For context, the emachines “never obsolete” wasn’t referring to this computer, it was a recycling program where you could send your old machine back and get a huge discount on your next one. It was actually a pretty good deal at the time, especially when your average family machine was a lot more expensive than they are today
There were a couple of companies that tried programs like this. PeoplePC was another similar program. You would pay for their services and they would lease you a computer every 3 years.
You conveniently blocked the part of the sticker saying what they mean by “never obsolete” with the red circle. IIRC, they gave you a massive discount to trade in your computer every 2 years for the latest model, so you were always up to date. Kinda like phones now.
Every “trade in and get the latest” has always failed imo.
Either the company ends up being bankrupt. Or the company realizes they really f’d up and the upgrade ends up costing more than had I just bought it flat out on sale.
Source:
I was part of a few of them over the last 10 years. Phones. Tablets. Laptops. Tvs. I did it because I always thought this time, it’ll work out.
What do you mean, this bad boy is probably powering a semi-critical government system somewhere, definitely not obsolete.
Edit: not even joking or shitting on it, there’s probably a proprietary software system out there somewhere that a contractor was paid to build ages ago. The contractor is out of business or doesn’t support it anymore, but it works perfectly in its one little spot. Also an update is gonna cost a quarter of a million dollars.
I’ve seen disk chart meters at facilities that are 40+ years old and need a new disk chart every so often. You could replace it with a digital meter, but that won’t integrate with the rest of the control panel and a third party took over production of the disks 15 years ago. The system works great and it’s unlikely to be updated unless they stop making the disk charts.
Edit 2: the correct term is circular chart recorder
I don’t know if it’s still there but I once did some work getting a plasma cutter back to operational. OS/2. Not even warp!
Oh it’s a pretty solid OS but i mean, damn.
Parallel port hardware key and everything. I do believe in keeping what works working but at some point you gotta let go because you run out of people that can solve problems with it.
Seems like this issue is across a few different industries. I had two CnC machine running software on old PC’s with special cards to interface with the drives. One was running in a Dos box while the other was running windows XP. We could never afford any down time so it was fine some old PC’s that can still run this stuff.
There are some data recording systems on planes designed in the 90s that still use the original designs. Memory cards that are as big as your hand and only hold megabytes worth of data.
Upgrading would be fairly simple in theory, but getting anything approved to be used on an aircraft is an expensive pain in the ass so they don’t want to go through that. They don’t need any more storage capacity either.
So somewhere out there some companies are making these now ancient parts for now ancient systems, and probably making a killing because nobody else makes them.
I made so much money on this kinda stuff. And even after all updated they still kept those damn chart recorders. Luckily they were standalone and I guess easier than hitting print.
And most of you would be terrified if you knew what they were manufacturing. Ignorance is bliss, trust.
outside of manufacturing steel grotesque horror/violent art pieces i don’t see how anything being manufactured would be terrifying to anyone these days.
But you have my interest. I’m curious to know what you think the rest of us couldn’t handle.
There are components of various flying machines that are critical and must be made at certain temp and humidity. Else they are out of spec. That’s pretty much it. The people in charge of this are less thorough than you’d like.
text has no attitude except for the bias you bring to it. i was asking a genuine, curious question. You took it for something else. That’s fine, you are free to do that. But lets not mistake Direct questions as not being nice.
And certain temp and humidity levels for material tolerances is industry norm for Computer, Engineering and Design fields. there is nothing scary about it. Why would you think that would be scary?
X amount of Material in so much thickness and height and Spun can Withstand A B C tolerances under ‘these’ conditions.
this material is made uniquely because chemists and engineers found the right mixture… and you’re selling what equates to glorified cooking as voodoo magic that you think people would be terrified of. wat…???
Am i Being Nicer? I am sorry your feelings got trampled in the way of proper discourse to get answers.
Not only am I not your child, i’m not your mother or your spouse. So if you want Nice, Ask them. Otherwise fellow Other Human out of 8 billion, welcome to the jungle?
I’m actually in complete agreement with you. Yes there are safeties and whatever, I was just saying those safeties aren’t exactly monitored as you would expect. Don’t worry, I’m sure it won’t affect you. Wasn’t this just about chart recorders?
As for the personal stuff, sorry you took it that way. You want to argue about something we agree on and I know exactly how that goes. As such, i suggest we just skip to the part where we chill and do something fun. No you aren’t my child but picking apart my simple comment is sorta… well you know. It’s all good, you might be one in 8 billion but I’m still your friend. Take care.
I know for a fact that many hospitals are still running 1970s COBOL on beige servers in the corners of basements that have been taken over by ICU wards. Because I has to maintain that shit amongst the dying. Weird job.
This is super true. I occasionally visit a TRIGA reactor that was built decades ago, and a good chunk of the computers critical in infrastructure run comically old versions of windows since software used to operate the faculty was a custom job.
God,the number of these I sold at Best buy…rolling my eyes the entire time…and making absolutely sure the customer understood exactly what that phrase meant in this ultra-scammy context…
Ended up not being able to handle that job. Something about literally full-time debunking of lies printed on everything in sight was exhausting for me.
It actually was a good concept cause you’d get a massive discount on a new PC by signing up for the subscription program. The only thing “scummy” about it was the way it was marketed.
They were basically obsolete the minute they were shipped to stores with the shitty Celeron CPUs, virtually no RAM, and tiny hard drives but people still bought them from me a year later for too much money.
I wonder if it’s possible to get a bunch of these, daisy chain the processors, and span hard drives until it can install and run Monster Hunter World. Lack of VRAM is the only foreseeable issue.
Not at all - VRAM isn’t nearly as important as people make it out to be. It’s actually kinda weird how all of sudden Reddit and Lemmy became obsessed with VRAM.
The actual bottleneck in this infinite chain of obsolete computers would be the link speed between each client, as eventually the mere length of cable would be enough to delay signals to the point their pooled computation would be slower than a frame requires, but also the sheer processing power required to even assign load and regroup the information calculated by each system.
I realize the irony of me talking about latency as a concern given my absurd above suggestion, but I think the bus speed would slow dramatically if it only relied on regular RAM.
By the time they got rid of the AT form factor found around the pentium and early socket 7 era, motherboard sizes and screw hole placement started following the ATX specifications which meant standardization. Manufactures still sometimes did really dumb shit with case designs but they still do that today. For example I once saw this shitty compaq with the psu right over the cpu so you can’t fit a serious cooler. And those iconic Windows XP Dell Dimensions everyone had were only big enough to fit micro atx motherboards even though the case was basically mid tower sized. I can’t even remember how they made such inefficient use of the space but it involved lots of stupid brackets and screws in idiotic places.
Add comment