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Old Computer Challenge

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116 pointswrxd79 comments

Participated last year with my Thinkpad R61 that I still use as my main laptop after getting so cozy with it during the challenge.

A lot of the group was great, but some friends I invited to the challenge had a bad time in the irc with transphobes and we all dropped out.

I hope this year people moderate the chat a bit better, but I understand its not their day job to police random folk that enter the hobby challenge community.

> A lot of the group was great, but some friends I invited to the challenge had a bad time in the irc with transphobes and we all dropped out.

That sucks, and the channel or network should do something about it.

IRC is how I was friends with many trans people, before we knew the word trans.

It makes sense: it was much easier to pass online. So you could just hang out and talk about programming or whatever, and no one cared what plumbing you were born with.

Of course, there were always some people being antisocial on IRC, and that's why there were channel ops, war scripts, and IRCops.

I think I recall one or two occasions when someone attacked a channel I was on, and then later came back and reconciled. There should be more of the learning to play nice with others, but less toxic to start with.

Yeah it sucks. Since then I've tried to better vet retro tech groups before inviting more friends along. It seems rather unfortunate that more often than not old hardware enthusiast groups come with old beliefs.

Things are much better off at IRL gatherings I've noticed. Vintage Computer Festival events have been very open and welcoming to all peoples without issue in my experience.

Regarding "old beliefs", a distinction I'd like to make...

My anecdotal impression is that early Internet overall was, on average, more enlightened and amiable than Internet today.

Our earlier experience: Nobody knows you're a dog, people are excited about the possibilities, people are open to meeting others around the world, people see others sharing just to share, people haven't been conditioned to intolerant extremism by a couple decades of propaganda, etc.

Today we'll meet intolerance and meanness in many places, and we might want to call that "old beliefs" in that they are outmoded, and want to think that the latest generation will be smarter and OK. But it's certainly not just older people being hostile. And some groups of older people (e.g., much of early Internet) already did it better in many ways, before society backslided. When kids are trying to repair society, they can find allies in older people too.

Early Usenet was similar, there were no flamewars or anything like that.

MINIX having inherent design flaws was simply just a robustly expressed opinion ... it was nothing like the Meow Wars of '98.

It's inherently hard to get along with people you don't share values with, and the culture war got extra vicious. But I wouldn't call the people throwing racial and sexual slurs more intolerant of the outgroup than the other side (the people deciding to get offended), if anything, they seem to have thicker skin when it comes to differences in worldview.

Since 2013, I have used a laptop made in 2009 as my normal, everyday laptop. I am currently in the process of replacing it, but only because other people have complained about the fan noise.

If that works for you pls buy a second hand MacBook m1 or M2 air (air has worse design but some silicon bugs are ironed out around vms etc) and run it for Linux. It is silent very powerful and you will use for a very long time. Very non repairable tho :(

> you will use for a very long time. Very non repairable tho

This seems moderately contradictory, because as the time that you use something increases the chance of some physical damage increases, especially for a portable device where dropping, an imperfect bag holding, or someone else bumping it, and the like, are all more likely than a stationary device (like a desktop).

This is a huge reason that I don't use many Apple devices, so if they somehow effectively addressed this without reparability, I'd be interested to know. However, I suspect that that's impossible because just making it durable only delays the need to repair, so you end up up shit creek maybe 2 years after buying it instead of 1 year (made up numbers).

the storage will eventually fail and you will be able to do nothing about it (unless you have some pretty good rework chops). I do not recommend apple laptops (with soldered storage) for very long term applications like this for this reason alone.

A slight tangent but BGA rework is pretty easy to learn, and I recommend doing so. I find it an invaluable skill for upgrading/repairing/hacking modern hardware.

Yeah I need to learn it. I have learned to do some surface mount work but working on a hobby board that might cost me a hundred bucks to replace if i fuck it up vs a modern mac motherboard.. different tier of terror ;)

Some of us just don't do that sort of thing. When I took my five year old iPhone 7 in for a battery replacement the person serving me commented on the good condition. This was a phone I used daily without a case.

they're pretty durable relative to most laptops on the market, and replacing components most likely to break like the screen is... neither great nor terrible? https://www.ifixit.com/Guide/MacBook+Pro+13-Inch+Two+Thunder...

how often have you had to repair your current device? non-rhetorical question

>Since 2013, I have used a laptop made in 2009 as my normal, everyday laptop.

What's the specs and what apps are you running?

Intel Atom, 1.66GHz. 2Gib RAM.

I mostly run a web browser, some terminal emulators and a mail reader. Oh, and Emacs.

Insane. Can I ask how you live like this? Is it a income issue or a statement?

I'm from a developing country and I had a 2010 dual core Celeron notebook with 4GB DDR3 and I found it unusable in 2016-2018. Can't imagine still having to use that today. Especially for browsing the web today.

It was hard for a while just before Firefox had their big optimization push. But ever since, it’s still workable.

But why

I got it for free.

I bet you a dollar you could get a better machine for free if you looked around ;)

Same I've got a Thinkpad R61i from around the same time that originally came with a Pentium dual core and 2GB of ram.

It's been fully upgraded with an SSD, the fastest core2duo I could find, and more memory. With a fresh battery it still manages to be a great machine all these years later.

This is just my life. I have an old netbook running openbsd. It can do netsurf and email just fine when I'm on the go, I have my vita for any media I want to experience on the go, and for anything more intense than viewing a simple website, email/chat, or the occasional perl script, I shell into my home computer

Try yt-dlp+streamlink.

YT-DLP config:

    #at ~/.config/yt-dp/config

    --format "best[height<=480]"

MPV config:

#~/.config/mpv/config

    ytdl-format=bestvideo[height<=?480][fps<=?30]+bestaudio/best
     vo=xv
     audio-pitch-correction=no
     quiet=yes
    pause=no
    vd-lavc-skiploopfilter=all

Dillo (from git) has worse CSS capabilities than netsurf but more than often the webs aren't broken as often as NetSurf.

On the rest, get MuPDF, nsxiv for images, maybe xfe for files, mutt/sylpheed for email...

What was the point of this comment? Yeah this is pretty much how I use my computer. I use netsurf because I can use it in the framebuffer. I use mg for text editing and file browsing (using dired), chat using ircii, and email with elm. I don't really do much that can't be done without a GUI, so I rarely use X for anything other than forwarding something from my main computer over ssh

Playing videos in underpowered machines vía streamlink/yt-dlp.

Tons of people under HN might know yt-dlp, but not streamlink.

About GUI's and the like, mpv has both SDL and KMS output, and both can render to the framebuffer. Ditto with mplayer and fbdev2.

Yeah, I'd probably use those if I had much use for them. Like I said, for any media consumption I have my PS vita and my work rarely requires me to do something with multimedia content while I'm on the go

There is something healthy about a challenge where the goal is not optimization, productivity but just spending a week with constraints and making something

I want to do something similar.

Specifically, the project is to create VFS similar to the one in Linux 1.00 in xv6-riscv. I completed the MIT xv6 labs and read the VFS code in Linux 1.00 a while ago, and I don't think it is a particularly difficult task -- but xv6-fs touches a lot of places, so I'd imagine some re-architecture is needed.

The scope of the project is NOT to create more FS for xv6, but to add one abstraction layer on top of the FS, i.e. the VFS. The kernel is supposed to know which FS is picked manually (in this case it is the original xv6 FS) by the programmer in the makefile, and it should load the correct superblock and go from there.

The whole work, once kicked into gear -- that is, once one has gotten familiar with the xv6 kernel and written some code for the labs, should take more or less 2 weeks for an ordinary people who has no experience with system programming to complete. The good part is that there is no need to write tests for this project -- you just keep running xv6 and see if it passes all of the existing tests -- once that's passed the VFS should work fine.

Interesting site/challenge; however, I had trouble browsing and finding "what to do" in a reasonable time.

I recently spent like $170 giving a new lease on life to a 15-year-old Lenovo S10-3 Ideapad with a 1-core Intel Atom CPU, 2GB of RAM, a WiFi card, and a 250GB SSD running AntiX Linux in TTY/Command Line mode.

So far, I've turned it into a picture/frame + vision board running Tailscale so I could SSH in and/or rsync stuff.

I am also attempting to run a no-AI version of Pwnagotchi to pwn WiFi networks.

I am also using it as an always-on appliance that does stuff like rsync/backup my entire server, run lightweight Python scripts to check the uptime and days until domain expiration, etc., on a set of websites I own and would like to own, etc.

I have all of this stuff connected to a Telegram bot that reports to me.

It's an interesting set of constraints, and you can surprisingly do a lot of cool stuff.

Here’s an idea that’s been following me for a while, if you like low-level stuff:

Make a toy OS that boots into a Lisp shell.

Another to appreciate how fast computers that we call old effectively are: write a game for the shell. Depending on your level of skill, you can try pong, snake, lunar lander, or a 3D software renderer.

OLPC (one laptop per child) had Open Firmware, a Forth bootloader/firmware

https://lwn.net/Articles/209301/

Open Firmware was originally a Sun thing, then Apple adopted it at some point as well

Make something that makes music.

Trying to use a 15-year-old Atom netbook as a modern laptop is mostly pain. But treating it as a small always-on appliance is a much better fit

I gave my wife a 2012 macbook pro running ubuntu. It was a huge upgrade over her ~2014 macbook air running stock, which couldn't even update itself anymore.

It never occured to me to consider it might qualify as a "challenge" since it is 14 years old. It just works fantanstically and was my daily driver until 3-4 years ago.

I got it off ebay for approximately $100, cleaned it, and put in a new battery.

The 2012 macbook pro (non retina, at least. I never owned a retina one) is the last truly great macbook apple ever made. God I loved that thing, I used it to death and was truly saddened by its loss. It lasted a good 12 years

I had an 11” 2011 air. An incredible machine, one of the best I’ve ever owned. I stupidly replaced it with the 2016 retina touchbar MacBook Pro - which is hands down the worst Mac I’ve ever owned bar none. My modern M1 is fine. But that little air was somehow more fun.

> 15-year-old Lenovo S10-3 Ideapad with a 1-core Intel Atom CPU, 2GB of RAM, a WiFi card, and a 250GB SSD

What a weird coincidence, I've just found one of these while clearing out a box of equipment I'm getting rid of and thought "I should stick NetBSD on this!"

I mean, I guess I daily run an old computer. Lenovo T400 from 2009, 2.4Ghz Core 2 Duo with 4GB of RAM. So far I haven't really had any issues. That said today I picked up a Carbon X1 4th gen for $100, that might be become my new Old computer. Also in the process of refurbishing an IBM Aptiva from 1996. Pentium 166Mhz with 64MB RAM, that one is a little beauty.

I do like this years challenge, 'hand-make something' as that is always a good thing to do.

A T400 is old enough to feel refreshingly simple but still new enough to be useful. A 1996 Aptiva is more like a historical instrument. I like that distinction between old and actually vintage.

T400 is definitely cool, I have a T420 I love. But that Aptiva... man, when those were new, they were full of more bloatware than any other machine I'd ever seen. I made bank in high school just reinstalling windows for people on those... it was like 5x faster when I was done with it, easily. I think it's made it impossible for me to see that as a beauty, though.

I have a TRS-80 that still ran last time I tried. It used audio cassette tapes for storage, but I don't have one, so I built a cable to use a modern voice recorder to read and store data on.

I've been wanting to build some kind of project for it that uses the old school nature of the machine with modern conveniences. As an example, it's way easier to create graphics now, but the machine has really limited methods to recreate those.

That machine has such a pleasant form factor.

I have an old Osborne 1 that worked the last time I plugged it in-- years ago. I would be shocked if the 5 1/4" discs are still readable. If they aren't, or I wanted to add some new software (like a better compiler) is there a place where I can find CPM boot disks etc? It would really be fun to write some C or Pascal or even (less fun) BASIC.

Sorry if this sounds crazy.

have you looked on archive.org?

Hmmm. I have a T500 I could use, but it's not that old (a mere 18 years!) - I'd mostly be running the same software and doing the same things, just a bit slower.

Going back another decade I also have a Pentium MMX system, and that'd be more interesting to work with but also a lot more tedious.

Could do hp ipaq challenge, old thinkpad challenge, old macbook challenge, old smartphone challenge, fix an old computer to working state challenge, old browser challenge, it’s not meant for this challenge.

Ok I’m out of ideas.

In short: a bunch of people who like old (as in around year 2000) tech periodically try to achieve something using the tech of the time. Many post on Gemini, a few on Gopher (which already was ancient in 2000).

I want to participate. But maybe I already do everyday. My daily driver is a MacBook Pro 2009 running Linux MX 23, does that count as an old computer for this challenge?

This just reminds me that I have my old MicroATX HTPC (remember that term?) that I built in about 2010 sitting in a closet. I bet I haven’t booted it since 2014. I wonder what’s on it…

HTPC are still very much a thing, I use mine for everything from MAME to watching a 72GB sized 4K copy of Apocalypse Now Redux. I think the major home theater receiver manufacturers continue to include a "PC" button on the remote control and a "PC" labeled input on their better receivers with five or six HDMI inputs.

I ended up getting a second hand Optiplex Micro for this. Tiny unit, low power usable, never even heard the fan switch on. Even with the slow frequency (2ghz) the Intel media decoders are brilliant at handling this stuff.

Mine was built with a leftover ryzen 1500X, microatx motherboard and RAM that were effectively free, a geforce 1030, and a random cheap 256GB SSD I found on newegg (the video content lives elsewhere across the LAN). It continues to be capable of playing 2160p60 H.265/HEVC content so I don't see a cpu and motherboard upgrade any time in the next couple of years, unless very high bitrate AV1 encoded content suddenly becomes more popular.

That sounds like it should be good for many years to come. Maybe if there is an uptake in AV2 once that is out then issues will come up. I'm not a shill but the one thing Intel have done well with their ARC cards is the media decoder. If their GPU space doesn't work out at least they have that and that could be a decent upgrade path in future.

I've tested it with 'normal' bitrate 1080p and 4K AV1 content and it still keeps up, staying under 70% CPU usage on all four cores, all AV1 decode in VLC is done in software since the geforce 1030/1050/1070/1080 generation of cards obviously has no capability for AV1... We'll see how it goes in 3-4 years.

For anyone wanting to build one, silverstone makes some really good HTPC cases

This is one of the baby ones smaller than Micro-ATX. Weaker too, with soldered-on processor. Only 15 years old:

https://www.gigabyte.com/Motherboard/GA-E350N-USB3-rev-10

https://www.bit-tech.net/reviews/tech/motherboards/gigabyte-...

Early SATA 3 and USB3 and the mainboard footprint is not much bigger than a miniPC. The enclosure it's in is about twice the size of a miniPC, 191 x 286mm, and the discrete little power supply probably has less than the recommended 200W. Enclosure only fits 2.5 inch drives, holds two of them but can't always power up both if they are HDDs when 4GB memory is installed. Never would handle a video card and there's no way one would fit inside the case anyway. Not really taking advantage of the SATA 3 yet, using an appropriate vintage HDD from a 2011 Macbook that's 160GB at SATA 2 which is half the speed.

But it has 3 video connectors from which you can choose any two, and decent sound.

This one has two full processor cores but it's not much faster to boot than my old Dell which does run at about twice the speed. The Gigabyte has a nice BIOS geared toward overclockers but it runs hot enough with default settings so that's enough.

Windows 11 in a MBR/BIOS layout, can only handle up to W11 23H2 but it's fully updated by manually installing the patch each month. Edge updates as expected. LAN drivers also less than a year old. OS takes up over 20GB of a 32GB partition. As drive space dwindles the manual patch installation using DISM will require a /scratchdir on a different partition than you are booted to, or on a storage drive having plenty of space.

This next one is 20 years old, still just sits there running:

https://dl.dell.com/Manuals/all-products/esuprt_desktop/esup...

32-bit only so it's Windows 10 x86. Used to play internet videos fine just a couple years ago, PC never changed but the internet got more encumbered. When it had XP it was snappier than a new Windows 11 PC at least.

I do use a PS2 mouse with each of these but only one with any balls at all :)

This is awesome!

Time to pull out my Acer Aspire from 2006, and make something with it :)

Also: what a blast from the past to see Kyodai mahjongg on Andrei's desktop in last year's challenge <3

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