Boomer Tech Thread - *crack* *sip* Yep, the C64 was a good computer.

[Cedric_Eff]

I actually liked the LPX style motherboards.

 

[Glad I couldn't help]

Can we count the old Thinkpad laptops before Lenovo slapped their name on the brand? I remember my first laptop in 2005 being an IBM Thinkpad. While it couldn't run recentish games of the time on it without slowing down, I had fond memories of using it to browse the internet and playing flash games on Newgrounds. Ended up having to give it away thanks to my mom saying I should give it to my uncle. The upside to it was getting a new laptop that had more updated specs. The downside to it though was that the operating system was Windows Vista and the background didn't have what the Thinkpad had.

Probably, IIRC the x60 were last IBM ThinkPads and they are now reaching the end of their usefulness for everyday computing tasks (each surfing the hellscape that it is modern Web), so they definitely count as boomer tech.

 

[melty]

My dad was a big fan of Boomer tech and bringing home outdated stuff from garage sales, so I used a lot of old technology when I was a kid that most people my age didn't use.
The first computer that was "mine" was a commodore 64. I really enjoyed playing games on this, and my favorites were Olympics and Ghostbusters. The Olympics game had stuff like pole vaulting and gymnastics, and the USSR was selectable as a country which I thought was pretty neat.
Prior to that, my dad would bring home ShareWare discs with a billion games, most of which didn't seem to work properly or had only a couple of levels available as a trial, but there was some good stuff there. Of course we accessed everything from the command line, so my dad would write down what to type to run my favorite game. My favorites were Duke Nukem and Commander Keen. Eventually we got a hold of windows 3 where I enjoyed Paint and some card games.
I was also thrilled to get my first printer: a dot matrix printer. I actually have fond memories of that horrific screeching sound that could be heard throughout the entire house, and possibly from outside. I ran some kind of graphics software on the commodore, I think it was called Print Shop 3, where you could make your own flyers, postcards, banners etc. I would come up with business ideas and design flyers and print them on the dot matrix printer to hand out to neighbors.

Finally, I didn't use this much but we had a Vectrex. This is an old console that played simple games like asteroid and centipede. The wildest thing about the Vectrex is that it offered a "color screen" in that it came with colorful plastic sheets for each game that you put over the monitor so that you have a colorful background for your game.
Even for me this was incredibly hokey, obviously better technology existed and even the commodore 64 was much better, I was just like 10-20 years behind my peers at home because my dad was both really cheap and loved boomer tech.

My dad was also a die hard Altavista user, which to my recollection was, somehow, always outdated and uncool.

 

[teriyakiburns]

The Vampire is cool because it runs Elite 2 the way you remember it running. It is pointless like you say, WinUAE can do the same thing.

my man

It was never as good on PC. The sound was shite.

 

[Kiwi Lime Pie]

I ran some kind of graphics software on the commodore, I think it was called Print Shop 3, where you could make your own flyers, postcards, banners etc. I would come up with business ideas and design flyers and print them on the dot matrix printer to hand out to neighbors.

One of the earliest versions of Print Shop I used had a thing called "Screen Magic" that would generate random fractals, line art, or other assorted shapes and objects. If I recall, one could also add centered text with the image as a background. This could then be printed off and colored in if one desired. Sadly, this feature was silently dropped in future program updates, and there's times I miss it and the random creations it came up with.

 

[Pee Cola]

Finally, I didn't use this much but we had a Vectrex. This is an old console that played simple games like asteroid and centipede. The wildest thing about the Vectrex is that it offered a "color screen" in that it came with colorful plastic sheets for each game that you put over the monitor so that you have a colorful background for your game.

Does you dad still have it? A Vectrex is worth serious coin these days. Because ａｅｓｔｈｅｔｉｃ　畝ぼイ.

(that, and the Vectrex is unironically awesome ... I still kick myself for selling my Vectrex to buy a 1541 floppy disk drive for my C64, because I was young and stupid as opposed to the old and stupid I am today)

 

[melty]

Does you dad still have it? A Vectrex is worth serious coin these days. Because ａｅｓｔｈｅｔｉｃ　畝ぼイ.

(that, and the Vectrex is unironically awesome ... I still kick myself for selling my Vectrex to buy a 1541 floppy disk drive for my C64, because I was young and stupid as opposed to the old and stupid I am today)

Nah, he sold it awhile ago at a garage sale for some small amount of money, like $20 or $50. Even at that time it was worth more and I begged him to try to sell it on eBay. It is a very cool looking item.

 

[The Grognard]

I have one of these as desktop version in the plastic shell, even the two carrying hooks are still intact, with the keyboard that'd snap into the underside. My uncle bought it back in the day because everyone was doing computers now, but he had no idea what to do with it, so it's basically unused. The carrying angle of that system is hilarious "Oh nevermind, it's just me carrying my huge-ass and heavy-ass desktop computer around on some straps. I'm an important business man" Nevermind that the thing would break to shit as soon as you'd bump into anything because of the weight. I don't know what they were smoking, especially since notebooks already existed that had actual useful features integrated and were somewhat better to carry. That thing also has massive metal shielding and the mainboard doesn't work outside the shield reliably, so you can't even take it out to make it lighter. It's an interesting evolutionary dead-end and from todays standpoint sort of an upgrade but even back then that thing was just odd and unnecessary. It's like they tried to give it as many features as possible but none of them were particularly useful.

Amiga fanboys are still insufferable. Ever visited your average Amiga forum? That'd be a thread for itself if it wasn't such a niche thing to begin with. Lots of crazy people still thinking the Amiga has a future or doing insane and unspeakable things to their old computers. I feel other communities are a lot more willing to let the past be the past.

When it comes to why Amiga in particular has such a fanatical and BITTER fanbase is because Commodore was a phenominally inept company after Jack Tramiel got forced out. They did all the wrong moves a computer company in the 1980's could do and in spite of all that, the European branches of the company kept the company afloat to the 90's simply because they knew how to actually market and sell computers.

 

[The Real SVP]

"Board reproductions"

I see your objections, and raise with ancient power supplies, ancient capacitors, and memory expansions with barrel batteries. From my perspective a 1:1 board replacement makes perfect sense for somebody who wants something resembling an original A500 in 2020. There are simply more Amigas with boards beyond repair than there are working or salvageable ones.
As far as the prices for working Amiga hardware go: They are disgusting, but not absurd. Especially not for a market with so many parasites collectors. It's stuff that was meant to last for 5 years which is now 25-35 years old.
I do give you FPGA accelerator boards, beyond 1:1 recreations of original hardware, though. That's just bullshit.
Edit: BRB, building an FS-UAE/Linux system...

 

[Glad I couldn't help]

It's partly because the Amiga was the first to do a lot of the things that we take for granted in modern computing. It was the first truly multimedia PC, more than a decade ahead of its time compared to any of its competitors (Apple only goit a pre-empotive multitasking OS in the late 90s, for instance), but Commodore didn't quite have the nouse to take advantage of the technology they'd acquired. The result is a bunch of clinging fans driven largely by resentment that their favoured device, which should have won from a purely technical perspective, ended up failing and being replaced by devices that were (and in some ways still are) markedly inferior.

So it's basically a more politically-correct Lost Cause for nerds?

 

[President Joe Biden]

Crossing the us border. If it's not a smart phone, they don't bother thing to extract anything from it.

Are they doing that now? I stopped leaving the country after Obama's reelection when Europe hit its peak with migrants, what's the point anymore? I don't have to do business outside of the US, Europe is lost for the foreseeable future.

 

[teriyakiburns]

So it's basically a more politically-correct Lost Cause for nerds?

Agnes shall rise again!

Are they doing that now? I stopped leaving the country after Obama's reelection when Europe hit its peak with migrants, what's the point anymore? I don't have to do business outside of the US, Europe is lost for the foreseeable future.

Travelling into the US carries a significant risk of your computer and phone being examined and imaged for arbitrary reasons. I think some recent USSC rulings limited how far the TSA could take it, but I've had enough experience with them to know that it's better not to even risk the possibility. On the rare occasions I travel to the US, I take a burner phone and either take a nuked/paved laptop, or buy a cheapie while I'm in-country, and use a VPS to connect home for actual work.

 

[XYZpdq]

also there's a segment of AV nerds who dig the Amiga for its contributions to tv production

 

[tehpope]

Is the MiSTer project boomer tech? Its FPGA re-creations of PCs (I think the only PCs not emulated yet are Apple II GS and Mac SE) and 8/16 bit home consoles. Its great. PS1 and Jaguar cores are in development. There's also a ton of classic Arcade cores as well. CPS1 is pretty much ready and can be downloaded through 3rd party sites.

I would love to try out the vampire v4 though. It's like 600 gbp FPGA based Amiga. Instead of using a FPGA to replace the 68k cpu, it replaces the whole computer. I know Amiga is way outdated and outclassed by PCs today, but seems like you can also use it to run Mac 68k software too. There's a few Mac "emulators" for Amiga (really just setting up a Mac enviorment and running System 6/7 on). They seem to run well. Not sure if its perfect, but both systems use the 68k CPU. 600 pounds is a hard pill to swallow when you can use WinUAE to basically do the same thing.

 

[Chad Nasty]

Anything using ASP.net or SharePoint in any way, I might be alone, but thats the hallmark of a deadend boomer job in tech for me.

 

[The Grognard]

So it's basically a more politically-correct Lost Cause for nerds?

In a way, yes. Though, i'd suspect Commodore would just end up being a niche computer maker with something like a 5 to 10 percent market share with a line-up of some other technical products.

 

[Coolio55]

Anything using ASP.net or SharePoint in any way, I might be alone, but thats the hallmark of a deadend boomer job in tech for me.

Had to use ASP.net MVC for a college course. It has the worst programmatic database description I have ever seen.
All of the foreign key related shenanigans constantly fucked up for no reason and even if that worked I was always getting nulls and had to monkeypatch in the values.
I was absolutely shitting myself up into the late night and I wasn't even sure if I was gonna be able to make it work for the deadline.

At that moment I knew why people hated Microsoft in the 2000's. Imagine paying money for this shit.
Now all their products are this quality grade .

 

[TaimuRadiu]

When I got my Trumpbux I was going to buy either a MISTer (the preconfigured ones were all sold out because they needed parts from China), an FPGA C64 like the Turbo Chameleon or the Ultimate 64, or a PS Vita. I decided on the Vita, and I'm pretty happy with it.

That being said, King Terry was right about the C64. He was right about everything.

 

[Chad Nasty]

Had to use ASP.net MVC for a college course. It has the worst programmatic database description I have ever seen.
All of the foreign key related shenanigans constantly fucked up for no reason and even if that worked I was always getting nulls and had to monkeypatch in the values.
I was absolutely shitting myself up into the late night and I wasn't even sure if I was gonna be able to make it work for the deadline.

At that moment I knew why people hated Microsoft in the 2000's. Imagine paying money for this shit.
Now all their products are this quality grade .

Yea, fucking up an index with sql will get you fucked. But its better with highly relatable data with built in ACID compliance so its not going anywhere and i hate working with it. But, shits moving towards the big data models i enjoy more. But then if data integrity means a lot you gotta implement your own ACID compliance. The only real hurdle is that jumping to mongo is a totally different ball game. Storing data how it gets retrieved was a lot harder that being like, a customer table, an message table and stuff. I like it, the only real drawback is in shit like mongodbb aggregation pipeline its real hard to handle complex and highly relatable data.
But i wont ever touch sql/asp again unless i absolutely have to.

 

[Pee Cola]

Some brand new boomer tech that I'm looking forward to.