• Please review our updated Terms and Rules here

Why was the Vintage age thread closed ?

I can see that... but I still think most of it is common sense, and most people agree, EXCEPT for where to draw the line.

I, myself, would not consider *ANY* pentium-and-up to be vintage. Classic, maybe, depended upon the individual machine in question.

Me personally, I don't even consider 386/486 machines to be vintage, as you can still buy them by the boatload in thrift shops, recyclers, craigslist, eBay, etc.. There is no shortage of these machines still.

Now, my opinion is skewed, because I have absolutely, positively NO desire to collect anything from the PC category, except palmops pretty much, so I'm not a fair judge!

However, what I have gathered, is that it is generally accepted that 486's and earlier are considered vintage, newe has some other category.

It's common sense, and most people here assume the same - the only real difference of opinion, is that some may consider, say, a Pentium 60/66/75/90 vintage, and some don't.

I dunno - good discussion, though.


T
 
I think most of us would agree that there's a 'Golden Age' of personal computing. I'd place it from the advent of the personal computer, early - mid 70s up to the age of the cookie-cutter clones, in the mid 80s. Beyond that, I'd have to say that a 'classic' should be something which has sum'n special about it, regardless of age. Some things can be almost instant classics, while other things in the same category (computers, cars, wines, whatever) will never be. I don't care how old a bottle of MadDog 20-20 is, it just ain't vintage...

--T
 
I think the terms "classic" and "vintage" are always going to be debatable around the edges as they are both fairly subjective adjectives. But it does tend to be just around the edges where people disagree. Regarding microcomputers for example, I don't think anyone will disagree that an Apple II, is both a vintage microcomputer and a classic one. A pentium 75 on the other hand? Hmm....

Regarding my own use of the term computer, I feel vintage is anything from about a 486 down. If I was asked why I pick that cut off point I'd say that's where a computer's historical and curiosity value (at least to me) starts to increase. Not just so much from a hardware perspective, but also the Operating Systems (Win95/MS-DOS/OS2/CP/M/Proprietry etc. ) which were used. I've been using microcomputers since 1981 and was exposed to larger ones in 1977.

As regards to what this board should deal with, I think there should be some guidelines (rules?) as to the acceptable range otherwise you loose too much focus. Just what that acceptable range is open for debate, but it should be known to people considering posting something.

Tez
 
It seems weird to call a 486 "vintage" and not a Pentium 1. Both can run windows 95 and both had quite a life for DOS gaming.
I have used both way more then I want to remember and when choosing the issue was required speed and/or memory needs.

The 386 for me went quickly into the "vintage" range because of its lack of support for windows 95 (I know you can force it to work but have you tried to use it?) and many verisons of linux.

I myself have issues with saying thinks such as "vintage" I like to look at things as an era. This keeps the peace on a fight on what is or is not "vintage" where if you say 8086 to 286 era or Apple II era people then to know what you mean.

Joe
 
As regards to what this board should deal with, I think there should be some guidelines (rules?) as to the acceptable range otherwise you loose too much focus. Just what that acceptable range is open for debate, but it should be known to people considering posting something.

Tez

To respectfully disagree, there are guidelines posted by the boss in several places, and the matter isn't open to debate. It's Erik's playground, and he has the first and last word on the subject.

--T
 
One could put it in this way: Any computer on which you can run a modern, mainstream operating system without tons of patching and ways to get around obsolete hardware, isn't a vintage computer. It should pretty much set the level around 386, perpaps also 68030 for Macs/Amigas. As time moves on, newer versions of Windows will totally refuse to boot on the first generations of Pentiums. Linux/*BSD may also drop support for the older machines, and that pretty sums up what I refer to as mainstream OSes. Once that happens, perhaps more people will be willing to consider the today obsolete but not yet vintage computers. If we however define a golden age of computing, it will be fixed and other forums will have to cover up for discussions about old computers past the golden age but not quite recent.
 
One could put it in this way: Any computer on which you can run a modern, mainstream operating system without tons of patching and ways to get around obsolete hardware, isn't a vintage computer. It should pretty much set the level around 386, perpaps also 68030 for Macs/Amigas. As time moves on, newer versions of Windows will totally refuse to boot on the first generations of Pentiums. Linux/*BSD may also drop support for the older machines, and that pretty sums up what I refer to as mainstream OSes. Once that happens, perhaps more people will be willing to consider the today obsolete but not yet vintage computers. If we however define a golden age of computing, it will be fixed and other forums will have to cover up for discussions about old computers past the golden age but not quite recent.

Ok, here we are again. What's the definition of "a modern, mainstream operating system" ?

From the way you are defining things, Vista should run on one of my 486s.
 
Personally, I'd consider vintage/classic/whatever anything that would be annoying to use on a daily basis if you had to. I know a Pentium from 1994 is fundamentally the same thing as the (not so new) P4 Dell I'm typing this on - and is like some pure mind blowing science fiction robot machine compared to a Commodore 64 - but what if you HAD TO use it every day? You'd go nuts, you'd never get anything done. I've got this Pentium 100 I pulled out of the trash awhile back and I love it. It's just some generic computer-store assembled beige mini-tower that's worth a buck maybe, if that. To most people, it's just an old, crappy computer. To me, it's a neat toy because I was too broke to afford one when they were new....and all I had were "vintage" machines that were just considered old, crappy computers back then.

But, let's be realistic. A Commodore 64 or a Tandy 1000 is just an old, crappy computer to most people....just like a no-name brand Pentium. For that reason, I think it's kinda silly to try and establish a cut-off date for what's vintage and what's not. Seems like more of a marketing term to me, just because something is valuable or collectible to a handful of people doesn't change the fact that to the mainstream, it's still old and useless.

So yeah I think it'd be great if we had a place to discuss newer machines on here, but if not that's cool too. This is a phenomenal website and forum, and hopefully it'll still be around when people really do start getting nostalgic about Netscape Navigator and K6s.
 
I think this discussion is really about what we think belongs on this forum. If we had a god set of topics (which I think we do) and people stuck to the topic it would not really be a problem. Discussion windows Vista in the off-topic sections are perfectly fine by me.

If we were to organize topics in some sort of chronological order (which I don't think we should) here is how I would order it:

pre 1960: Relics

Computers in this era are often one of a kind, lives in museums and hardly runs(there are exceptions of course, such as functioning replicas). E.g. Colossus, Univac, SAGE.

1960-1973: Antiques

These computers are hard to come by and usually have a high price tag. They are runnable but require love, tender and care. E.g. LINC-8, straight-8, H316 kitchen machine, mini PDP-11.

1974-1981: Vintage

I selected 1974 because the altair showed up then, setting of home computing. I guess this is when microprocessor computers start to show up. On the big iron side we still have mini's, this is when the PDP-11 starts blooming. E.g. Altair, IMSAI, Cromemco, PDP-11.

1982-1993: Vintage part 2 (?)

I selected 1982 because thats the year when the C64 was introduces. Making home computers avaialble to the masses. The market really explodes with computers now: ZX-spectrum, tonnes of MSX variants and of course the IBM PC. I seems to me that most threads on this forum deals with computers from this era, perhaps because most people started using computers about this time (I got introduced to my fathers VIC-20 when I was around 5 or 6 years old :). Also there is a lot of computers circulating, so they are not that terribly hard to collect. On the big iron side we have PDP-11, VAX, DECSYSTEM-20, HP and IBM. These machines are out of reach for most collectors, but fun to talk about nontheless.

1993-present: Classics/Obsoletes

Ok, here comes the gray area. I'm personally a big fan of SGI hardware and would love to get my hands on a BeBox. Neither is very old but has something unique or had some groundbreaking feature. I guess that very few could afford to buy these computers for home use, which makes it very interresting that you can get them cheap or even for free today.

Pentium and upwards obviously belongs in this "era", but I don't think they are very interresting to anyone. You can find and set up a machine fairly easy and would be usefull as an original setup for some fun games. The portmanteau "wintendo" comes to mind, signaling that people view them almost as consoles for gaming. Perhaps they are usefull as a bridge for converting between various formats. I imagine that reading and writing 5.25 inch floppies are a suitable task with these machines. Anyway, I feel that discussions about these machines should go under Off-topic.


Wow, that's my longest post in a long time. Going back to the initial question "what belong in these forums?" I think that existing topics/subforums cover these five "eras" pretty well (except maybe the "relics"-era). Maybe an "SGI"-section would be nice, but nekochan.net is an excellent forum that doesn't need to be replicated here. Pentium/PC discussions should go under off-topic IMO. Its all up to Eric though, and I think he has captured the spirit of us forumdwellers pretty well.

Cheers :)
 
I'm confused.. I mean we all have our interpretation of vintage. Given, I keep forgetting we're not in the 90's anymore so the systems I used 12 years ago aren't vintage since I saw it and bought it when it was top of the line.

The qualification of classic car I thought was 25 years (and some googling proves the difficulty with that too http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Classic_car)

lmao.. so using my keen sense of logic http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vintage_computer it seems Wikipedia is quite furious with the vintage computer entry as well.

I dunno, I guess I've kept considering vintage to be 70's and 80's. But with my lack of growing up with 680x0's around me I still consider Amiga or vendors that are near death from the earlier days to be vintage as well. (Only stating that I'd like an Amiga 4000 despite that it's not really vintage).

I agree though there could be some better defining of "antique" (this would be kinda rare in computers seeing that the field isn't that old, so pre-60's? or pre-70's machines?), vintage, collectible, classic, and obsolete which many systems fall into the obsolete category without issue whether or not they're vintage or collectible. Just like a few of us that have SGI or Sun servers, etc.
 
From the way you are defining things, Vista should run on one of my 486s.
Doesn't it? :rolleyes: No, but perhaps a console install of the latest Debian Linux distribution. Frankly I don't know if modern day Linux distros still support 486 class systems, but the odds are good you can get it to work without too much patching and recompiling.
 
Back
Top