes, say "nice" then shrug and go to sleep :)
The only real difference is that emacs is using a TrueType font.