Hacker News Reader

No machine is an island. You can’t send anybody an Atari 800 floppy disk, or bring that floppy somewhere, and expect it to be read. An Atari 800 does not have a USB port. You can’t browse the modern web on an Atari 800. And all of those things are what people do now. The computer did not, by itself, become worse, but the world around it changed, and the computer did not change with the times. The computer is therefore unusable for any normal activity which people want to do, and the normal term for that is, indeed, “obsolete”.

Again, if your reference point is the "normalized" market, that's the only way obsolescence really works as a model. This requires little effort to understand.

What I'm saying is, think about the long tail and the extraction of value from this technology. It's far from incapable. I don't know about you, but I could plan a global economic takeover on an 800; still can. I can also teach someone else to do so. In fact, it's easier to stay focused. There's no malware and comparatively little practical need for encryption.

We waste a lot of qualitative profit as we march forward in search of breadth. Here we are robbed blind by the obsolescence model, which imparts heavy bias to our thinking.

It's obsolete in the way a horse is obsolete. If you have a specific job - getting to the next town, or maybe crossing the continental USA - it will do that job, or at least attempt to.

But it will be painfully slow, unreliable, and potentially expensive compared to more modern alternatives.

No one is really being robbed here - because there's a point where incremental changes in technology mean that a product becomes qualitatively different. Not just faster, but able to do things that an older product can't.

In this example the qualitative differences are obvious. You can't make calls, watch videos, browse the web, develop modern software, play modern games, write modern documents, or print them with a modern printer.

You can still do some very simple programming on it, but you can't share the code without hard-to-find extras.

So - obsolete. It's capable of some extremely limited applications, none of which are particularly useful. And it's quite useless for anything else.

> ... unreliable ...

I'm sure that machine will still power on after in 20 years. Try that with today's flimsy throwaway junk.

Why design for 20 years when it’ll be unusable in 5? If anything we need more biodegradable parts, and bottles that last 10 years not 500 years.

> Why design for 20 years when it’ll be unusable in 5?

I can't think of any modern machines that will be unusable in 5 years. Even my smartphone is 7 years old and still perfectly fine.

Until a few years back, I regularly used an old Cromemco System III computer that was built in 1979 (it has since been donated to a computer museum).

>Until a few years back, I regularly used an old Cromemco System III computer that was built in 1979

Please don't take this as sneering -because I'm genuinely interested in late 70s micros!- but what did you use the system 3 for? Can you tell me about it as a computer? It's not a computer I know much about and I'm interested in what you would've used it for, especially recently.

It was a z80-based CP/M machine. I got it as payment for a software project I did for someone. I used it for recreational/hobby activities.

I forget the system clock speed, but I think it was around 2 MHz. The thing was made of steel, weighed over 100lbs, and contained 4 8-inch floppy drives (combined capacity for all four was about 2.5 megs, I think, but it may have been 5). The one I had contained an insane 512 megs of RAM. If I remember correctly, the one I had was purchased new for somewhere in the neighborhood of $10,000 (1979, which is about $35,000 today). This was, at the time, serious hardware. It even did high-resolution graphics that would (barely) still be considered high-resolution today.

Turning it on literally made my lights dim momentarily and sounded like a jet engine spooling up. It was glorious.

Nothing about it is practical in today's terms, of course.

I had fun doing things like writing compilers and software to use it as the coordinator for a crazy project I was engaging in at the time: I had networked 10 Kaypro IIs together with it and was using the entire combined system as a single multi-CPU computing machine.

What I mostly did with it, though, was to experiment with hardware. The System III was an S-100 bus machine, and did not even have a motherboard as we think of them these days. It had a backplane that you installed cards into to provide all functionality. This made it really fun and easy to experiment with changes that would, in a modern machine, have required altering the motherboard.

> You can’t send anybody an Atari 800 floppy disk, or bring that floppy somewhere, and expect it to be read. An Atari 800 does not have a USB port

Actually, not only you can use an SD card as mass storage without much effort, thanks to the many people who build modern peripherals for the SIO bus, but you can probably telnet and ssh as much as you want from it (smart modem-like network interfaces). If I wanted, my Atari XE (mostly an 800, slightly modernized) could easily be used for light local text editing.

If you buy modern hardware to do modern things, why not also buy a modern keyboard and monitor and cut the 800 out completely? Especially since modern web browsing pretty much requires more pixels and colors than the 800 can produce.

And why not? The expansion bus supported intelligent peripherals with their own embedded computers since day 1. It'd be totally fine to format a floppy, or defragment a hard drive, or backup your entire volume library via a downstream network modem, without the computer being even aware of it.

Think of an Atari 800 as a small cluster of specialized computers each doing its own thing, connected through a serial bus. BTW, other computers of the time, most notably the C64/128, also did that.

I spend my weekdays in front of a computer that has two displays daisy-chained through a serial bus. The hard drives are on other serial buses, just because I have a couple extra ports.

Yeah it looks like the SD card reader adapters have more computing power than the Atari 800 itself. So why even bother with the Atari?

Well, one possible reason that you might not have thought of is that modern hardware (and software!) has so many hidden layers that you never know what you are running. Like PCs have Minix, and CPUs besides the main CPU, and so on. So you might look at something old like the Atari 800 and say, well, I know basically what it is. By comparison, a modern PC is like the horror movie trope of a thin humanoid skin over writhing innards. Because computers are so cheap and tiny that a device has vastly more than you are aware of.

See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intel_Management_Engine

Some people are taking classic cars and converting them to electric power, without changing the fact that they are basically un-aerodynamic deathtraps and without even getting rid of the manual transmission. That may not be what you consider optimum, but it is logical given some peoples' values.

If you feel that you could reasonably trust SSD and USB adapter boards, I don’t see why you couldn’t also put the same trust in a minimal computer, like an ARM board or a RPi or similar, both of which are still technically usable for modern tasks. It’s not a binary choice between an Atari 800 or modern Intel CPU, you know; there are other options.

> Some people are taking classic cars and converting them to electric power

This is one of my dreams! I own an awesome 67 Pontiac wagon which is a lot of fun, but after decades of riding in modern vehicles you just can't help noticing how much louder and smellier everything is with an old carbureted v8. It's wonderful to be able to pop open the hood and make sense of what's going on in there, but I'd still trade that engine in a heartbeat for a quiet electric in the same exterior.

https://evwest.com/catalog/

I had an old PowerBook that hadn't been used in years, which had a PowerPC chip, and I had the impression that it was useless, because you need a new web browser to view current websites, and Apple does not provide updates for such machines. However, I did find a distribution of Linux that booted to a GUI, although as usual there seemed to be issues with power management which might have been software or hardware.

So, I'm saying you can't forget that any computer is probably more useful than you think, given suitable software. These days, it should be easier than ever to make an interface for something weird, given the resources for hobbyists like FPGAs. I remember 15-20 years ago, when I had access to a "Fat" Mac 512K which had pretty much no software including an OS, and I wondered if I could do something with it, because I had recently been learning about Linux. I didn't go very far with the experiment, but I copied some minimal hand assembled bootstrap code to the boot sector of a floppy (avoiding any problems with the drive being unreliable at reading large amounts of data) and then I rewired a Mac printer cable to connect it to the PC serial port, and I got the Mac to download an image to its framebuffer. I didn't have the motivation or stick-to-it-ivness to continue, but I had the vision at the time of a Mac as a terminal for Linux.

Edited: Duplicate

>The fact is, this machine still does what it started out to do, technically speaking. If you look up the dictionary definition of obsolescence though, you'll find some really terrible news: "no longer useful." An Atari 800 is no longer useful? That's arguable, to say the very least.

Obsolete (Adj.): no longer used or needed, usually because something newer and better has replaced it.

It doesn't matter whether the Atari 800 still does something. It's so bad compared to newer options that there is no circumstance where it's the best available option. We live in a world where a 32-bit microcontroller costs about the same as a banana. $10 buys you a single-board computer with roughly the same performance as a mid-00s desktop.

Human effort is worth something. So is energy, so are raw materials. Keeping old, crappy stuff just isn't a good use of resources when new stuff is immeasurably better and ludicrously cheap. Melt down the old stuff for scrap metal, burn the plastics for fuel and use that material and energy to do something more useful.

> It's so bad compared to newer options that there is no circumstance where it's the best available option.

I'm not sure this is true. At the very least, it's not hard to imagine circumstances where it's the best available option for recreational use (hacking on, programming for, etc.)

> Keeping old, crappy stuff just isn't a good use of resources when new stuff is immeasurably better and ludicrously cheap.

It isn't a good use of your resources. But it can be a perfectly fine use of resources for someone else. It all depends on what turns your gears.

"No longer useful" is not a very good definition. I declare that dictionary obsolete!

I would tend to define obsolescence based on the task. (Arguably this is just the "micro" definition corresponding to your market-based "macro" version.) Obsolescence is when another alternative exists for doing the task, that improves on the previous alternative to a sufficient degree that you prefer it, and don't see yourself ever willingly going back to the previous alternative.

Just to pick some random domain, from outside computers: Steelmaking/metallurgical technology at the turn of the 20th century tended to produce a relatively high carbon-content steel, which was more brittle, especially at low temperatures, and could cause a ship to crack, take on water, and sink. As steel tech improved, and new ships were built with the newer steels, those failures started happening less often. Steels that were less "hard" but more "tough" made navigation safer.

On the other hand, and maybe to your point, most of those older ships of the higher-carbon steel, that didn't sink, were still able to serve out their service lives. Maybe if you found a way to put them on routes in warmer waters, you could've extended their lives even more. Which, translating to your conception, would be adapting to the new market or sub-market.

So hey, at least for shipbuilding, your model seems to fit!

The idea of obsolescence reflects an often unquestioned bias toward, or belief in, progress. If that which is newer or came later is always better, and if we're always (or mostly) moving forward in a more-or-less unbroken arc of steady unalloyed progress, then of course older things are obsolete. When in fact it's usually more complex than that. For example when moving to a newer technology, there's often something else desirable that has to be sacrificed, or that gets ruined, in order to get the improvement. So progress is rarely unalloyed (no pun intended given the steel talk above), and obsolescence is also, rarely unalloyed.

> An Atari 800 is no longer useful?

Machines wear out. If I can't get service manuals or replacement parts, then it's no longer useful, even for its original purpose.

I've thrown out more than a couple pieces of computer hardware, over the years, which were almost certainly 99% fine, but unrepairable.

On ebay right now, I see 6 "Atari 800" machines. 1 is advertised as "working".

The model I'm presenting is not a "go buy an Atari 800" model. It's a counter-model to displace the shallow concept of normalized-market obsolescence.

The best way to understand this thinking is to look at people who already employ it. Look at the people using fountain pens and Gregg shorthand in 2019. And did you hear about the Polish auto shop that was using a C64 well into the 21st century?

We junk really, really good standalone ideas because human psychology determines that they don't fit into an emerging network of systems. This creates literal tons of waste at a personal and individual-business level and forces humans to think in unsustainable ways about what technology is and how it's used. We need new models to help us address the qualitative problems within the tech world.

My point was that, for a complex product like a computer, an individual consumer can't decide this. A shop still using a C64 is lucky that it didn't break -- or that there's plenty of other C64's for sale which broke in different ways, so they could be cannibalized for parts!

I was happy with my C64, but the 1541 drive kept failing (even 25 years ago). As a user, I'm able to ignore network effects for the device's use. That's merely an inconvenience. I can't ignore network effects for repair and maintenance. That will turn it into a fancy paperweight.

It's not like a pen and shorthand. Those I can use even if no company wants to support me. I could even make my own pen, without too much trouble, if somehow all pen companies went out of business next week.

> which were almost certainly 99% fine, but unrepairable

Repairability is dependent on your skillset and interest, though. Aside from machines that used custom chips and those chips failing (and even then, you can usually replace those with modern tech combined with effort and ingenuity), I can't think of any old-school machines (and very few modern machines) that are actually unrepairable.

While I wish I could agree (and being from the demoscene, pushing hardware to the breaking point is just what we do), there comes a time when you really do need a new machine. Many iterations of home computers (VIC-20 to C64 to C128 and so on) were mostly including what was once an expansion card or device as a stock feature. enough iterations and you'll have something nowhere close to the original. Of course it's technically the same computer, but no average Joe could tell unless you pointed it out. Apple ][ evolved into the ][GS, which was so far away from the original computer it might as well been called something else entirely.

This iterative evolution continues to this day on PC with the existence of Bluetooth being on motherboards now instead of being a PCI card or USB dongle you would install.

And there is a great example of going too far in the console gaming space: the Sega MD at the end of its lifespan, with the 32X and CD modules, was a hulking beast with a tangled mess of cables and power cords.

I love making old hardware do new tricks, but I sure as hell wouldn't use it to watch YouTube or debug software on. Not even 'sceners do that.

Can you edit text on it? If so you can win a war with it, you can make a million bucks with it.

Comparisons to YouTube while amusing are more like a smoke screen. Obscures value, sure. But also there's not much to it. It's not a substantially deep commentary on the Atari; it's a commentary on the market reference point. And my point is that you've got to understand the Atari first; the unique market part comes after.

I wouldn't recommend watching YouTube on an Atari either. :-)

If an old computer can be 100% emulated by a new computer using 1/1000th of the electricity then the old computer should be archived as software and physically recycled/eliminated.

Your laptop probably draws, what, 15W. Your old computer probably does not draw 15KW! - yes, I'm sure there will be old computers that do, and more, but since this article is about the Atari 800, I'm going to assume the discussion is about that sort of old computer, rather than something the size of a room that required a reinforced floor and your own personal account manager at the electricity company.

Modern hardware that I've got:

1. Mid-2015 13" Macbook Pro, mostly idle, battery charged, screen fully dimmed: 11W (16W with screen at full brightness)

2. My 2011 i7-2600K desktop: ~100W idle (packed away right now - but it's about that)

I happen to have my old Acorn junk set up right now, so here's some measurements from that:

1. BBC Master 128: 12W

2. BBC Micro model B: 25W

And some other Acorn peripherals. Add these figures to either of the above:

1. Acorn 6502 second processor: 5W

2. 5.25" disc drive: 2W (when in use)

3. Ancient early-80s monitor of unknown provenance: 50W

4. Acorn-branded CM8833: 85W

Looks like my favourite Acorn-branded monitor is actually pretty bad :( - however it's not actually drawing a huge amount more than the 2 x 27" monitor setup I have with my Macbook Pro, even though the pixels per watt isn't quite as good.

In fact: the overall power draw for BBC Master 128 setup vs Macbook Pro setup, both period-authentic, both (if not cutting edge for the time) up to the task of a good range of period-authentic workloads, is about the same! - and even if I was certain 1000x was an overestimate, this is still a bit of a surprise...

If you factor in that your MBP could probably comfortably emulate 100 6502s in real time, 1000x isn’t quite as severe an overestimate. Get the GPU in the game and, even with terrible warp utilization and cache efficiency, you still might be able to hit that 1000x for purely academic purposes on a desktop card with HBM (maybe 2500 real-time-emulated 6502s on a 250w system).

Move to the microcontroller world, though, and 1000x is a vast underestimate. The main core in a current project of mine runs at 24 MHz and draws around 1.2 mW without even entering sleep. This system could probably emulate a Master 128 just fine in real time, for about 1/10,000x the power.

My MBP can probably comfortably emulate 150 x 1 MHz 6502s in real time, but your average 6502-based system is a system, not just a 6502, and the Acorn stuff is no exception. There's a lot more to emulating it than just dealing with the CPU.

The Master 128 runs at 2MHz. For each emulated microsecond you need to (broadly speaking) do at least 2 CPU updates, 2 VIA updates, and 16 bitmap bits/1 teletext glyph. 24MHz = 24 cycles per emulated µsec :( - good luck even squeezing the video output into that, let alone the other stuff. Rather you than me!

(This also ignores handling the FDC, ADC, and ACIA. The devices accessed via the VIA will also take a bit of time to emulate...)

I'm talking more raspberry pi range than MBP, which is also 1000x more powerful. (or more; aka could probaly emulate all of the BBC Micros every sold at once)

a raspberry pi is 5W(?) at 100% cpu I think and can still emulate all of these machines with room to spare.

My macbook pro is only drawing 15W because it also includes a monitor and keyboard and happens to be plugged in. Otherwise I can emulate a data center worth of these machines without drawing ANY additional power ;)

I do tabletop gaming with a group of friends, and have an ongoing debate with one that seem relevant to this.

The debate is that he is of the opinion that tabletop games (particularly ones with complex scoring or recordkeeping) should be computerized. I am of the opinion that they should not, because when you change the form factor, you are changing the game even if all the rules remain the same. We are humans, and as humans, physicality matters to us.

I think that the same thing comes into play with old-school hardware. The hardware itself is important, and no amount of emulation can really replace it.

My friend and I will never agree on this with tabletop games, and that's OK. You and I may equally never agree about old-school hardware, and that's also OK.

At 100% you necessarily include sensory equivalence. Otherwise you still change the experience drastically. Emulators are a fundamental shift in the sensory aspect. Even moving the F-keys around a tiny bit can be enough to drive a user crazy or break a great word processor.

I went to a local video game museum the other day. It was a ton of fun. You simply can't emulate the feel of the Arkanoid controller (a knob which you turn clockwise and counterclockwise to move the platform), or the way games actually looked like on a ye olde CRT (although some might point out that there's decent effort done here and there), not to mention games for vector-based displays.

If. That makes sense only when comparing very old hardware to new, and only because the new hardware is much more power-efficient. But it's not a good argument for perpetuating absurdly short hardware cycles like we have with phones (1-2 years).

I'm specifically talking about things like VAX and old sun and DEC etc

The new computer will probably stop working in <10 years. The silicon will self-destruct in 50. The old one will survive the collapse of global civilization.

OK, is a mercury delay line memory obsolete?

As a commercial technology? Sure, read my post again. The obsolescence model works only with a "normalized market" reference point. But this also creates a huge blind spot: There is more value to be extracted. Think even of a simple teaching model. Is it useful to the average Joe off the street--that's the shallow part of the estimation.

> There is more value to be extracted. Think even of a simple teaching model.

Except mercury delay line memory is completely uninteresting except as a footnote to computer history, which doesn't change the fact they're heavy, expensive to run, and quite fragile. And I don't consider "It's a museum piece!" to mean something isn't obsolete.

Keep in mind that this is completely subjective/qualitative and that's the point. Disqualifying a substantially qualitative theory because you found an edge or corner case would in the first place be really silly, as every model is known to be broken in some way, and the point is that in the trade-off you generate value. But in the second--I'll bet if you really got into mercury delay line memory, you'd find some qualitative research gems. You are still referencing your comfortable normalized market, and that's a major point of departure for the thinking I'm describing.