With good reason. Can't have people use outdated versions of Windows reliably! Gotta prop up Win11!
All the more reason to never use Windows.
This has become the bane of my life. Can anyone explain why the fuck this has happened? Any "how to..." search I make that doesn't include "reddit" just yields dozens of shithouse article farms giving me 10,000 word answers to a 10 word problem that don't include a fucking solution!! Are these articles AI-generated? Is there a way to exclude them from my search?
More or less because Google stopped caring once their focus shifted from search being a product to search being a free source of AI training data.
I blame troons.
It was often the ways many boards generated the clocks, back then that all worked a bit differently. Some boards had very fancy and accurate (for the time) clock generators, some delivered very skewy clock signals through cheap tricks. (and logic) This was usually decided by price. Also the way voltage generation was done when 3.3V cores became common. Also some boards were just very poorly designed and bad at keeping the noise out. Of course on top of that, like you said, silicon lottery. Just saying, there was a lot of variation and many factors. Mainboard manufacturers like to pretend it's still this way (and theirs is the best) but it's not really. A lot of boards are just CTRL+C, CTRL+V copies of the reference design. Often not worth it to experiment, especially since the board manufacturers themselves don't seem to understand some intricacies of the designs anymore. Probably the most unique thing about board designs these days are the gamershit heatsinks. (which not rarely are plain unnecessary)
The MediaGX. One of my favorite retro computers from that time and I have a Pi-sized industrial computer with one. Neat machine for old DOS and early 9x games. Well AMD ended up inheriting the technology and in a way the modern APUs are distant ancestors, so it wasn't all for nothing.
Sometimes I stumble about the (genuine, non generated) blog of some nerd who writes it just because and I always bookmark that shit so hard. It's like finding water in the desert.
Because Apple made a phone that was shiny polished glass on the front and back and shiny polished stainless steel on the sides. And because everyone has to copy Apple, well, every Android flagship has shiny polished glass on the front and back and shiny polished stainless steel on the sides.
I'd imagine those computers would be a bitch to haul from house to house.
Yeah, I know. It's always Apple first. I just wish one of these outlier companies would do something. Motorola or someone that takes a risk with a phone design for once. You can make a metal aesthetic object still look very appealing with serrations and stippling, look at firearms.
Until the Studio/Distributor/ISP/etc... decides your last post was offensive, and pulls ALL your games...
I have a few of them, PCs-on-a-card for the Amiga. The Amiga 2000 had his Zorro II slots (Commodore's own expansion bus) and a passive ISA backplane, and these "bridge cards" as they were called (briding the world of Amiga and IBM compatibles together, as they would say, clever ain't it?) would contain an entire PC (usually 8088, the most advanced one I have is a 286) would plug into both Zorro and ISA backplane, facilitating that the Amiga side could control that PC or like, use the Amiga input for PC software or have the DOS prompt on AmigaOS in a screen or have a HD image on Amiga side the PC could load etc.. Then because of the passive ISA backplate you could add normal PC hardware, like graphics cards and such. The 8088 one Commodore made was quite good, the 286 one was kind of a mess and very slow for an 286 as far as I remember.
Hey! We used BNC and null modems up until I think it was 1998 or 1999? 10mbit PCI network cards with both BNC and TP ports became cheap at that point (~€20). Still no routers. But Linux was around. Remember the fun of installing and running Linux in 1998? And configuring a 486 shitbox filled with network cards to act as a router so everyone could share a single modem connection? Good times. I'm angry now.
That is a time I remember fondly. Video cards weren't that expensive, the latest ones maxed out at $299 and they were released so fast that the one I had could be sold for 200-250 or traded online. At no real cost, I had a G200 and dual Voodoo 2's when what was a thing.
It wasn't so bad, the case didn't weigh that much, a 14" monitor wasn't heavy either, they were just bulky. I almost shit myself once, thinking I killed a baby. On a commuter train my arm slipped while getting off and when trying to catch the computer I accidentally spiked the sharp corner of it into a baby carriage. The mother was right next to it holding the baby so it was fine.
What I loved was just being able to click a combination of buttons. Now I'm a PC! Now I'm an Apple! It was so awesome.
Just put Portable Ubuntu on an SSD.
You can have gaming laptops now that are 50x stronger than those PCs were, and 10x lighter.
I remember a linux distribution that was made extra to be used like this and would fit on a floppy. It had a 4 in it's name I think? A quick google didn't tell me anything. My current, all-fat-trimmed kernel with just hardware support for things this computer actually has is 17 mb big, and that's compressed. About ~6-7 mb is the initramfs programs so that leaves an 10-11 mb kernel with firmware blobs needed for this computer only. And practically, this computer isn't more usable than a 1998 486 with the kernel of back then probably weighting in at about 1 mb, like at all. The other day I noted my very lightweight alpine installation on the Thinkpad with basically just a browser, a terminal emulator minmal X with ratpoison and a browser+supporting tools weights in at about 1 GB. Just system files, /home not included. It's kinda disturbing if you think about it.
The trick early-on was to look out for the DACs that could do "true color" vs. only 256 "indexed" color. For true color, the DACs had to be better quality. The MUSIC dacs on the cheap cards were the worst. Cirrus Logic also did DACs directly inbuilt into their graphics chips (not their invention, they acquired a small outfit called Acumos Inc. to get into the graphics market, I still have a graphics card with Acumos branded chip which is virtually identical to the early Cirrus one) and for the longest time, they were the only ones. These were decent too, but often were on the more expensive side. (Cirrus logic is still around and still does signal processing last time I checked)
I don't remember what it was called but a 486 desktop computer worked very well was a router of sorts.
That went on so long, up until things went DVI/HDMI/DP. I remember getting a cheap GF2 for free and it was just awful, benchmarks were on point but the image was off at my resolution. I kept using my GF2MX.
I used a 486 as a router running FreeBSD for something like six years. Literal just set it and forget it other than the occasional manual update. I once even forgot where I had it.
