386SX wrote on 2024-10-22, 11:06:

Lately I had the idea to try buying new components for a modern desktop computer for a main home/office machine and went for an i3-12100 with 16GB DDR5, NVME disk, an Intel Arc etc..for the usual Office and Internet tasks, while not high end I was expecting a huge speed jump from the old machines I was using in these years like early i3/i7 configs and even the Raspberry Pi 5. Instead while of course faster it doesn't feel that much fast at all at the point the Raspberry Pi 5 surprise me considered the low power required to work. Going back I'd have still used the i7-3770 that I built lately.

i suppose the real test would be some kind of video encoding or other intensive computation task, i'd expect a jump there - but not anything where there is a normal interface like the web, the OS and various applications

Jo22 wrote on 2024-10-21, 00:18:

@all what I wrote may seems a bit unfair and unpolite, but we maybe need to ask ourself ocassionaly what we have become. Are we […]
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@all what I wrote may seems a bit unfair and unpolite, but we maybe need to ask ourself ocassionaly what we have become.
Are we getting old? Are we becoming the people our parents have warned us about when we were young?
A lot of the discussions and mindsets I read these days on Vogons remind me of the older folks I know of in real life.
It manifests itself in rejection of all sorts of modern things. Later, it results in stuck ways of thinking.
Edit: I'm not excluding myself here. I often ask myself how much I have become like them.

In Vladimir Makarov's voice: Stubborn old men hopelessly out of step with the changing world. You too, will change.

I thought I was hip and groovy enough to be on fleek, now I gotta have the rizz, where does it all end?

UCyborg wrote on 2024-10-25, 11:06:

Jo22 wrote on 2024-10-21, 00:18:

@all what I wrote may seems a bit unfair and unpolite, but we maybe need to ask ourself ocassionaly what we have become. Are we […]
Show full quote

@all what I wrote may seems a bit unfair and unpolite, but we maybe need to ask ourself ocassionaly what we have become.
Are we getting old? Are we becoming the people our parents have warned us about when we were young?
A lot of the discussions and mindsets I read these days on Vogons remind me of the older folks I know of in real life.
It manifests itself in rejection of all sorts of modern things. Later, it results in stuck ways of thinking.
Edit: I'm not excluding myself here. I often ask myself how much I have become like them.

In Vladimir Makarov's voice: Stubborn old men hopelessly out of step with the changing world. You too, will change.

I mean Socrates thought youngsters were stupid for writing things down and that it made the brain weak , so the whole old man yells at cloud thing has been around since the dawn of man.

Hell there were probably cave men that thought using spears was for sissies because you were supposed to use your hands to fight.

Its just a thing that takes more hold the older you get.

For example, Geforce 6200 sells well on eBay, bought one for $8 at a thrift store and sold it on eBay for $100, decline in interest in retro is myth.

^Well, I don’t mean to judge. It's just that this danger hangs above all of us like Damocles' sword.

I do see almost daily in real life how people around me have changed in past years.

They do repeat old mistakes, refuse to adapt, refuse to try out new tech (like a Mac or an OS like AROS).
They ignore technological changes like SSDs, USB 3 and so on.

I guess the reason I'm still noticing is because I'm younger than them and because of my younger sister (I had to get through childhood twice, essentially, because of her and her generation's pop culture).

This allowed me to see things with different eyes, maybe and question my own nostalgia and habbits.

That being said, I don’t consider myself to be immune.
My biggest fear is to become a stereotypical baby boomer* person.

That's why I do try too keep in touch with current games, shows and trends.
Not that I do enjoy them, but I want to be able to see things with young people's eyes.
They're the future, after all.

(*A lot of the people that are horrying to me are from that gen, simply.
There are a few exceptions, though. Some have stayed young by heart.)

MAZter wrote on 2024-10-25, 17:28:

...decline in interest in retro is myth.

I think that is generally true, but the price of admission has definitely gone up a bit. Also, I have definitely noticed a migration over to realtime chat venues rather than forums. I think in the long run this will only hurt the vintage hardware/software knowledge base as some of these chat servers are restricted access only. So what this will do is create data/knowledge silos and will be unsearchable from a search engine. Maybe I'm wrong, but it seems that way. Vogons is one of the more active vintage hardware/software forums on the web and seems fairly healthy, but I've seen a decrease in foot traffic in other retro/vintage forums. Where do I see a strong pulse personally? Discord. Not that it's a bad thing, but good luck finding any of that info years from now.

AFAIK, there is something about the brain and neuron connections being all over the place when you're young and then settling in certain way when you're getting through life, basically getting optimized for certain patterns, old pathways dying off and then it gets more difficult to change them. My father never learned to use the computer, not even how to read and send SMS on a mobile phone. He'd be 88 years old this year. I think he was one of more extreme cases.

The remaining family is older than me, yet I'm considered to be into retro stuff because my computer is 15 and smartphone is 10 years old. Apparently among (some?) people into iPhones, particular iPhone model may be considered retro in few years, eg. check this review. I noticed for some people new tech is just about having something to look forward, even if that tech doesn't do anything for them that old tech didn't.

IT is constantly changing, for better or worse. Is it capitalism? Boredom? Does it make sense? Did it ever make sense?

Slightly OT, but there's a relationship between new nervous connections and happiness. Keywords are dopamine and neuroplasticity.
When you are, um, "enthusiastic" about something then new connections can form, even in high age. It's a biological thing, not just hocus pocus.
So it doesn’t have to be that we're ending up yelling at clouds, gratefully. 😄

Sorry also for being a bit OT here in the past few post, hope you don't mind.
It's just that certain older people (late 50s to 80s) that I know of personally are unwillingly "retro".
They insist on installing latest Windows on outdated hardware over and over again for years (2000s hardware) or do connect their 46" LCD TV via RF cable to a DVD/BD player,
or want their modern Android phone to look like an ancient Android 4.0.4 phone.
And that's harmless, still. There are a few more facepalm stories.

Sure, we can wave this away and say they are old and have it hard these days.
But is that so? I mean, what were they doing the past ~40 years? 🤷
They had over 20 years of time to catch up with society and didn't care.
It's not that the modern world appeared out of thin air.
Back then, they were still young enough to learn all that painlessly.
But no, for whatever reason they rather actively refused to ignore the changes. It's hard to help them now, because they refuse to accept help.
They rather want the world to change to suit their needs.
That's my story, at least. Maybe it's also a local phenomenon, not sure. I'm gratefully being proven wrong here. 🙂

Edit: I think that's all I can say about the matter, maybe it was a bit too much already.
Sorry if that's the case. I promisse I'm quiet now (this topic). 😅

Edit: By "old" I mean the mental age. I'm not saying that a person at 60+ has to be walking on a cane.
There are young old men that do hiking, surfing or diving at age 60. It's all relative.

MAZter wrote on 2024-10-25, 17:28:

For example, Geforce 6200 sells well on eBay, bought one for $8 at a thrift store and sold it on eBay for $100, decline in interest in retro is myth.

Just my thoughts on this, if we are to measure interest in retro we need to define it first. Is it the "how many", the "how much", other things? What denotes "bigger interest in retro", 10 people buying for $100 or 100 people buying for $10? Because you are right about the prices, but I'm not sure they tell the full story.

Jo22 wrote on 2024-10-25, 22:55:

..
It's just that certain older people (late 50s to 80s) that I know of personally are unwillingly "retro".
..

I notice a few things relating to older folk and tech

1) in general people do most of their learning by 25-30, i don't mean academic but that quiet absorbing of "how things work" in society - values, whats polite or not, what is "normal" and practical things like "how we open bank accounts" etc, this know how then gets some updates over time but eventually, after decades, the changes may be so far away from what was initially learned that they cannot adapt or apply their "learned rules for life" anymore
2) Retirement - people have to get on with tech (and changes in other ways things operate in life) to some extend while at work, at least in many roles. when they retire they don't have to keep up so much, after 10 or so years the tech has changed enough to be inaccessible
3) Inter generational - too many older folk are (either by choice or by social circumstance) relegated to be among only their own generation and have no one to learn from, everyone loses out; young and old
4) Some things were actually 'better', at least in some limited way, e.g. back when you always spoke to a person for customer service - it was slow compared to automated service paths but whatever it was, someone would be dealing with it for you, complex issues would get dealt with

i searched for some experiment i'd read about: https://finance.yahoo.com/news/radical-experi … -204944551.html

not the most rigorous experiment but suggests that older people actually feel better when surrounded by the things and processes they had known - they feel competent and able again rather than pushed out, left behind- maybe that's a small part of the appeal of vintage stuff too - the first pangs of "old" come in middle age

..connect their 46" LCD TV via RF cable to a DVD/BD player,

i'd kinda like to do that though 😀

I think people age out of tech because people are just inventing new ways of doing the same old thing for new real reason other than to make you keep upgrading.

A particular bugbear of modern tech to me, is how the hell is two or three gigahertz too slow to keep up with my keyboard input at times and drop chunks of a sentence because I overran the buffer. Meanwhile, the other week tried some text thrashing in the "First" works suite that I found on my old Turbo XT and I think you'd have to exceed 300wpm to trip that up, when modern stuff choking on 40-60wpm. Input is so slow on some platforms that I need to type in NotePad and cut and paste it, otherwise, I have to go like, 8 characters, wait, 4 characters, wait, 11 characters, wait, 2 char, wait wait 15 char, wait, 6 char.. thinking what the hell is this doing, online spell checking at 50 baud half duplex? (Vogons doesn't have this problem by the way, one of the best on the net)

That sounds like one of the javascript-laden abominations, such as Reddit.

Vogons still uses standard HTML form elements like <input> and <textarea>

For whatever reason, it seems standard practice in modern web dev that you can't just let that happen, instead, you hook each keystroke and run your javascript code on it, and they have a race condition where they never tested a typist going faster than a certain amount

For example my bank's bill payment form seems to try and keep the decimal point in the right place (e.g. 100 becomes 1.00 not 100.00) and sometimes it will drop or even transpose digits.

Oh yes, this I have run into numerous times as well! The AWS Console does it all the time.

Is the interest in retro PC hardware decreasing? 

Nah - quite the opposite - our interest in modern hardware is dwindling...

Aui wrote on 2024-11-02, 14:19:

Is the interest in retro PC hardware decreasing? 

Nah - quite the opposite - our interest in modern hardware is dwindling...

Good point!
Win98 era was a strong Intel vs AMD, 3DFX vs Nvidia, Creative vs Aureal battles.
WinXP (P4) era you still had Intel vs AMD and lesser extent Nvidia vs ATI/AMD, Creative vs Asus Xonar.

But now I don't really hear people get passionate about new hardware. Last thing I can think of people were excited for Ryzen.
and sure people are interested in new GPU's or whatever but more as a simple upgrade rather then "wow this new thing is amazing"

chinny22 wrote on 2024-11-03, 23:19:

But now I don't really hear people get passionate about new hardware. Last thing I can think of people were excited for Ryzen.
and sure people are interested in new GPU's or whatever but more as a simple upgrade rather then "wow this new thing is amazing"

i think its because there are no big leaps forward lately, nothing is "double the speed" and even if it technically is then it isn't really noticeable in real world performance

as analogy; 10mph is twice 5mph but 100mph is only a bit faster than 95mph

From my POV I see a decrease of interest. Lets say 10 years ago I would do retro related stuff daily for 2-3 hours. Now I do it maybe 1 hour per week. There still comes a day when I'll do it all day long... but on average the time has decreased by a lot.