The 2024 Old Computer Challenge has been announced. The challenge started 4 years ago with the challenge to use a computer with 1 core at a max of 1 GHz and 512MB of RAM for a week and grew a small community surrounding them with 34 entrants for 2023. This year's theme, however, is no theme at all. The announcement post includes suggestions however there's no set of official rules this time around.
Anyone interested in participating can take a look at Headcrash's OCC Site to look at previous years' entries and find instructions for how to get listed this year.
Personally I'm planning on running a classic Clamshell Mac with OS9 as my daily driver :)
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Old Computer Challenge v4 Announced
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(Score: 2) by Freeman on Wednesday June 26 2024, @05:18PM (2 children)
In the event I could put my hands on my old Thinkpad IBM A21m laptop(s), I would be in business. https://www.productindetail.com/pn/ibm-thinkpad-a21m-2628#specs [productindetail.com]
While something like an original Raspberry Pi would have worked, it's not a good experience. Booting from an SD Card is pure torture. It's at least as bad as using an HDD. Booting from a USB 3.0 flash drive on my RasPi 4 showed me just how much of the latency and slowness was down to how horrible of an experience it is to run an OS on an SD Card. Now, if you were running TinyCore Linux in RAM on the RasPi, that might be something. TinyCore Linux is not for the faint of heart though. Mostly due to how much you have to do for yourself. Otherwise, any RasPi with SD Card boot is just not worth it, from a standard desktop user perspective.
I recently built a stand-up arcade style setup with my Dad. It's a bit of a monster, but quite functional. The biggest issue I have with it is that I've found I abhor the arcade stick I got with it. It's worse than just having a d-pad. I may look into getting an actual decent arcade stick, but most likely I'm going to be disappointed in something. Whether it's the options, price point, or whatever. Still, by far, the most expensive part to the whole project was the materials to build the cabinet. At least I know it's sturdy!
Joshua 1:9 "Be strong and of a good courage; be not afraid, neither be thou dismayed: for the Lord thy God is with thee"
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday June 26 2024, @07:13PM
> I abhor the arcade stick I got with it.
This looks like a generic arcade joystick, as used on commercial coin-op machines:
https://www.aliexpress.us/item/2255799843325270.html [aliexpress.us]
Might not be as strong as one that Atari or Sega used back in the day, but looks similar(?)
Page down and there is a picture with dimensions.
(Score: 3, Touché) by driverless on Thursday June 27 2024, @09:26AM
Shit, my mom has been using that computer for the last 20 years or so (seriously!). Does she win the grand prize?
(Score: 2) by janrinok on Wednesday June 26 2024, @06:35PM (14 children)
I didn't realise until I reached the Headcrash site that you were organising it! I don't think I have a suitable machine for it - except for RaspPi's which are all doing useful tasks for me 24/7.
I am not interested in knowing who people are or where they live. My interest starts and stops at our servers.
(Score: 2) by Freeman on Wednesday June 26 2024, @06:45PM (5 children)
Using an older RasPi as a "main computer" is semi-torturous. The thing is just not responsive at all. That said, I've not tried TinyCore Linux or Puppy Linux on a RasPi. Both of which would load into RAM which should mostly bypass the SD Card woes. Initial boot time would still be kind of bad, but I'm not terribly concerned about that part. A minute or two vs 10 seconds boot time isn't such a problem as long as my OS/UI/programs are responsive once it loads!
Joshua 1:9 "Be strong and of a good courage; be not afraid, neither be thou dismayed: for the Lord thy God is with thee"
(Score: 3, Interesting) by Reziac on Thursday June 27 2024, @03:55AM (4 children)
I have an ancient laptop with a 1GHz single core and 340mb RAM (yes it's weird, one 256mb stick max plus assorted soldered) and for a while it ran Wary Puppy 5.x -- very slick. Stopped using it because networking notworked more than worked, but it certainly ran well enough. I'd think it would be fine on even the slowest Pi, with initial read time being the only delay (SD card certainly has to be faster than the laptop's antique IDE HD).
Later ran TinyXP on it and it was reasonable, if not superslick like Puppy.
And there is no Alkibiades to come back and save us from ourselves.
(Score: 5, Interesting) by Unixnut on Thursday June 27 2024, @10:38AM (3 children)
That was quite common on cheap laptops back in the day. 128MB soldered in + 256MB stick = 384MB total RAM. Cheap laptops would take ~42MB of RAM for graphics memory and 2MB for cached BIOS and other bits, leaving you with around 340MB reported usable.
Sorry to break it to you but in my experience this is not the case. Firstly while the SD *might* be faster than an IDE HDD on reads (in my experience HDDs are faster, even IDE ones if they are post 1994 vintage), it is definitely slower on writes. Secondly a lot of the pi's peripherals are connected via USB, which requires CPU power to manage. Therefore on a single core PI a lot more of the CPU is being used just to drive the peripheral HW leaving less for the end users purpose. The latency on the pi is pretty poor in my experience, regardless of load.
I have an old EPIA-5000 motherboard with a 533MHz VIA i586 (Eden I think?) and 256MB RAM. I booted up recently with Linux and it flies compared to the single-core Pi, which on paper has twice the CPU speed. I suspect it is because the Mini-ITX board has a better architecture and a lot of the HW does not need CPU power to be driven, so most of the 533MHz is available for my use.
To be fair to the pi though, it was never meant to be used as a desktop. It was designed as a small, cheap SBC to teach people computing/development and provide an embedded platform for hobby projects. It does a smashing job at those things.
If you want a desktop type SBC, you may be better off with one of the non-pi boards out there. I was looking at some recently (BananaPI I think?) which actually have SATA ports and seem a lot more geared towards being a small silent general purpose PC.
(Score: 2) by Freeman on Thursday June 27 2024, @02:50PM (1 child)
Booting from USB 3.0 on my Pi4 makes the desktop experience usable. I can only imagine that it's better with a Pi5. I just haven't ponied up for the new iteration. I have a Pi, Pi2, Pi3, Pi4, and Pi0. Just a matter of time for me to get my hands on a Pi5. I mean, money too, but it's not terribly expensive. Certainly more expensive than they used to be. That said, you can still get your hands on a Pi Zero/Zero 2 W, which are cheaper than the original price point and as good as the original or pretty close! I pretty much don't have time to mess with a Pi Pico or the like. I don't even know what I would use it for.
Joshua 1:9 "Be strong and of a good courage; be not afraid, neither be thou dismayed: for the Lord thy God is with thee"
(Score: 3, Interesting) by Reziac on Thursday June 27 2024, @03:14PM
That's why I don't have a Pi. Seems like fun if I were doing that sort of messing around, but I'm not.
ExplainingComputers channel has a whole bale of every sort of Pi and Pi-adjacent, and reviews them with realworld performance tests, not only with Raspbian but sometimes larger distros. They seem adequate, if not what you'd want for everyday.
And there is no Alkibiades to come back and save us from ourselves.
(Score: 2) by Reziac on Thursday June 27 2024, @03:22PM
Yeah, those old laptops were pretty much take what you get. I have a 386 laptop (still works perfectly) that's entirely that way.
I don't do Pi myself but ExplainingComputers channel does tons of performance reviews. For the most part they behave decently, at least with his usual setup. But Raspbian is one thing, bigger distros another.
And yeah, not its goal (tho Chris did daily-drive one for a week, and lived to tell of it). But I'd like to see more of the philosophy leak into laptops.... I have an Asus netbook that internally is basically a Pi-style board (with a Celeron CPU) mounted in a complete package, and the nice thing is it's entirely modular, anyone with a screwdriver and minimal patience could repair it. Nothing buried under a maze of wires, and freakin' crazy battery life (have seen it report over 24 hours, tho it's rated for 10).
And there is no Alkibiades to come back and save us from ourselves.
(Score: 2) by tekk on Wednesday June 26 2024, @06:57PM (6 children)
Oh no, I'm not the one who organizes any of it. I just offered to do a soylent writeup because the site always needs submissions and (afaik?) I'm the only OCCer active on here. My OCCs are at http://tekk.in/computers.html [tekk.in]
(Score: 2) by janrinok on Wednesday June 26 2024, @08:00PM (1 child)
I just saw the 'subscribe' link which appeared to be you... My bad.
I am not interested in knowing who people are or where they live. My interest starts and stops at our servers.
(Score: 2) by tekk on Wednesday June 26 2024, @08:20PM
Ahhh, I may have just filled the submission wrong. Iirc there was a field for the submitter's website I put my site into, but I might've misread the label?
(Score: 2) by Reziac on Thursday June 27 2024, @04:14AM (2 children)
Your link doesn't work, tho I found your OCC, very cool!
http://tekk.in/oldcomputer.html [tekk.in]
And I absolutely agree with your conclusions. Why on earth does every program or OS have to grow to epic size, and kill off formerly excellent hardware?? Take the Atlantis Nova word processor as an example... most of the power of the big boys in... under 3mb. (I have a 2010 version installed that's all of 600k.) Exactly what does Win11 do in 10GB of disk space and 4GB of RAM that WinXP didn't do in 500mb on disk and ... I've seen XP use as little as 80mb RAM fresh out of the box, tho with drivers the default is 386mb (someone had to work hard to hit that).
My somewhat-outdated inventory of random PCs...
http://twilightasylum.com/pc/the_borg.htm [twilightasylum.com]
The average retirement age is about 15 years, tho Moonbase is old enough to drink.
And there is no Alkibiades to come back and save us from ourselves.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday June 27 2024, @03:58PM (1 child)
Part of the reason for this is I think in a large part because sotware developers are generally using the most powerful workstations available. In a very real sense, it is all they know. I don't think this fact has changed very much since the past but something that has changed is that today, 30-year-old computers are really not fundamentally different from modern ones.
Like, nobody would bat an eye at the fact that if I have some software for early-1990s Windows PC it's not going to make any sense to use that on something from 30 years prior like the Bendix G-20.
But today, we're still using Windows PCs that are so similar to the early-1990s Windows PCs that you can literally run the exact same executables on both and install some of the exact same hardware peripherals!
Personally, I do try to keep a bunch of 1990s/early-2000s-vintage computers (mostly UNIX workstations, but also PCs and I just added a new-to-me Power Macintosh!) in working condition and for my hobby software stuff I do build everything to work on these old machines (as well as new ones) when it makes sense to do so.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by tekk on Thursday June 27 2024, @04:38PM
> Part of the reason for this is I think in a large part because sotware developers are generally using the most powerful workstations available. In a very real sense, it is all they know.
As loathe as I am to give credit to Mark Zuckerberg for anything, the rotating shitty computer was a fantastic idea and every company should do it. I don't know if it's apocryphal or not but supposedly back in the day at Facebook engineers were forced to use for x% of their time some old beat up 10 year old computer with slow internet access to drive home how important the site's performance was.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday June 27 2024, @04:27PM
I have a lot of old computers but had never heard of the Old Computer Challenge!
It's unfortunate that the Old Computer Challenge web forum [deadnet.se] is essentially unusable in old web browsers.
Maybe I will participate using my Sun, probably the only old machine that I could really make usable as a daily driver within 2 weeks. Perhaps if I sort out an X server on Windows 98 (since that machine is on the same KVM as my primary workstation) I can use it that way. Hmmm...
(Score: 5, Interesting) by DannyB on Wednesday June 26 2024, @08:17PM
The very first original RaspPi is the correct computer for the specs: 1 core at a max of 1 GHz and 512MB of RAM for a weak
In one of the latter months of 2014, my boss's boss came into my office, gave me the then new RaspPi as a gift and told me to do something interesting with it and let him know what I had done.
I did two things:
1. I had written a Mandelbrot set explorer program (desktop GUI program) in Java back in 2004. The RaspPi didn't even exist then. I took the compiled binary (from Windows) and moved it to the RaspPi and it ran on the Pi's desktop perfectly. Sluggish, but slowly usable as long as you didn't dive too deep where it would start using BigInteger calculations instead of floats.
Deciding to continue this absurdity . . .
2. I decided to take the company product I work on and run that on Java on the Pi. I didn't want to run Apache Tomcat as an application server on the Pi so I used the smaller leaner Jetty instead. The compiled "WAR" file of my application ran on Jetty perfectly. Connected to an MS SQL database server in my office. I used a browser to connect to my application. It was sluggish but worked.
WAR file:
Later on . . .
3. I used the RaspPi to drive multiple MAX 7219 modules connected to either LED matrix displays or 8 digit 7 segment LED displays. [ibb.co] Or both at the same time on one bus. I drove the first MAX 7219 on the chain slightly out of spec according to the data sheet, but it worked fine using SPI. And yes, this was also done in Java on the original low spec RaspPi.
I wrote this so that separate threads could operate different displays on the chain of MAX 7219 modules. A separate thread picked up what was ready to be sent to all of the modules, and sent it all out at once. So all modules update at the same (fast) frame rate. But they display unrelated things. Each of the two 8x8 matrix modules displays a different length snake running around that matrix. The 7 segment display has a millisecond counter counting up to 20 seconds at which point the program stops. And a separate thread makes one segment of the leftmost 7-segment digit run around in a circle in the bottom half of that digit. I have written about this before on SN. You could probably search for 7219 and find it.
Stop asking "How stupid can you be?" Some people apparently take it as a challenge.
(Score: 2) by Rich on Wednesday June 26 2024, @08:24PM (3 children)
The idea of using a Titanium G4 laptop felt like cheating. I keep one around for ResEdit work on legacy projects, it runs Tiger and the classic box. Tiger doesn't feel any worse than Sonoma, quite the opposite. TenFourFox would even give halfway modern web access. So I powered it up, but unfortunately it wouldn't connect to my current WLAN (probably some old WPA version), and it had (insane for these days) 1 GB of RAM installed. I was too lazy to downgrade the RAM and run an Ethernet cable, but if I did, I would have been on the challenge without much suffering - unfair to the folks who try to get by on a 128 MB Pentium 166 MMX and KDE3 - although I guess a Win XP setup could be made to work even less troublesome than Tiger.
I did my retro duties last week though, when I finally dug out my roadside-found Atari 2600 (MY80 light sixer woody), repaired the broken bottom case and sliced RF cable, and designed a Composite+S-Video+Audio interface that keeps the original RF modulator intact. Hints: 1.) A 74HC125 is faster than a CD4050 for the video DAC, and it can pull sync separately when wired as OE with grounded input. Faster is good to avoid the color burst overlap glitch. 2.) LM4562 work fine for video at TV rates, 3.) NE5532 have just barely enough bandwidth for composite, but the result looks retro and cool.
(Score: 2) by Reziac on Thursday June 27 2024, @04:24AM (2 children)
I once accidentally hooked the wrong HD to the old test rig, and found myself watching Win2K boot up... on a 486DX4-100 with 8mb of RAM. It took about 5 minutes to reach the desktop, but ran acceptably after that. Even Office2K was usable, if not snappy. (With no swapfile.)
But wait! I knew a guy, a hardware programmer, who ran Win95 on a 386SX16 (with 16MB RAM, IIRC) ... he said it took about 15 minutes to reach the desktop, but wasn't too bad after that.
Nowadays we don't know what suffering IS.
BTW I made the peculiar discovery that if XP is the 2nd install as a dual boot with ReactOS, it uses a mere 80mb RAM. All I can figure is that it loaded only default drivers, but everything worked fine. Why this combination triggers that behavior, tho, I have no idea. (Repeatable on different hardware.)
And there is no Alkibiades to come back and save us from ourselves.
(Score: 2) by Rich on Thursday June 27 2024, @09:44AM (1 child)
I remember rather long boot times, but usually not annoying like you mentioned. Might've been because I was on classic MacOS, which, once the little gallery with extensions had flashed by, was ready - given the lack of memory protection that could happen a few times a day when debugging what would have been an ordinary segfault. I do remember trying to get KDE3 on a machine with 64M of RAM that was running XP sort-of-fine, and it was a nightmare, though.
(Score: 2) by Reziac on Thursday June 27 2024, @02:53PM
When Windows behaves poorly and isn't so cramped it can't move, it always means shit hardware or shit drivers, or malware. On good hardware, it is rarely unstable. I go back to 3.11 and can count total crashes on one hand, and uptimes measured in months or years. But I always maxed out RAM and used good hardware with stable drivers (and until about 15 years ago, that meant build your own from quality parts, and avoid namebrand systems, which used factory seconds and low-grade hardware that had all sorts of issues. And Intel, not AMD; per observations on a hardware forum, 90% of unstable Windows systems had an AMD CPU.)
64mb for XP is a trifle tight, tho. -- I have a netbook with only 4GB RAM, a slow CPU, and Win11 (but awesome battery life) and needed some old Windows in a VM for when Win11 is too hard on the old eyes. VirtualBox couldn't get XP to run, but Win2K is good. No idea why; VBox wouldn't import my usual XP VM even when it was dismangled to the naked virtual HD.
Back in the KDE3 era linux didn't need so much RAM (I had Mandrake 7 running on middling hardware). Its decendant Trinity still only uses 300mb on a tight distro. But a friend just installed current Ubuntu... 1.9GB to admire its navel.
I have a G4 with MacOS 9.2 that took about a week to boot... replaced the extremely slow Quantum hard drive with an SSD (IDE SSDs did exist), replaced the 256mb with 1GB RAM ($20 for PC RAM, $1200 if it were Mac branded RAM, but it was the same damn thing), and it improved immensely. I still don't like MacOS, but it is so much more pleasant when it's not taking forever to do anything. I have a SnowLeopard Hackintosh that was sluggish with 8GB RAM, but pretty decent with 32GB... that strikes me as excessive for that old an OS.(Dont like OSX either, but there it is.) Anyway... Old MacOS cheated -- it displayed the desktop first, then went about loading everything else in the background. They did this to make it look like it booted fast, because it actually took several minutes.
And there is no Alkibiades to come back and save us from ourselves.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by damnbunni on Thursday June 27 2024, @01:35AM (1 child)
I came close to this a while back when my Mac mini was away for repair. So I used my PowerPC Amiga for a couple weeks.
It's 800 MHz, but it does have a gig of RAM. Though halving that wouldn't be much of a hardship. It may be running the current AmigaOS, but it's still basically an Amiga. RAM hoggery is not a problem.
It was okay to use for a couple weeks, but the web browser situation on AmigaOS is kind of butt.
(Score: 2) by Reziac on Thursday June 27 2024, @04:28AM
Dunno about Amiga browsers but Supermium (current-Chrome clone) runs all the way back to Win2K, and doesn't use anywhere near the RAM that regular Chrome does. (I use it regularly on XP64, and ended up using it on a Win8.1 VM because regular Chrome refused.)
And there is no Alkibiades to come back and save us from ourselves.
(Score: 3, Funny) by namefags_are_jerks on Thursday June 27 2024, @06:15AM (8 children)
(boots a VIA C3 800 Mhz/64 MB box)
$ ssh -Y boomer@usualworkstation
(Score: 2) by namefags_are_jerks on Thursday June 27 2024, @06:19AM (7 children)
...the only real hassle with that is the C3 system only does analog VGA and it would be Surfing the Webz at 1024x768..
(Score: 2) by Rich on Thursday June 27 2024, @09:58AM (6 children)
Hardly any worse than these discount store laptops with 1366x768 panels. I had a C3 as server & gateway for over a decade,, until it was replaced by a RasPi 3, and the only downtime it had was when the power supply failed (about 2 times) or we had a power outage (about 2 times as well). Other than that, it saw four-figure day uptimes. For most of its life, it ran Ubuntu Dapper (6.06). The RasPi IS nicer, though. Methinks, the cut to "modern" was about 2006 with the Core 2 CPUs; not too much of a felt difference between a 2006 Macbook Pro on Snow Leopard or El Capitan, or a T61 even on current Mint, and today's gear. A 2012 Retina MBP or a ThinkPad W530 are still better than the entry level stuff a decade later, except maybe for the small touchpad of the TP (for those not accustomed to the ... nub (see xkcd 243)).
(Score: 2) by Ingar on Thursday June 27 2024, @10:34AM (4 children)
No updates for a thousand days seems grossly irresponsible for an internet-connected system.
Understanding is a three-edged sword: your side, their side, and the truth.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by Rich on Thursday June 27 2024, @01:32PM (3 children)
No risk, no fun. But it wasn't pwned in all the time (unless some "APT" had a nefarious kernel space bug in there). There was nothing of value on there, so I would not have cared much (except maybe to have to explain spam from my IP to the provider), and a clean wipe would have been as much effort as an update. It only had port 80 open and served plain http from Apache 2. I figured if they ever had a buffer overflow in basic Apache, it would be known VERY widely. No bluetooth, no wireless, no fringe protocols, no complex VM stacks, no PHP (!!!).
I'd rather have a simple system with all known good, old components than some modern "full stack" where all you can do is switch on auto-updates and pray these don't come with a supply chain attack.
(Score: 2) by Reziac on Thursday June 27 2024, @03:03PM (1 child)
Don't do stupid shit, use a decent firewall/router, and any damn OS is fine, updated or not. I still use XP64 for everyday and I'd hazard I'm safer than the average daily-updated Win10/11 (mind you, I used to collect malware, and have ID'd two new viruses in the wild). Your point about new attack surfaces... see, malware authors aren't geniuses. But every patch points directly at the defect it fixes, and that paints the target. No new patches means no newly-painted targets. Known-good and no new targets is better than Gee-I-Hope with daily updates.
And there is no Alkibiades to come back and save us from ourselves.
(Score: 2) by Rich on Thursday June 27 2024, @06:24PM
Well, it WAS my firewall/router. It ran Shorewall and dnsmasq with a pppoe uplink. Back in the day, anything that did NAT for connection sharing couldn't properly port-forward, so I had to do it myself.
Originally, I had DSL modems, then some kind of halfway modern router that was re-configured to do PPPoE for me, so I didn't have to change my setup. Eventually, the telco decided they had to trash the PPPoE capable thingy and put some modern WLAN-enabled router there, which, fortunately, has decent port forwarding. The RasPi which took the place of the VIA C3 is now behind that thingy. It's still worse than the old setup, because I have no sensible means of finding out my external IP to update my ancient dynamic DNS service. This is done by a python script I did ad-hoc, but it has to ask some external "whatismyip" service, to my knowledge the router has no easy way of finding out, and I'm not going to webscrape that from its configuration.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday June 27 2024, @05:16PM
The entire concept that "automatic updates" are somehow a good thing for security is absolutely insane.
When "bad guys" setup automatic updates on a computer, we call it a "back door", and the affected computer systems are called "zombies". And people actually believe doing exactly that on purpose is somehow going to improve security?
I remember a few years back that Mozilla released a list of "secure" tech products you should consider for Christmas gifts. As I recall one of their selection criteria was that the product must feature a back door^W^W^Wautomatic updates allowing the vendor to install whatever software they like whenever they want.
(Score: 2) by Freeman on Thursday June 27 2024, @02:59PM
A Pi4 is so worth the upgrade. Being able to boot from something other than an SD Card just makes the whole thing less horrible.
Joshua 1:9 "Be strong and of a good courage; be not afraid, neither be thou dismayed: for the Lord thy God is with thee"
(Score: 5, Touché) by ledow on Thursday June 27 2024, @11:43AM (3 children)
I still have a Thinkpad 360 with external floppy drive.
It was second-hand when I got it.
I started writing a book on it about 25 years ago.
I'm still writing that book. There's no reason I couldn't do it on the 360 (but I like cloud-backup for such a thing).
Every now and then I boot it up and am amazed how well Word-of-the-era works on Windows-of-the-era (Windows 3.1) on a laptop-of-the-era.
I do have PCMCIA modem, PCMCIA network, PCMCIA wifi (802.11b) and PCMCIA GSM cards that work on it, and for a time that machine ran my home network with an install of Freesco (a single-floppy Linux distribution to turn your PC into a router/firewall/NAT gateway).
I wouldn't like to think of the security and compatibility mess that would result trying to access the modern web with it.
(Score: 2) by Reziac on Thursday June 27 2024, @03:07PM
Compatibility mess, yeah, but security -- use a decent router/firewall and it'll be fine. And right, it's amazing how slick and usable and just not-in-your-face things used to be.
The oldest combo I know of that can cope with the modern web is Supermium on Win2K. Older stuff will run and scrape by but can't handle... mostly modern PHP sites, or recent JS.
And there is no Alkibiades to come back and save us from ourselves.
(Score: 2) by Freeman on Thursday June 27 2024, @03:08PM
That thing came out 2 years, before USB was a thing. The Thinkpad A21m that I've got has USB, so finding usable peripherals is a lot easier! It also has a 3.5" Floppy Drive along with a working optical drive. I think it was only CD, but I'm not entirely sure. I also have the dock for it, which is pretty cool.
Joshua 1:9 "Be strong and of a good courage; be not afraid, neither be thou dismayed: for the Lord thy God is with thee"
(Score: 2) by Reziac on Thursday June 27 2024, @03:09PM
BTW, I'll see your 25 year book and raise you... I started one on a two-floppy XT in 1990, with WordPerfect 5.0. Finally last year got it all brought up to code (nowadays I'm a much better writer) and wrapped up.
And there is no Alkibiades to come back and save us from ourselves.
(Score: 2) by VLM on Thursday June 27 2024, @03:50PM (1 child)
Double dog dare you to try a TRS80 color computer 3 with Microware OS9 instead of the mac. Predates it about 1 or 2 decades.
The challenge is coming up with a definition for that. My microwave oven runs on a potato so I can "use" a computer like that to reheat my lunch. From a retrocomputing point of view I am in between projects right now and I'm trying to decide between messing with RSX11m on an emulated PDP11 or with RDOS on an emulated Data General machine (probably a Nova but why not an Eclipse? Or both?) I suppose networking the RSX11 would be more fun, but RDOS has it attractions.
(Score: 2) by tekk on Thursday June 27 2024, @04:39PM
> Double dog dare you to try a TRS80 color computer 3 with Microware OS9 instead of the mac. Predates it about 1 or 2 decades.
Considering how part of the challenge is writing it all up that might be a problem :)
Now you have me thinking about trying a C64 next year though. I think they make ethernet cards for those and I could probably telnet to a server to make the blog posts...