And more fun, lots of laptops have really goofy routing. I’ve got one where the DP alt mode on the USB-C ports are on the dGPU, but the HDMI ports are on the iGPU. And the internal panel is on the iGPU unless you switch it to be on the dGPU because yay mux.
Why? I don’t know. Too much meth while laying the board out or something I guess.
I mean, eBay exists. You can get a Commodore 64, a Mac II-era mac, or a 486 for not that much money.
I have a giant pile of retro stuff including those, and an absurdly expensive Pentium 1ghz box with a proper Vortex 2 and 3dfx voodoo 5 card, sitting around for retro gaming.
Which uh, mostly is all I do anymore. There’s also a TON of modern improvements to emulate floppy drives, replace hard drives with SD cards, and even new video and sound cards that are waaaaay better than what you had to deal with when the hardware was new.
It’s not as cheap as it was 5 years ago, but it’s still reasonable if you have an era you’re after and kinda stay focused on one or two retro computers and don’t, say, decide you want to own one of every G3 and G4 tower that was made or anything insane like that.
…stop looking at me like that.
There’s also a ton of Youtubers that are touching all sorts of rare and expensive hardware that’s a good watch, too. (8 Bit Guy, LGR, Adrian’s Digital Basement, Necroware)
I’m not quite THAT old, but I certainly remember the early 90s.
Tech was all new and cool, and I remember very much reading computer shopper or going to various computer stores looking at all the new cool shit I desperately wanted but could in no way afford.
And, of course, the BBS lists that were in the back of computer shopper and various other things like that: I spent uh, more time than I should admit arguing about stupid shit online via local BBSes and Fidonet and a couple of other networks. But, even then, you’re right: the absolute hostility was very high, but it was about who had the “right” computer, or my dumb 13 year old opinion of which games were fun, and the level of absolute grumpiness was way lower.
(As an aside, those FTN-style networks do still exist, and still have people having conversations on them, and it’s still pretty great.)
Now even the hardware is boring: oh gee, the new CPUs are 5% faster for $600! Oh yay! New video cards which are 10% faster for $1800! Like who gives a shit anymore. The days of there being generational or even every-other-generational improvements sufficient to justify prices of buying it are quite dead, and I don’t know if that’s just physics being a pain or if it’s straight up engineering design choices. Both, probably.
Anyway I’ll stop internet Boomering and go take my metamucil and watch the wheel.
There’s a hill I’ll die on: screw that 19th century-ass business dress crap.
Nobody gives a crap outside of a bunch of boomers who are still arguing about how offended they’ll be if you don’t put on a monkey suit to sooth their egos, so like, we should just stop that crap.
Also: ties. Who the hell came up with the brilliant idea of wearing a noose?