WPA2 was standardized a year after his laptop was built. The ancient 802.11b card in it wants to do WEP. Getting driver support for a modern USB WiFi on that prehistoric version of OSX is no picnic either. It's a good thing he doesn't want to get it working.
there's a huge number of 802.11b and 802.11g devices that simply won't operate at all on a 2.4 GHz radio of a 802.11n/11ac/11ax network that is set to "dual 40/20MHz" channel mode. And definitely not on a 40 MHz channel. Remember that in older wifi systems there was no such thing as a 40 MHz channel.
same thing for old 802.11a 5 GHz band devices, they don't understand anything other than a fixed 20 MHz channel.
And that's before you run into problems with modern usage of WPA2.
Got there and tried to connect my laptop to their wifi network. No dice. My laptop (2014-15 era) doesn't do 5ghz and they had no 2.4ghz access points. Ended up having to use a cellular wifi hotspot they had lying around to get anything to work.
Wow, that’s surprising…most laptops from like 2010 onwards have done 5 GHz. Did yours have a particularly old Wi-Fi card in it?
It's a shame, because I'd love to use Tiger as a distraction-free environment. I'd even try and build a controller app for Tidal or Spotify so I could still have modern music streaming facilities. I spend a lot of time SSH'd into servers anyway so the lack of modern compatibility doesn't matter as long as a terminal's available.
In fact, i am using an Atari 520ST as my main computer since my laptop died a while ago. It started as an experiment, but now "it just works". I got network connectivity, email and (limited) internet access through a "Netusbee" adapter, and easy modern media access through a gotek floppy emulator.
Perhaps i am just crazy, but it simply works!
Buying that adapter and floppy emulator cost more than a whole used computer. I guarantee you, if you just do what that Atari 520ST can do, it will "just works" too ;).
I can't guarantee anything about any others tools that a computer provide, like Teams, but lets be honest, if someone that do everything he needs on an Atari 520ST were to use theses tools, it seems like it wouldn't be by choice.
By the way, using older tools is certainly not a controversial opinion on here, you will find plenty that still works using terminals, vi, etc...
I went the opposite route: I basically built a gaming rig so I could get really good auto-complete in vscode.
Couldn't be happier... and I have a 'free' light show. :-)
The Olivetti M10 is a dream for when the ideas need to flow. I can't get anywhere near as much text written on my modern MBP, as I can in an hour on an Oric Atmos. These machines are great for my productivity.
Of course, I still take my MBP with me everywhere I go. ;) But when I'm in my home office, and need to write .. the older machines are great.
Every computer that was ever made, is still just as useful as it was the day it was put into operation, for some reason. Okay, its not absolute: but as a first principle, computers are as useful as the user decides they are. Its just a decision.
I love my old machines. Its so fun, as a hacker and grey-beard developer who has seem some shit, to go back to the great ol' days of .. say .. CP/M .. and sit down and noodle on some code or other.
Or, hack around with tools like "8-bit Unity", which is an attempt to build a high-performance engine for as many 8-bit machines (6502-based) as possible, with modern toolsets. Actually, this is bonkers enough I just have to make sure you know about it, in case you don't already:
One set of tools, tons of machine targets, and .. who knows what these systems will get up to, when this gets into there right hands ..
The computer is not a tool ‚such as a hammer‘, since the progress in computer innovation obviously outpaces the progress in hammer innovation.
It is all about the features, not the age. You are definitely not crazy for using whatever tool you enjoy using, though.
Tell that to someone doing basic tasks such as reading textual articles online and sending emails via some gmail web interface
I was thinking to put this whole "using an ancient computer in modern times" thing into an article for a while now, it seems i will have to stop procrastinating on this matter and start writing in the next few days ;-)
They are tools, for sure. But some tools aren't so obsolete that today's youth would struggle at first to use them.
One idea that I have is for a laptop manufacturer to develop a chassis that comes with a high-resolution display and a high-quality keyboard (like those of older ThinkPads), and where the user can supply an Intel Compute Stick or a similar device for computing power. This way the chassis can be used for a long time while the user upgrades compute sticks.
https://mntre.com/media/reform_md/2020-05-08-the-much-more-p...
It's not as powerful as most modern laptops (uses an iMX8 SOM, rather than an x86 CPU), but it's got a full keyboard, trackball (!), replaceable batteries, etc.
"i.MX 8M Family - Arm® Cortex®-A53, Cortex-M4, Audio, Voice, Video"
https://www.nxp.com/products/processors-and-microcontrollers...
And:
"i.MX8M has four 64-bit ARM Cortex-A53 cores, an additional Cortex-M4F core, faster PCIe, USB3.0, a better GPU, and much higher memory bandwidth."
https://mntre.com/media/reform_md/2019-05-20-reintroducing-r...
I have been thinking about this and I can see this as being one potential path for the future of personal computing, with phones (unfortunately) being the Compute Stick equivalents. If phone manufacturers made them more upgradable, I may even welcome this; however I don't see them jumping at that anytime soon.
AFAIK there are a few similar ones as well
> Old Mac Games Still Run, Too
Spot the error.
I still have a small-ish Centrino laptop from 2004 that's running Windows XP. It's been airgapped for roughly 10 years (wifi broke and at some point there were no updates for XP) but it's getting occasional use as a portable DVD player. I don't get why you'd willingly buy an old machine to be constrained but I hate throwing out old stuff that still works. And this does.
Working with old technology also gives you valuable insight into the worlds current latency-poor bloated software. You might be able to run the latest but with latency that is hidden on modern machines now painfully visible, you might think otherwise. This leads to choosing software that is fast, minimal, and effective.
Upgrade it to Vista, have fun ;)
It's a weird marketing and social undermining of comfort and control. Sure there is the 'security' argument, and an accretion of various quirks, but people were often happy dealing with these quirks in the day, and as OP says, making interoperability frictionful has an definite upside with all the media and IT giants trying to mine your attention span for money.
Obviously the game stays the same, but game designed has advanced and, if you are used to play modern games, some problems that are mostly fixed on all games from the last decade become annoyingly obvious.
For me, the main one is controls:
* Once you are used to WASD+mouse for FPS, going back to ctrl+arrow-keys (with some awkward keys to strafe and look up/down) is awful. If you are able to patch the controls to WASD+mouse, some games then become much easier than intended (since they were not designed with circle strafing in mind).
* Controlling the camera in old 3D platforming games is also a pain. It's amazing how long it took to move the camera controls from the bumpers to right the analog stick. The limited ability to control the camera is also partially responsible for it to get stuck in corners a lot.
There are also some level design choices that are arguably bad, but were required at the time, such as loading tunnels or abusing backtracking/repeated assets (e.g. fight all bosses again) to make the game longer.
Because your needs grow, and you want to able to do more stuff with it.
A great workstation from 00s won't render your 4k video project or compile Chromium from source in reasonable time, or let you mix an entire virtual orchestra with several dozens of Kompakt sample libraries at all. All of those things are just something you couldn't do on the computer in those days with such fidelity and quality, and now you can, and this is awesome.
The problems you cite here, namely 4k video and Chromium are both arguments in favor of retro computing in my opinion -- Both are solutions looking for a problem that succeed only in perpetuating the churn in hardware, no intrinsic value added, like the 100th re-imagining FPS machine gun splatter fest game. Yawn! :-)
If they don't, then the old hardware is still good.
So much this. It upsets me when new reviewers take a look at old games and claim things like they are "dated" (usually they mean pixel graphics, which is a whole category of misunderstanding art) or that they were "good for their time".
No. If they were good when they came out, chances are they are still good. One of my favorite games is Microprose's Sword of the Samurai -- to this day I haven't played a better, more artistically sensible, and more comprehensive simulation of feudal Japan. Even the Total War series is not as good.
Conversely, some old games were bad, and we simply didn't know better. But masterpieces remain masterpieces.
Normally things do get better and even if its small, it accumulates.
Display resolution Display colors, refreshrate Battery lifetime Weight (x220 is much heavier then my x390) Thickness Techstandards like newer/better/faster wifi USB-C (I love! charging my laptop with the same cable as my switch and my smartphone. Makes travel easier etc.)
If you are happy with it, feel free to keep using it, but i don't get why it is a possitive thing to not update/upgrade anything at all.
Its grammar and spellchecker are also much better.
When I was first messing around with Linux, I was (pleasantly) surprised when a WordStar clone popped-up instead of vi. Googling says it was called joe editor.
Still have painful memories of using Fastback, a DOS based backup software. Sitting there feeding floppies into a drive. Stacks of floppies. Twice. Praying the data would restore.
Part of my innovative file sharing solution, aka SneakerNet.
Authors have been seeking ways to avoid distractions for decades, and it goes well beyond pervasive connectivity. Sometimes the very features that aid them in their work can also hinder them. For example: computers vastly simplify the editing process, yet one of the earliest pieces of advice I saw was to turn off the computer monitor while writing in order to avoid editing prematurely.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WordStar#Notable_users [1] https://www.sfwriter.com/ws-vdos.htm
A much better modern alternative is the Alphasmart Neo 2.
* It was designed for elementary school children so it's decently rugged. * It runs a long time (months) on 2 AA batteries. * To get the text off the device, it impersonates a USB keyboard, making it compatible with basically every computer.
It's fairly easy (not always cheap) to get almost any old computer you could think of in very good condition to run the programs you like without further hassles. This can make a lot of sense because sometimes there are hassles associated to virtualisation/emulation/modern hardware.
Maybe you feel at home using WordStar 4.0 + VGA text mode in a CRT monitor. If that's the case, you can't beat the ease and responsiveness of a DOS computer. I have this conviction that there's nothing wrong with that.
But a predilection towards WordStar isn't just about not having fancy icons and weird ribbons, as author Robert Sawyer[1] pointed out. The "long page" metaphor and a short-cut friendly environment should be somewhat understandable for us programmer people.
Yeah, that's what the hipsters say. With a maximum of 5 rows of visible text I don't think it would be a very good option for novels.
[1] - https://onezero.medium.com/this-35-keyboard-for-children-tra...
- quote - @nordsieck
>> George R.R. Martin uses Wordstar 4.0 on DOS to write the Game of Thrones novels
> A much better modern alternative is the Alphasmart Neo 2.
* It was designed for elementary school children so it's decently rugged. * It runs a long time (months) on 2 AA batteries. * To get the text off the device, it impersonates a USB keyboard, making it compatible with basically every computer. - unquote -
But the barriers to file transfer get larger the farther back you go.
I have two old Macs that I use for writing: a 1985 Mac SE 2/40, and a PowerBook G4 1.67ghz.
The SE is indeed pretty thoroughly cut off from the world, but this also means that if you want to get your data off the drive, you have very limited options to do so. In my case it means using an SD card-based floppy emulator, writing to virtual floppy, loading the SD onto my modern Mac with a dongle because MBP2019, renaming the virtual floppy file so that Disk Utility will still recognize it, and then finally hoping I remembered to save the file as plain text because nothing is gonna read that shit other wise.
I have experimented with a Wifi232 dongle as well, but found that getting a vintage version of Z/XMODEM to talk to a modern one is all but impossible in 2020 and I failed at almost everything I tried.
So: enter the PowerBook. At 1.67ghz it's actually beefy enough that with TenFourFox you could technically get to some websites, but other than a handful of Mac abandonware sites and the old version of Reddit, almost nothing else will work thanks to JavaScript requirements. So distractions remain minimal and the alt-tab addiction is kept at bay.
BUT, it is still internet-capable enough to be able to connect to modern WPA2 wifi (mostly, I had some compatibility issues with my old ISP router that required working around with an old Airport Express), and that means I still have ways to more directly share the fruits of my labors. Email works just as well as any modern machine of course, USB is there (albeit slow 1.0 speeds), and some of the older sites I post my work on even still work in TenFourFox. More recently, thanks to Tigerbrew, I've got working git, so I can even backup my stuff to Github.
The PowerPC line makes a very nice "bridge" generation. Just modern enough to still by able to connect to the outside world, but old enough to be relatively free of distraction, or at least to keep the Twitter habit out of the way while I work.
new OS for PowerPC Mac: https://voidlinux-ppc.org/
or, a new PowerPC computer: https://www.talospace.com/
I continue to compile my Audio Unit plugins, to this day, on a 10.6.8 Snow Leopard machine specifically so I can release them as PPC/32/64 bit fat binaries. Far as I know that should continue to hold for everything I've done (not sure if it holds for the Mac VST plugins, though)
So that constitutes new audio DSP plugins for PowerPC Macs.
Though I don't use it day-to-day, I've got an old G3 (?) Mac laptop. It does indeed have a better keyboard than modern ones… and from an audio production standpoint, it may not be up to high sample rates but it's got digital optical in AND out, standard. Just plug an optical cable into the headphone or mic jacks.
thank god for linux to make my computers workable. Mail: mutt, Editor: vim, actually most like newsgroups, irc, .. all had cli clients. Only netscape was run in a very lightweight window manager like blackbox.
good thing about that in my teens is that I learned a shit load about computers and now 25 years later having a nice carreer thanks to tinkering with that.
But then it booted! I was so proud of myself. I was a poor kid and computers were expensive and I just had brought my machine back to life.
And in the end we started and finished around the same time. Because while he was iterating quickly, continuously changing something and running it again, I just sat in front my monitor contemplating the problem and my solution. When I finally got the chance to update my program, I was able to make a big, significant change.
Lesson learned: it is not the computer time that is important, but the thinking time. And thinking time is spent best in big blocks, not in tiny slivers.
Much of this is due to the history of AppleWorks -- it was a Carbon conversion of ClarisWorks, which dated back to 1991. Parts of the UI -- like that ruler -- are essentially unchanged from version 1.0.
It's probably one of the most "timeless" looks ever used by OS X.
Problem is that people tend to confuse the two and fool themselves into thinking pretty equals usable. Glossy vs matte screens are the classic example. Glossy looks pretty but has way more issues with glare.
I would very much like to see that data; I'd be interested to see if/how to objectively measure such a thing. (Also the results would be interesting)
It's the window which is not partially/fully obscured by the windows underneath it?
This brings me to wonder how difficult it would be to develop a notebook that is specifically designed to be a focused offline ultraportable, using the most power efficient and cost effective components available along with an extremely lightweight, nearly nonexistent OS (think classic Mac OS) with some modern affordances and high-end touches (USB-C charging, milled single piece enclosure, etc). The imagined result is a machine that costs less than a decent Chromebook while being more responsive, having dramatically better battery life, and being generally more pleasant to use.
These are technically achievable with an iPad or Pixelbook, but require effort and discipline on the part of the user and on some level directly contradict the design and intended use of both products.
I think there are still significant savings to be had in terms of power usage/battery life. Lower power hardware puts a hard cap on how much any one application can consume and incentivizes efficiency on the part of the developer. The device's screen panel can also be selected for efficiency over density, brightness, color gamut, etc since those aren't priorities.
Of course, a shitty "modern" website will perform exactly as you'd expect, but I try to avoid those even on my workstation so no big loss there.
Aside from that, it's perfectly usable for things like writing code, reading/writing emails, chatting on IRC, browsing lightweight websites like HN, reading documentation... you know, 99% of the stuff I use a computer for.
I have more powerful laptops as well, but I often reach for the T60 anyway, because it makes little difference for these kinds of tasks, and I love the 1600x1200 screen.
Or are you suggesting the matte 17” screen, keyboard and I/O ports on the last PowerBook “leave a lot to be desired by modern standards”?
I'm typing on a Lenovo X1 Carbon (gen2) I bought for $200 last week. Win10, 1440p touchscreen, ssd, bitlocker encrypted with fingerprint biometrics.
I've seen macbooks at the same pricerange, but I'm a windows guy.
I paid something like 20 bucks for it. It came with a busted ide hard drive, but no worries. I went online and brought an ide to sd card adapter, and will now install Tiger in it.
I don't spect to take any serious workload, but It will problably be fine to run Starcraft and Diablo II in it. Will see.
https://justinmiller.io/posts/2020/06/17/project-386-part-4/
I mean, yeah, it’s not _capable_ of a whole lot, but it’s a refreshing perspective to look back at computing from then and to think about how much we did that wasn’t sitting at the computer as a nerve center of our lives.
As long as it works, why not use the hardware if you have it and it's still operational? Older desktop PC's have a certain power usage issue compared to modern ones, but laptops usually tend to keep power consumption down.
i have an old Imac g4 too, but apart from games i haven't gotten around to use it for anything productive...
I wonder if a Pi 4 would have the horsepower to run a PowerPC emulator with OS 9 properly. If it did, the biggest difficulty might be finding a decent small-ish external screen.
I have a 2001 PowerPC G4 Quicksilver tower. Haven't booted it in a while, but it worked fine last time I did. If you can find these local to you, you can often get them very cheap. Shipping is expensive though, so buying them on a place like eBay is kind of a non-starter. I recently found a sealed old copy of Cubase VST available online for about $10. Bought an old M-Audio PCI card a long time ago for this machine too. At some point I may set it up as a Digital Audio Workstation.
I found a pair of old (2001) PowerPC iBooks on eBay a while back. They're good for running kids games and software - useful if you want an inexpensive, air-gapped machine for a young child you don't want on the open internet. Or typing / writing. These can be had very cheaply, I think because many schools bought them and eventually liquidated their inventory to replace with newer equipment. I had no problem finding inexpensive new batteries for these on eBay, and bought a couple extras.
More regularly, I use my old mid-2007 black macbook to run the original Starcraft. I'm running it via the OS X Installer (it's originally a PowerPC OS 9 game). I'm not much of a gamer these days, but Starcraft can be fun once in a while... like when PG&E in California shuts off the power for days and you want to conserve your main laptop's battery for work... And it's cool to have games that actually support local lan multiplayer, which Blizzard moved away from over time.
For anyone looking to delve deeper into this topic, here's some recommendations (off the top of my head) on what version of OS X to settle on for a given machine:
For older Intel Machines, I recommend 10.6 Snow Leopard. This is the last OS to support Rosetta, which allows you to run PowerPC OS X software. Note: PowerPC OS X software, not PowerPC OS 9 / Classic software.
For older PPC machines, I recommend 10.4 Tiger. This is the last OS to support running OS 9 applications via the Classic environment. Or of course, you can just install OS 9 and forego OS X altogether.
This project https://www.powerpc-notebook.org/ is pretty advanced in that regard.
The author mentions Slack. I’ve been using Mattermost for about 2 years now. I’ve found that having a mandatory offline schedule is important. I’ve been vocal about that with my team. Usually I’m offline from Mattermost for about 2-3 hours a day. Which allows me to focus on my work.
Out of interest, I wonder what the minimum spec to run an IRC client is?
You can browse wikipedia on one of those, too.
Really, it's just text, it doesn't matter. Literally any general purpose computer will run IRC if it can do TCP/IP and someone bothers to write a client.
Wasn’t the initial PowerPC architecture and designs done by Apple, IBM and Motorola, with Motorola and IBM also working the fabs for processors used by Apple during that time (before the switch to Intel)? When did Apple stop being involved in the design of specific processors used in its systems?
Any way I can get old Ambrosia games?
https://macintoshgarden.org/ has most of them. (Sadly, Ambrosia appears to have shut down entirely. End of an era...)
What? That's a very surprising statement! Of course Slack has a web client. Does it not support any browser that runs on the old hardware?
I have a raspberry pi 2 I can use for that, probably.
Ok, I've found my weekend project :P
Recently acquired, however.
Encourage consumption (of old/novelty hardware)
Promise of "productivity" (the holy grail for hn commenters)
A pip on your shoulder for being different/special
Deflect from the hard problems internet addiction and procrastination, to "hey do this instead"
I have upgraded from a X220 to a X390 for a single reason: YouTube Videos, which i like to watch on my laptop, started to put the x220 under high load.
I'm just not writing an Article about it.
Ah and one generic reason for not having something with is 20 years old: You do wanna have security updates.
invidio.us, mpv + youtube-dl, smplayer...
...
Now I fully appreciate the draw of doing something like this as a hobby or something, but this article is talking about productivity. This is not an investment for productivity.
I personally don't enjoy writing with a laptop-sized monitor for long periods of time (ergonomically speaking). It's much more comfortable writing on a 24" LCD.
https://www.ebay.com/i/324223000220?chn=ps&norover=1&mkevt=1...
To me that’s more than a 10x improvement over the setup the author describes. There’s relatively little you can’t do on such a $500 machine.
I get where you're coming from, but this is the fundamental problem with network-connected devices. I'm an Apple fan, of sorts, and my whole family is part of the Apple ecosystem, but the company has a nasty habit of strategic obsolescence and doubly so around transitions.
It will also run the current version of the Linux kernel.
