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Your input requested: Scope of the Pentium subforum

Chuck(G) said:
Mike, I don't know how you'd draw the line. You could say "P6 or earlier", but there are still P6 (mobile, I think) chips being made today. What about non-Pentium chips, such as those by VIA and AMD? Is my VIA C3 or C7 chip included or excluded?
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VIA C3 and C7 are a bit new to be considered a Pentium-class, with the first being released in 2001 and the later 2005. Instruction wise they're fairly similar but so is the Quark X1000 on the Galileo and that's far from what anyone'd consider vintage.

The 6x86, Winchip, K5, K6, etc are easily considered a Pentium or Pentium II-class machine. All were the competitors at the time and shared the same socket as the Pentium.
 
Does this line have to be defined strictly by hardware, or is software a factor?

Maybe it's just me, but when I think of what defines an "Old PC" it's DOS, and arguably the last (mainstream) gasp of "DOS-based" operating systems was Windows ME, released in September 2000 and obsoleted by Windows XP in October 2001. (For the purposes of this discussion we'll ignore Windows 2000, which was *arguably* the first "Consumer" version of NT but wasn't quite for everyone.) Therefore to my mind the outer limits of what qualifies as "vintage discussion" would be Windows ME-era hardware *running similar vintage OSes*. The second part seems important to me; a thread about building the ULTIMATE Windows 98 gaming box around a first-gen Willamette Pentium 4 might qualify as a trip down memory lane but a thread about the same hardware running Linux or Windows XP or whatever? Meh. A system like this running a modern OS (and I'm lumping XP into "modern" here, as comical as that might be) is a "Tweener" or just "old", not "Vintage".

Another thing to think about: is it really correct to lump a range that starts with Socket 4 and goes all the way into Coppermine territory into a single "Pentium" forum? Windows 95 came out in the middle of the Classic Pentium era so in a number of respects an early Socket 5 box that shipped with DOS has more in common with a 486 than it does with a late-model Socket 7 running Windows 98 even though it's technically the same processor generation. To keep it in three categories ("PCs and Clones", "Older PCs", and "whatever but still old") I'd probably widen the "Older PC" category to say "Later MS-DOS computers, 386 to Early Pentium" whilst saving the last category for "Win 9x Era" machines, however they're described.

Windows ME and the Pentium 4 debuted within a few months of each other so setting the hardware cutoff for the last category as "Anything less than a Pentium 4" is probably close enough.
 
How about titling it "Pentium and beyond" but then clarifying it in the subtitle by saying something like "For PCs from the mid to late 1990s, including up to Pentium III, AMD, and Cyrix".
 
Compgeke said:
VIA C3 and C7 are a bit new to be considered a Pentium-class, with the first being released in 2001 and the later 2005. Instruction wise they're fairly similar but so is the Quark X1000 on the Galileo and that's far from what anyone'd consider vintage.
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Well, you can see my problem. My C3/Nehemiah systems are basically P3-compatible, including clock speeds and FSB frequencies. They don't run 64 bit code and are nowhere near as fast as the P4. They're a peculiar implementation of small core, streamlined design puts them in a sort of neverland from the viewpoint of the Pentium line. It's almost as if someone implemented a very, very, fast 486 and released it five years ago.

That's why I say, "Does it run 64 bit code?" is as good as anything, particularly from a future viewpoint. Sure, you'll get some P4 and Athlon stuff, but mostly that stuff isn't very interesting anyway. But you do get a bright-line criterion for separating the old from the new.

I see a day coming when any modern OS comes in only the 64 bit flavor. PCBSD is pretty much that way now.
 
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There is always some leeway when it comes to uncommon hardware. The point of the subforum titles is to serve as a general guide to the majority of systems that people will come here to discuss, not as an exact list of the only things allowed in each subforum. As long as the content is not grossly off-topic, we shouldn't be so picky about it. If the mods feel that a thread is not in the correct subforum they can move it.
 
being a day old on this forum ...

a lot of windows 98 + applications run fine on modern windows 7 machines, pentiums fill that half breed gap tween 16 bit windows / dos and 32 bit windows /dos

though I have battle chess for windows 3 running just as good on windows 7 x64 as i did on windows 3.11 for workgroups, along with a fair amount of windows 95 titles...
 
I think the modern os is a good example to define a reasonable line between old and new. Also the point that discussion should not be limited with adding bureaucracy is valid.

For example, i have been using suse/opensuse for about 15 years now and the newest main version does not officially support x86 any more.

Same with windows 10. Does not install (without hacking) into a Pentium 4.

I know you can install a modern linux into a 486 or something, but that is not mainstream use.
 
Modern linux is not in mainstream use?

I think we'd be stuck arguing about what is a modern OS, unfortunately.
 
TL,DR.

Bear in mind Intel has released new Pentium powered processors. Dell has/had a desktop standard that runs at 3ghz called Inspirons.
 
I did not say that Linux is not mainstream. What i tried to say is that the Linux kernel in a modern mainstream distro is monolithic and huge.

The newest kernel is about 80M if i remember correctly. That means, that a modern mainstream distro will not be suitable for a 486 or a Pentium 2 any more. You really need a dualcore or something else later than a Pentium 4 to run it without compromises.

Slimmed down distros use older or modified kernels to be able to run on older hw. For example the whole Puppy os is something like 200M. And even with a slimmed down os like Puppy Linux a Pentium 4 will not be able to run basic tasks like play Youtube (without compromises).
 
If we're having a poll, my vote would be up through P3 as well, while some may consider P4 vintage, it's still too new by my books, when they can be found on every street corner, I wouldn't call it vintage lol. P3's (and their AMD/Cyrix/IDT/VIA counterparts) are sufficiently hard to find now that I would certainly call them vintage, and I think they should be incorporated into this forum. Judging from YouTube content, there are plenty of people in the community building P3 era gaming machines for retro-gaming, so it would seem to me there is plenty of interest in this era.
 
I 2nd Wallow on that. I'm a huge PIII fan and use it as a tweener (DOS/XP) and some gaming. Not so much for the P4, but I do have a complete, in the box, Intel P4 motherboard w/CPU (big knock is it that mine runs hot).
 
The funny thing is that the P4 is considered as "retro", yet I use one as a development machine and see no benefit to changing.

The motherboard was an old ECS Elite that was discarded as junk because some idiot forgot to connect the 12V CPU supply line and toasted a trace on the PCB. A bit of wirewrap wire and a little soldering fixed that (he also bent a pin inserting the CPU into the ZIF socket.) and it's been running at 3 GHz now since 2006. No problems to report after 10 years.

So not vintage for me by any measure.
 
I think Pentium 4 soon also will be retro, just wait a few years, together with Win XP. But only with special legendary machines like some Thinkpads or the machine I have shot this weekend: A Fujitsu-Siemens Activy 570 Mediacenter PC. Using a Pentium 4 today is not that good idea as the CPU itself consumes more than 100 Watts even if it just waits for your mouse click, and it's slower as most current ATOM CPUs. My Thinkpad A31p is a good heater even if it s a P4m, but anyhow I love that one because of it's fantastic display. Another good heater I still keep is a Dual Xeon 3.2 GHz mainboard MSI E7505 Master-LS2 (MS-9121) with a fat AGP-Pro graphics card from ATI, that used to be my home workstation until about 10 years ago, an interesting "youngtimer" to keep as a souvenier.
 
"Retro" or "vintage" are terms that base more on emotions than on facts. In Japan (Where my wife is from) any tech that is older than 1 year is considered "old", after like 5-10 years many people already consider it as "vintage" or "historical". So an early core2duo would already be considered vintage by a majority of Japanese users.

Not gonna happen here, sure. But as i said before - I don't see us being overrun by Core-i7 and Itel Atom discussions here. Most people have a pretty good feeling about whats vintage and what not. And if in 1 of 100 threads someone "accidentially" asks how to flash the BIOS for a Pentium-III instead of a pentium-1 (OMG, end of the world, right), I'd help them. If they were clever they would have lied about their processor, i know.

I am repeating myself here, but unless it becomes a real problem i wouldn't overregulate stuff. I think 95% of the users here are only interested in REALLY vintage stuff and wwouldn't even consider the Pentium-1, so why bother. If you don't wanna read about such modern PCs then chose one of the other 179 subforums. And if somebody loves Pentium 1 so much that he peeks in here i doubt they would be heartbroken to also see posts about a Pentium-II...
 
Could one define the category by "Does it have a legacy floppy disk support? and real serial and parallel ports?"

Probably not, because my AM3+ system does and it was made last year....
 
Chuck(G) said:
Could one define the category by "Does it have a legacy floppy disk support? and real serial and parallel ports?"

Probably not, because my AM3+ system does and it was made last year....
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And "legacy-free" was already starting to become a thing during the Pentium III era, such as the Dell WebPC.
 
Thought I'd add my voice to the crowd here! My sense is that it "felt" like a big jump between PIII and P4. I associate P1/2/3 with the Win9x era of dialup modems and CRTs. Around the year 2000 a transition happened with P4, broadband, WinXP, LCDs, etc. coming along around the same time.

I know there is nothing scientific about my classification, but, well, there it is!
 
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