As someone older than 33, seeing "preserves" and "and it still works!" hits in a way I was not expecting to get hit this morning
this post was submitted on 22 Aug 2024
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Also you're fat.
you get used to it a few years into your 40s
In a 2019 Ars Technica documentary video, Meier said he'd saved two of the Compaq Deskpro 386 computers, but one of them exploded when he tried to boot it up due to the dust in the power supply.
Lol that sucks. "Hey look guys! I found my old PC, let's power it on" BOOM "Well... shit."
Rookie mistake, always check the power supply and the capacitors
Fuckin devs...
Yeah, I'd suspect Rifas before dust when I hear "exploded on first power up"
Eithee Rifas or shorted tantalums
Right, dust + air + spark = dust bomb.
It was probably bad capacitors, not the dust that exploded. Electrolytic capacitors are know to be issues with old equipment.
More exciting to me than finding one of Hemmingway's typewriters! Ah, imagine if like the original id software NeXTSTEP machines had been preserved? Or the devkits used to make NES classics? What a treat, to boot up and look through the scattered virtual desk of one of the founders!
There may be a museum of VM images copying their system, programs and files, so you can just put them on and see what person X saw before compiling the version they shipped, see their last edits etc. I bet, comparing Carmac's and Romero's systems circa Doom can be a joy for at least a couple of nights.
now now now
My mind fluctuates towards having their emails too, like we have from poets and politicians of the past, and building a narrative, or even a game collected entirely in diving into a dump of their relationships and file history. A captivating idea I'd never materialize, so if some indie dev reads that - no demands, just steal that.
Hmm, an intriguing idea, an adventure game but you have to use a fantasy version of git or svn to mine through old source code repos looking for erased clues, abandoned forks, and other hints of The Truth hiding in the code. Using file diffs to compare versions of a .finger file found on two different VMs where some significant detail has changed (a file hash or a phone number or something).
Could be good in several genres too. Secret romance in the all queer dev team, lovecraftian digital dieties hiding in the archives, counter-espionage trying to locate a critical secret under time pressure, etc
Or a sim\party-rpg\dungeon-crawler where you as a lead try to find a middle of enabling each person's passion, and either distancing them or overvaluing them makes the final product unbalanced and faulty. Like Daikatana.
I don't think Linux still has drivers for them tho.
That's about $32k in today's money, using the "Other goods and services" category at in2013dollars.com.
Did he have a special 386? I had one as a kid around that time and we were poor as dirt (then again, it might have 'fell off the truck' at Dad's work)
There was the 386DX and significantly cheaper SX - first was full 32 bit, second just 32bit instruction set with smaller external busses.
Then you could add the math coprocessor. And of course RAM and disks were expensive. 16MB RAM was way above normal for that time.
Apart from spinning things maybe not spinning, why would it not work?
Big one would be capacitors. They don’t last forever and with time with work less efficiently, or not at all. They can leak and corrode the board.
Tin whiskers could be a potential issue as well.
But more likely to dry up/leak if you use the thing for 20 years than if you don't, because of heat.
Electronics degrade over time. Like everything.
That's pretty cool. Where I work, there's a computer museum and all of our stuff boots up and we have gotten them to load stuff but it's a chore. We have an Apple Lisa but it's a stupid thing. It's best feature is the happy mac boot image and ding. Otherwise it's useless.