| General > General Technical Chat |
| nostalgia of 386-level systems?!? |
| (1/8) > >> |
| DiTBho:
My first computer was a Sharp MZ-80 *wheelbarrow computer* with a LH-0080 Z80 compatible CPU under a heavy plastic shell fuse with a bad keyboard, no floppy drive, but a tape driver in case you want to load a Pascal compiler. Otherwise you might just enjoy GW-BASIC yes, GW-BASIC ... the BASIC with lines, no text-editor, only suffering and panic among a thousand thousand "GOTO LINEX" and "GOSUB LINXY". "TRON" was the only debugger for that kind of crazy thing, but - worse still - it was not an option on my *wheelbarrow computer* :'( Having been pureed in the hydraulic press many years ago like a puree the potatoes through the sieve, the Sharp MZ-80 is something I'll definitely never want to type anything into, so the likelihood of buying it again on eBay due to some sort of nostalgia is equal to the likelihood that humans will never understand why some sub-particles can be written without the time variable in their equations(1). Nobody knows what is *nostalgia*, kind of illusionistic sentimental longing based on a wistful affection for the past, typically for a period or place with distorted happy personal associations, or if *time* itself is an illusion, kind of our naive perception of its flow doesn’t correspond to a physical reality onto which we project sequences of past, present and future. Anyway, my perception of time is that my second computer was an i386 personal computers with a better keyboard, two floppy drivers (one for 3.5" one for 5.25"), no colors but a VGA screen, and a OS able to run TurboAssembler, TurboPascal and TurboC with a text editor! From this point of view: we made progress! even if, when I looked at the assembly level ... I found the i386-architecture, x86, or IA-32, depending on context, pretty terrible and too confusing, anyway at least I learned new programming languages. Again my perception of past events, again pureed in the hydraulic press with some sadistic pleasure, because I then switched to a UNIX-RISC-workstation, which I simply love from the ISA up. Really for me, RISC was the turning point for everything, and having grown up with 386-level systems during the early 90s like so many of us, I never experienced an intense longing to experience the those i386 computer systems by building your own 80386DX-based single board computer. And why should I? To run ... what? ... DOS? What is this new hype on Hackaday?!? Does it serve to prove some physical theory? :o :o :o Like positing that reality is just a complex network of events onto which we project sequences of past, present and future (experience with computers), and the whole Universe obeys the laws of quantum mechanics and thermodynamics, out of which time emerges? (1) Rovelli puts forward the idea of ‘physics without time’. |
| Berni:
Nostalgia doesn't have to make sense. It's just whatever you have fond memories of (while often forgetting about how bad something actually was back then). There is no denying that the 386 PC was a very successful platform, so a lot of people have used one back in the day. The successors of the same architecture are still absolutely dominating the market today. If you wanted to experience old software and games you can more easily run it emulated inside doxbox, but this doesn't feel as authentic. The mucking about with motherboard jumpers and IRQs to get the hardware to cooperate, the whirring and clunking of a old 300MB hard drive, the buzzing of a painfully slow floppy drive, the disk swaps during installation, the fuzzy scan lines of a CRT etc.. is all part of the experience. This is what gets your brain to recall all the memories of the 'good ol times' as nostalgia. Nostalgia about the GameBoy is a similar thing. Looking back at it the thing was pretty terrible with that crappy low contrast 4 level grayscale LCD that has a pixel response time of a dead horse. It already used dated hardware at the time, then the GameBoy Color reused the dated hardware again. All the competitors had better specs. But the GameBoy was cheep and achieved by far the best market penetration, so a lot of people had one. Hence lots of people are nostalgic about it. Similar for Vinyl. Performance wise it is worse compared too our modern lossless digital music formats and more awkward and expensive too. But it has a tactile physical aspect to it that taping a flac file on a screen does not have. I am personally not into retro computing, retro gaming or vinyl but i can see why some people are. |
| DiTBho:
my understanding of time-space is that to move forward you have to leave something behind. I still play with GBA (Game Boy Advance), I mean I sometimes program some cartridges, but only because it offers a simpler ARM chip than today's Cortex. It makes sense for a practical purpose (less pages to study on the datasheet and manual -> better for hobby) rather than nostalgia for your days in college. |
| DiTBho:
"building your own 80386dx isa single board microcomputer", this is the link to the article on Hackaday :o :o :o |
| TimFox:
Nostalgia isn't what it used to be. |
| Navigation |
| Message Index |
| Next page |