Re: Re: Hi all!
By: hyjinx to Nightfox on Sun Sep 07 2025 09:35 pm

Pentium was 1993, P2 1997, P3 1999, and then it started to change. Th around the time when I started to lose interest in PC hardware.

When you say you lost interest in PC hardware, did you switch to Mac? And around 2006 or so, Apple started using Intel processors for the Mac, so it basically using PC hardware too..

Nah, I didn't switch to mac then, I just started losing interest in hardware, building PCs etc, everything was very 'same same'. Big beige boxes that didn't really innovate so much, they just iterated.

My first real mac I bought in like 2015 I think. Macbook Pro. Have mainly used macs since, although always some form of x86 something lying around, as well as rpis.

When computers started to become more about tools rather than objects of fun and tinkering. That's probably when I lost interest in the hardware.


hyjinx // Alistair Ross
Author of 'Back to the BBS' Documentary: https://bit.ly/3tRINeL (YouTube) alsgeeklab.com

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Re: Re: Hi all!
By: hyjinx to Nightfox on Thu Sep 11 2025 09:01 pm

When computers started to become more about tools rather than objects of fun and tinkering. That's probably when I lost interest in the hardware.

When was that? I feel like they're often still for fun and tinkering. I feel like they've been both for fun and tools for a long time.. You can still build your own desktop PC if you want to, and these days, there are also DIY projects you can make with a Raspberry Pi board & similar things - There are a lot of fun projects you can work on. And there are still good games for computers.

Nightfox
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By: hyjinx to Nightfox on Thu Sep 11 2025 09:01 pm

When computers started to become more about tools rather than objects fun and tinkering. That's probably when I lost interest in the hardwa

When was that? I feel like they're often still for fun and tinkering. I like they've been both for fun and tools for a long time.. You can still your own desktop PC if you want to, and these days, there are also DIY pro you can make with a Raspberry Pi board & similar things - There are a lot fun projects you can work on. And there are still good games for computer

Normal consumer computing (so, I wouldn't consider the RaspberryPI part of that) was fun and interesting. Every other month, you were wondering what new amazing tech was coming along - new graphics like the advances from 4 colours to 16, to 256, to millions, new CPUs which were significant marks better than the ones before. Exciting new operating systems that did things that no others did before it in some way or another. Untold amounts of tinkering, just for tinkerings sake.

Now Windows has been amounted to a big pile of advertising, CPUs are all pretty much meh, all the same, Graphics cards, whilst insane, are all just doing the same thing, just faster, PCs encouraged tinkering and upgrading, different computer types still existed on the market - Acorn Archimedes, Macintosh PPC/64k, Atari ST, Amiga and the 8 bits before them. Linux has been turned into a big lot of boring blah - enterprise kubernetes containerised IoT function deployers.

Yawn.`


hyjinx // Alistair Ross
Author of 'Back to the BBS' Documentary: https://bit.ly/3tRINeL (YouTube) alsgeeklab.com

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Re: Re: Hi all!
By: hyjinx to Nightfox on Fri Sep 19 2025 07:51 pm

Normal consumer computing (so, I wouldn't consider the RaspberryPI part of that) was fun and interesting. Every other month, you were wondering what new amazing tech was coming along - new graphics like the advances from 4 colours to 16, to 256, to millions, new CPUs which were significant marks better than the ones before. Exciting new operating systems that did things that no others did before it in some way or another. Untold amounts of tinkering, just for tinkerings sake.

Now Windows has been amounted to a big pile of advertising, CPUs are all pretty much meh, all the same, Graphics cards, whilst insane, are all just doing the same thing, just faster, PCs encouraged tinkering and upgrading, different computer types still existed on the market - Acorn Archimedes, Macintosh PPC/64k, Atari ST, Amiga and the 8 bits before them. Linux has been turned into a big lot of boring blah - enterprise kubernetes containerised IoT function deployers.

I know what you mean, and I agree. I've often thought about that too - In the early 90s, and through the 90s as well, computer hardware and software still had a new and exciting feel to it, and it was fun to see the new stuff coming out. Upgrades were more significant because they provided such an improvement over the previous stuff. But these days, it feels like upgrades aren't as significant.

Recently though, I've actually still felt a bit of that with newer graphics cards sometimes - I think the most significant is Nvidia's RTX cards with their ray tracing, which I think looks pretty cool. There have been some PC games that have been re-released to support RTX ray tracing, including Quake 2. I thought it was particularly fun to try Quake 2 RTX. I played Quake 2 when it was new back in the day, and I was impressed back then seeing its graphics on the Voodoo2 card I had; similarly, I thought it was cool seeing Quake 2 with RTX capabilities.

Otherwise though, yeah, it feels like a lot of computer upgrades are doing the same things but faster these days.

Nightfox
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hyjinx wrote to Nightfox <=-

Now Windows has been amounted to a big pile of advertising, CPUs are
all pretty much meh, all the same, Graphics cards, whilst insane, are
all just doing the same thing, just faster, PCs encouraged tinkering
and upgrading, different computer types still existed on the market - Acorn Archimedes, Macintosh PPC/64k, Atari ST, Amiga and the 8 bits
before them. Linux has been turned into a big lot of boring blah - enterprise kubernetes containerised IoT function deployers.

I miss the days of Audacious Hardware Design. Give me a MIPS-powered
Silicon Graphics box in some fever-dream color, Pee-Wee's
playhouse-derived case design, and a kick-ass keyboard. Or a Sun Sparc.
Or one of those industrial design looking IBM RS/6000s.

In 2000, I ran a company off of a Sun Enterprise 250 - Purple, gray,
big vents, a big door with a key... we replaced it with a bunch of
white boxes running Linux. :(



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On 20 Sep 2025 at 12:31p, poindexter FORTRAN pondered and said...

I miss the days of Audacious Hardware Design. Give me a MIPS-powered
Silicon Graphics box in some fever-dream color, Pee-Wee's
playhouse-derived case design, and a kick-ass keyboard. Or a Sun Sparc.
Or one of those industrial design looking IBM RS/6000s.

No love for DEC? Their later Alpha boxes looked pretty slick.

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* Origin: Agency BBS | Dunedin, New Zealand | agency.bbs.nz (21:1/101)

tenser wrote to poindexter FORTRAN <=-

I miss the days of Audacious Hardware Design. Give me a MIPS-powered
Silicon Graphics box in some fever-dream color, Pee-Wee's
playhouse-derived case design, and a kick-ass keyboard. Or a Sun Sparc.
Or one of those industrial design looking IBM RS/6000s.

No love for DEC? Their later Alpha boxes looked pretty slick.

A friend of mine couldn't bear to see a DEC Alpha being tossed out at
work, so he brought it home. It ran NT 3.51 and IIS for way longer than
it should have - but it would not die.

It was sort of a peak-industrial design mid-tower from the early '90s.



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In 2000, I ran a company off of a Sun Enterprise 250 - Purple, gray,
big vents, a big door with a key... we replaced it with a bunch of
white boxes running Linux. :(

That wasn't the worst days of it.. I remember the days of the 'big iron' workstations and micro-servers turning into beige Linux. But at least the operating system running in all that beige was a fun time to be in though. Back in 2000-2010, Linux was such a vibrant community. People really cared, interesting things were happening every day, and people committed so much of their free time to open source goodness for the sake of it, not corporate greed. I feel that has all but vanished now.

Now it's a sea of beige, and a sea of beige operating systems. Even Linux has ceded ownership largely to a few big corps when it comes down to it, excluding the kernel, for the most part anyway. But even that has parts coded by IBM, Microsoft, Google and others. Nothing is free any more. No more cathedral and the bazaar.

Al


hyjinx // Alistair Ross
Author of 'Back to the BBS' Documentary: https://bit.ly/3tRINeL (YouTube) alsgeeklab.com

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hyjinx wrote to poindexter FORTRAN <=-

Now it's a sea of beige, and a sea of beige operating systems.

Beigey-black. I'm tempted to paint my black desktop case something
garish. I did see a standard Dell done in an olive green with woodgrain
inserts, I kinda liked that...




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On 23 Sep 2025 at 07:30a, poindexter FORTRAN pondered and said...

tenser wrote to poindexter FORTRAN <=-

No love for DEC? Their later Alpha boxes looked pretty slick.

A friend of mine couldn't bear to see a DEC Alpha being tossed out at work, so he brought it home. It ran NT 3.51 and IIS for way longer than
it should have - but it would not die.

Yeah. I've still got an Alpha down in the basement that runs VMS.
I don't need this machine, but it's fun.

A fan died on it a year or so ago; the machine shut down instantly
with a thermal warning. Ok, so I got a new fan; low power, but enough
air movement to keep things cool. I installed it and the machine shut
down _again_. Oops; looks like they were measuring current drawn by
the fan as a proxy for how well it was working: the system believed
my much more efficient fan was broken (it was not).

So I had to get a less efficient fan. :-D

The SCSI disks in it are starting to die, though.

--- Mystic BBS v1.12 A48 (Linux/64)
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When computers started to become more about tools rather than objects of fun and tinkering. That's probably when I lost interest in the hardware.

And that's where tinkering comes back. We live in times where it's relatively easy to create your own computer connecting PCB, native chips and fpga emulation.

I don't have time for that so I tinker with such created by others or retro where bare metal is still not fully uncovered. But yeah, times when you can have your own custom cyber deck with your own hw and software wares is now!

-h1

... Xerox Alto was the thing. Anything after we use is just a mere copy.

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On 24 Sep 2025 at 10:34p, hyjinx pondered and said...

Now it's a sea of beige, and a sea of beige operating systems. Even
Linux has ceded ownership largely to a few big corps when it comes down
to it, excluding the kernel, for the most part anyway. But even that has parts coded by IBM, Microsoft, Google and others. Nothing is free any more. No more cathedral and the bazaar.

I think that's a bit of a simplification. IBM, MSFT, and Google
contribute to Linux because it's in their strategic best interests
to do so, but that doesn't mean that Linux is any less "free" than
it was before.

What _has_ changed is that the barrier to entry, and overall cost
(in terms of time, energy, politics, etc, but not necessarily money)
has increased dramatically. BigCo contributions to Linux seem to
dominate so much because those companies have the resources to
sponsor engineers shepherding their changes through to integration;
but a lot of other folks do not. So the biggies can afford to do
it, and passionate individuals do it just because, while a lot of
smaller organizations cannot justify the expense.

But even within the ranks of the big boys, there is discontent:
for a working engineer, time and energy (and political capital) have
a very direct relationship with money, so often it's easier to just
float a patch in your local repo than upsteam a change. And that
causes real problems: when I was on Google's kernel team, we had an
_enormous_ patch set and it took a very long time to rebase onto an
upstream release.

Why not upstream all of that? A great question, with a few different
answers. One is that some of it couldn't; some stuff had been done
in collaboration with a vendor, under NDA, and Google was legally
barred from sending that code upstream. Some was because, even
though there was no significant intellectual property concerns, code
might be so Google-specific that it didn't make sense to send upstream;
much of that is historical baggage, but getting rid of it takes time.
But probably the biggest reason was that it wasn't economically viable
for a lot of stuff. Google might make a change that was a win, but
for a specific, constrained use-case. It may be cool to upstream, but
when it's sent someone looks at it and says, "yeah, this is neat, but
it only works for n=1; you should generalize it for any n." Except
that doing that generalization might be 10x the work of the current
patch: the engineer can't justify the investment because it provides
no additional value to Google, so it's easier to just float the patch.
Of course, over time, that decision is more expensive than doing the
work and getting the thing upstreamed, but we're talking about a 5-10
year timeline here.

Anyway, yeah, Linux is as free as ever, but the days of Torvalds
taking any random code and integrating it are certainly over. The
bar is much higher, and that cost can be borne by the Googles,
IBMs, Amazons, Metas, and Facebooks of the world, but not so much
by the smaller players, let alone individuals who are more
interested in casual contribution.

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Why not upstream all of that? A great question, with a few different answers. One is that some of it couldn't; some stuff had been done
in collaboration with a vendor, under NDA, and Google was legally
barred from sending that code upstream. Some was because, even
though there was no significant intellectual property concerns, code
might be so Google-specific that it didn't make sense to send upstream; much of that is historical baggage, but getting rid of it takes time.
But probably the biggest reason was that it wasn't economically viable
for a lot of stuff. Google might make a change that was a win, but
for a specific, constrained use-case. It may be cool to upstream, but when it's sent someone looks at it and says, "yeah, this is neat, but
it only works for n=1; you should generalize it for any n." Except
that doing that generalization might be 10x the work of the current
patch: the engineer can't justify the investment because it provides
no additional value to Google, so it's easier to just float the patch.
Of course, over time, that decision is more expensive than doing the
work and getting the thing upstreamed, but we're talking about a 5-10
year timeline here.

This is a really interesting insight. I bet more people would like to know the inner workings of contribution in the corporate fed open source world. If you'd ever consider wrapping this convo into dialogue that you'd be willing to share to a wider audience, I'd love to interview you for the YouTube channel. Let me know if you're interested.

Cheers,
Al


hyjinx // Alistair Ross
Author of 'Back to the BBS' Documentary: https://bit.ly/3tRINeL (YouTube) alsgeeklab.com

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On 27 Sep 2025 at 09:27a, hyjinx pondered and said...

This is a really interesting insight. I bet more people would like to
know the inner workings of contribution in the corporate fed open source world. If you'd ever consider wrapping this convo into dialogue that
you'd be willing to share to a wider audience, I'd love to interview you for the YouTube channel. Let me know if you're interested.

Heh, I don't know if you really want to interview me; I'm pretty
boring. But I'd be happy to chat with you some time if you'd like
to explore further.

--- Mystic BBS v1.12 A48 (Linux/64)
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Heh, I don't know if you really want to interview me; I'm pretty
boring. But I'd be happy to chat with you some time if you'd like
to explore further.

Hehe, I disagree. You are definitley not boring. At least to the right
target audience ;P

Seriously though, you seem to have a wealth of knowledge and experience
and it's an absolute privilege to be able to get your insights into
things.

I'd definitly watch an interview with you.

Andrew


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On 27 Sep 2025 at 04:01a, apam pondered and said...

Heh, I don't know if you really want to interview me; I'm pretty boring. But I'd be happy to chat with you some time if you'd like
to explore further.

Hehe, I disagree. You are definitley not boring. At least to the right target audience ;P

Seriously though, you seem to have a wealth of knowledge and experience and it's an absolute privilege to be able to get your insights into things.

Oh wow, that's really kind of you to say. Thank you very much!

I'd definitly watch an interview with you.

I would hate to disappoint. People would see just how un-photogenic
I am, though.

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