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Your input requested: Scope of the Pentium subforum

vwestlife

vwestlife

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As requested by mbbrutman (see his quote below), I am starting this thread to open up discussion about whether this Pentium subforum should be expanded to include additional processor generations that may now be old enough to seen as "vintage", such as the Pentium Pro, II, and III, and competing processors (AMD K6, Cyrix 6x86, IDT WinChip, etc.).

As you might have noticed, this subforum was briefly renamed "Pentium and beyond", but mbbrutman saw that as being too open-ended and changed it back to "Pentium (first generation)".

Your thoughts?

mbbrutman said:
I don't mind people having a discussion over what is vintage or how the forum should be laid out. But it should be a public discussion with ample time for others to weigh in.
...
Start a new thread. Make the request. Have an open discussion that includes others by properly constructing a title and leaving ample discussion time. And remember, the site owners (now the VC Federation board I presume) can overrule, and the long time moderators (myself, ahm) are going to weigh in too.
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I want to clarify the reason for reverting the change to "Pentium and beyond" because I think that it has been mis-characterized.

"Pentium and beyond" is too vague and too sweeping of a change to just have it done with no real discussion or input from the board, moderators or users. My objections are based on poor wording ("and beyond" can mean the latest Chromebooks running an Intel x86 processor) and the lack of discussion. This is not the type of change that should be made unilaterally in the nth page of an unrelated thread. (See the original thread here: http://www.vcfed.org/forum/showthread.php?51206-That-seems-to-have-gone-smoothly-enough )

Feel free to discuss what you consider to be vintage here. Changes may be made as a result.
 
I'd say anything PIII or prior. P4 is arguably getting on towards "vintage" status but there's really no meaningful difference between a P4-era computer and a modern one other than Netburst's horrible performance. PIII and contemporary Athlon systems were kind of the last days of Win98/2k-era computing.
 
I'd not be opposed to extending it to Slot 1 systems. Around where I am I'm not finding them to be nearly as commonplace as a system being used for serious work or on every street corner anymore. I've also seen a fair amount of people building "retro" Pentium II setups for Quake and such (anything from suped up Dells to a liquid cooled dual PII in a rack case).
 
I'd stop at Pentium Pro. Everything newer than that seems too much the same to me. But that's just me.
 
As long as LibreOffice is being written to run on Pentium II, I find it hard to consider the Pentium II as vintage.

A more specialized topic to handle "tweeners," emulators, and other methods of getting old data and software running on newer hardware might be useful considering how often threads cover elements of that.
 
As I posted in the other thread, I believe anything too old to run a currently supported operating system counts as "vintage". That means any PC with less than an 800 MHz processor and 512 MB of RAM (Microsoft's minimum requirements for Windows Vista), and any Mac with a 680x0 or PowerPC processor.

And beyond the CPU and RAM, certain other hardware features now definitely count as vintage, such as ISA slots, full legacy ports (parallel, serial, etc.), a real PC speaker instead of a piezo buzzer, pinouts for a turbo switch and LED, and a floppy controller with support for 5.25" drives.
 
commodorejohn said:
I'd say anything PIII or prior. P4 is arguably getting on towards "vintage" status but there's really no meaningful difference between a P4-era computer and a modern one other than Netburst's horrible performance. PIII and contemporary Athlon systems were kind of the last days of Win98/2k-era computing.
Click to expand...

Actually, Intel scrapped the P4's NetBurst architecture and went back to the PIII to form the basis of their entire Core series of CPUs. But Intel kept the P4's SSE2 instruction set, which a lot of modern programs now require, so they won't run on a PIII or even an AMD Athlon XP.
 
I say keep the original Pentium chips from the 5V to the 233mhz socket 8 Pentium Pro in their own category. There was a TON of machines made in the 90's that used those chips and were not shop built ATX whiteboxes. Slot 1 PII's and above can have their own subforum. Once you pass the Pro and eventually hit the last of the socket 775 P4's you start getting into hardware which really isn't vintage by name or hardware. It's just old and generally storebought parts that were thrown into ATX whiteboxes, or OEM machines long separated from having anything more than just components rearranged for the sake of being OEM.
 
It's just a group consensus thing, I guess. I can still use Pentium 2/3 machines as router/firewall machines with a current OpenBSD or Linux install, I guess as such I don't really see them as "too old to be useful for modern work," but at the same time, I doubt you're going to find support for them anywhere but niche old hardware forums, like this one. Plus, you have an entire generation of potential hobbyists coming up to whom a Pentium 2 definitely seems vintage.
 
Maybe it's time we quit using the word "vintage" and came up with categories that made sense.
 
I didn't want to poke this subject any further out of respect for those who run the forum, but I'm glad to see there's a discussion now.

My thoughts when I mentioned it in the other thread was just to move the cut-off a little forward, so say include Pentium II (and maybe Pentium III) and allowing Windows 98 etc.

I do not consider P2 or P3 machines to be vintage, however if you've got vintage collectors wanting to talk about old machines they have or helping new collectors get started, then it makes sense for it to sit under "Vintage Computing" rather than pushing them to the bottom of the index where it's unlikely to be read. These machines can be great fun for vintage collectors, and it's nice to be able to go back to buying someone's old junk for $5, restore it, learn a bout it and make the most of it - that's how I got in to this hobby to begin with!
 
I would say Intel up to and including PPro. All the early Pentium (socket 7) clones by Cyrix, Nexgen, IDT, Winchip, and AMD.

Anything newer is just too new and pretty much just consist of AMD and Intel anyway.
 
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