[HN Gopher] The Old Computer Challenge
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The Old Computer Challenge
Author : zdw
Score : 34 points
Date : 2021-07-07 16:33 UTC (6 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (dataswamp.org)
(TXT) w3m dump (dataswamp.org)
| geocrasher wrote:
| I've no intention of taking this challenge but that doesn't mean
| that I haven't imposed some restrictions on myself in the past!
| Up until 2018 I was using a Phenom II X2 unlocked to quad core.
| It was fast enough for its purposes overall but the main problem
| was that the browser and websites were so far on it because it
| didn't have any built-in video codecs. Doing a video call on
| Google Hangouts at the time was enough to peg the CPU at 100% on
| all four cores!
|
| I used to have a laptop that was a Celeron 1.4ghz with 1.5gb
| memory. Even with the lightest weight Linux I could load on it,
| it wouldn't load most web pages.
| swiley wrote:
| > with 1.5gb memory. Even with the lightest weight Linux I
| could load on it, it wouldn't load most web pages.
|
| That's a bit odd. I used a raspi (1GiB aarch64 sbc with WiFi
| and SD card) as a desktop in college and while it was
| unpleasant to have Firefox and LibreOffice open at the same
| time I don't think I ran into anything that flat out didn't
| load.
| kQq9oHeAz6wLLS wrote:
| > wouldn't load most web pages
|
| This seems to be the biggest challenge to overcome, really.
| Looking at my daily computer usage, much of what I do is
| browser-based (email, calendar, CRM, connecting with customers
| -- heck, even the product my company creates is accessed
| through a web-based console).
|
| Web pages these days are so much more than just "web pages" --
| they're entire programs, effectively, which means they have
| hefty requirements.
|
| The rest of what I do is console-based, and I can use just
| about anything with a keyboard, screen, and network connection
| -- up (down?) to and including my VIC-20.
| geocrasher wrote:
| Yes, that was the conclusion I came to as well. Websites are
| no longer documents. They're software. Too bad.
| jmclnx wrote:
| I plan on joining, at least watch the fun. I do have 2 old
| systems, the oldest is AMD 333 32bit with NetBSD on it, but the
| system needs a serious upgrade on NetBSD (I think it is 6.x). I
| am hoping I can get that ready by the 10th. (cdrom flaky)
|
| The other old system is a tpad R51E, but 2 gig memory with
| OpenBSD. I may try and remove 1 gig, the 512mb is long gone. But
| really hoping to have the AMD 333 ready :)
| fsiefken wrote:
| Running Samsung Dex with Termux with tmuxinator, spacemacs,
| taskwarrior with karmawarrior, frotz, aerc, rdk77's elinks and
| bluetooth keyboard
| torh wrote:
| Would be interesting, but my old ThinkPad X31 has a dead battery
| and a broken charger.
|
| As many already has mentioned, browsing the web would probably be
| the biggest issue.
| teddyh wrote:
| At first impression this seemed nice; a call to use a less
| capable machine for a while, which would certainly make
| developers more understanding of people with lesser hardware,
| reduce e-waste, etc.
|
| But on closer reading, this _seems_ instead to be, in effect, a
| call to migrate everthing to cloud computing, and to abandon
| having your own computer at all and rely completely on locked-
| down platform locally. That would not really be something I could
| get behind.
| [deleted]
| syntheticnature wrote:
| Looking at the other comments here, it sounds like the sticking
| point for many is that the migration of everything to cloud
| computing already happened, and the problem is webapps assuming
| you can easily devote tons of RAM to them.
|
| The escape hatch in the rules, I figure, was more because
| you're not going to be able trivially to respec any cloud
| servers you already have for the week.
| cptnapalm wrote:
| My main laptop is in the shop so my Tadpole Viper has been my
| daily driver for a little bit. 1.2 GHz UltraSparc IIIi with 2 GB
| of RAM running OpenBSD 6.9. As others have remarked, the lack of
| a broadly useful web browser is the main pain point.
| kop316 wrote:
| My main laptop is a Thinkpad x200 (Intel Core 2 Duo) with 8GB of
| RAM. I like the idea of her challenge, and I have a T61/T61p
| hanging around two that I have thought about toying with.
|
| The two hardest parts of this challenge:
|
| - 512 MB of RAM: There are unfortunately a lot of programs like
| to eat up RAM (I am sitting at 3.9 GB used right now on that
| Thinkpad).
|
| - (not a hard requirement) HDD. HDD is unfortunately painfully
| slow. I put an SSD in the x200 and that make a world of
| difference for speed.
| jandrese wrote:
| A good SSD would take some of the bite out of that 512MB RAM
| requirement. Swapping to SSD is much less painful than swapping
| to a slow laptop HDD.
|
| The single core CPU only requirement makes finding working
| hardware quite a challenge. Core2 era chips were usually dual
| core, and the single core options were mostly put in trash that
| people have already thrown away.
| rvense wrote:
| I also still use an X200 and only rarely feel the need to
| upgrade. There are some sites that load a little slow, probably
| some activities I can't do, but mostly I just get stubborn and
| paraphrase Office Space: "Why should I change, [this future] is
| the one that sucks!"
|
| Agree with you on RAM and SSD. My wife had an X200 as well
| until recently with 4GB, and that was mostly unbearable.
| kop316 wrote:
| Heh, the only issue I noticed with my X200 is if I am forced
| to use Zoom, I cannot do anything else on it. Besides that, I
| can't tell a noticable difference between my x200 and my much
| more modern Desktop rig.
| Delk wrote:
| In the first half of the 2010's, I still used an old 32-bit
| desktop PC well past its best before date. It had more RAM and
| storage than the specs of the challenge, though.
|
| Nearly everything kind of worked, except for being kind of slow,
| but it had an early 2000's AMD CPU which lacked support for even
| SSE2. That started being an absolute dealbreaker for more than
| one application.
|
| I can't think of mainstream 64-bit PC CPUs with only a single
| core, and 32-bit support might be another absolute barrier,
| depending on your application needs.
|
| Other than that, it might be mostly a matter of dealing with
| potentially slow performance and lack of storage. The former may
| or may not be an issue depending on your patience and everyday
| reality. The latter would become an issue in a longer-term deal,
| but for a week it might not be that hard.
| timw4mail wrote:
| AMD's Semprons seem to all be 1 core, and from AM2 socket
| onwords, they are 64bit.
|
| Source:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sempron#Models_for_Socket_AM2
| titzer wrote:
| Time to dust off my old 2003 12" Powerbook G4!
|
| Man, I loved that thing. So many hours playing Civ3, Warcraft3,
| and writing Java code. And that aluminum keyboard was so awesome.
| It booted successfully as recently as 2 years ago.
|
| Mine has 640MB RAM, close enough for this challenge, I guess.
| fossuser wrote:
| My first new personal laptop! It's funny I was amazed how small
| it was, but picking it up recently it feels like a giant brick.
|
| I also remember it being a lot faster than it was - some of
| that might be age, but I suspect we used to just be a lot more
| patient with the slowness of HDD.
| svilen_dobrev wrote:
| i am still useing sometimes an eee-PC 701, 900mhz, 2gb ram, 4gb
| ssd, 16gb sdcard, as work/everyday linux machine. web, email,
| python, C/++, vim, whatever. That means what, 12 years? Waw.
| Original battery still holds 1+hours. Now on archlinux 32bit,
| about 2 years old. And all is fine. Sometimes also i teach python
| classes, and that is being carried around and vga-projected.
| anthk wrote:
| I suggest you Void Linux, it has a musl build. It may run far
| better than Arch.
| andi999 wrote:
| How do you survive the keyboard long term?
| anthk wrote:
| Bitlbee does wonders for inter-communicating with people.
|
| Also, mocp and mpv as audio/video players. Youtube-dl works with
| mpv.
|
| Config: cat ~/.config/mpv/config
| sws-fast=yes sws-allow-zimg=no #zimg-dither=no
| vd-lavc-skiploopfilter=all video-unscaled=yes
| ytdl-format=bestvideo[height<=?420] [fps<=?30]+bestaudio/best
|
| More lightweight tools: - Mupdf for
| cbz/PDF/epub files. - ImageMagick/Xpaint for image
| creation/modification. - Sxiv as the image/gif viewer.
| - Sc-im/visidata for spreadsheets. -
| Groff+ms||groff+mom/Ted for documents. By "groff" I mean eqn/tbl
| and so on. - Gnuplot for graphs, or grap from
| troff/groff. - Already said, but swirc+bitlbee. Get the
| libpurple build of bitlbee, you'll get lots of supported
| protocols with that build. Yes, telegram-purple does work.
| zozbot234 wrote:
| > 512 MB of memory (if you have more it's not a big deal, if you
| want to reduce your ram create a tmpfs and put a big file in it)
|
| You can actually reduce your RAM easily by booting with the
| mem=512M boot option. Though IME this tends to make even a
| lightweight distro grind to a halt; you need at least 1G for even
| the barest usefulness.
| anthk wrote:
| You understimate what we accomplished with 512MB of RAM in
| early 00's. Use a lightweight DE, or no DE at all.
|
| I use cwm+st under Void and OpenBSD and it flies.
| zozbot234 wrote:
| Yes, 512MB might still be usable with a 32-bit distro, as was
| used in the early 2000s.
| swiley wrote:
| I can fit on an 8mb (doesn't matter) machine no problem.
| ssh->tmux on my VPS, no need to change a single thing.
|
| Much more interesting would be an old computer _disconnected from
| the internet._ 512mb is enough to get away with it if you 're not
| crazy with your desktop environment although it would be tight
| now even for fairly conservative people.
| anthk wrote:
| 512MB are enough to play 720p video with a good video card and
| good mpv/mplayer settings.
|
| I think even 128MB would be enough under cwm+mplayer if the
| iGPU is at least from 2006/7.
|
| For games, meh. Nethack, Slashem, IF (frotz), MSX emulators
| with the Metal Gears and the Konami Games, and Mednafen.
| krylon wrote:
| I'm a little bit embarrassed to admit I don't have any computer
| _that_ low-spec. My most puny device is an Asus EeeBox, which has
| an Atom N270 (32bit, single-core, two threads) and 1GB of RAM.[0]
|
| The biggest problem in this challenge would be the web, I
| suppose, as a recent web browser that supports Javascript and all
| that will easily use more than 1GB of RAM just by itself.
|
| I like the idea, though.
|
| [0] Strictly speaking, I also own a mid-1990s ThinkPad with 24MB
| of RAM and a 80486 CPU, but that device has no storage except the
| HDD, no network, not way for me to attach any network or storage,
| so it's practically useless. :(
| zozbot234 wrote:
| > The biggest problem in this challenge would be the web, I
| suppose, as a recent web browser that supports Javascript and
| all that will easily use more than 1GB of RAM just by itself.
|
| You'd be surprised, I've found that 1GB devices are still quite
| usable on the 'modern' web by adding some swap space and not
| having too many tabs. Of course that's approaching the lower
| bound of usefulness these days.
| anthk wrote:
| - Install ZRAM on your Linux distro
|
| - Ublock Origin is a must. If not:
| https://github.com/StevenBlack/hosts. Clone it, backup
| /etc/hosts, append the content of the /hosts subfiles MINUS
| the localhost and ::1 lines.
|
| - Use a bare window manager, not a DE. Cwm, icewm, doesn't
| matter. Use lxappearance to set up your gtk theme to
| something you like.
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