The Sinclair QL Forum

Sparrowhawk wrote:They don't get it. The ones closest in age to me might fondly remember an Amiga or a SNES

It's normal. It's difficult to love something you didn't tried, used, understood, had fun with. I've never driven a 1960's Ferrari or used a mechanical calculator machine, so I can't love it.... unless it's an abacus obviously

I actually do know quite some people that are (way) younger than the computers they spend their hobby time on.

The Elephant Rope ?

I'll get me coat...

NormanDunbar wrote:The topic could also be:

Why the love of retro (classic) cars?
Ditto, for motorbikes.
Furniture.
Antiques.
Clothes.
Art.
Etc.

In a few years, these guys and gals will have their own retro stuff to love, I suspect.

Cheers,
Norm.

Music is another thing people like classic of...that's why we have classical rock stations and even younger generation like that.

Cristian wrote: It's normal. It's difficult to love something you didn't tried, used, understood, had fun with. I've never driven a 1960's Ferrari or used a mechanical calculator machine, so I can't love it.... unless it's an abacus obviously

It's not so much that I expect them to get my fascination with retro computers and operating systems, it's that they don't appear to understand why I might have it in the first place. Which is not a big deal, but I just thought the article was relevant and hence why I shared it.

Incidentally, it's also not that I'm trying to get them on board, it's that when we chat socially, they might ask me what I'm up to at the weekend and, as just recently, getting CP/M onto a Pi Pico baffles them. The disconnect seems to happen because there does not appear to be a purpose to it. A phrase I hear all the time is "Why? What can you do with it?". Which is not really why I do it.

Anyway, it does provide them with plenty of amusement at me expense, so there is that

Sparrowhawk wrote:

Cristian wrote: It's normal. It's difficult to love something you didn't tried, used, understood, had fun with. I've never driven a 1960's Ferrari or used a mechanical calculator machine, so I can't love it.... unless it's an abacus obviously

It's not so much that I expect them to get my fascination with retro computers and operating systems, it's that they don't appear to understand why I might have it in the first place. Which is not a big deal, but I just thought the article was relevant and hence why I shared it.

Incidentally, it's also not that I'm trying to get them on board, it's that when we chat socially, they might ask me what I'm up to at the weekend and, as just recently, getting CP/M onto a Pi Pico baffles them. The disconnect seems to happen because there does not appear to be a purpose to it. A phrase I hear all the time is "Why? What can you do with it?". Which is not really why I do it.

Anyway, it does provide them with plenty of amusement at me expense, so there is that

This crosses over into other aspects of everyday life too. I'm often asked why do I bother speaking Welsh when everyone speaks English? Why do some people collect old postcards? Why grow your own veg when it's less effort and possibly cheaper to buy them in shops? It probably boils down to "if you have to ask, you'll never understand."

It's also a sympton of modern life and to some extent social media, where people are so quick to judge and sometimes ridicule anyone who is 1% different to them.

<takes off grumpy old man hat and goes back to work on QL software >.

Just to ram home how inefficient modern code is, that as you can tell really irritates me, Gem the Atari windows before the internet is 2 MB so it would fit in the internal cache of a GHz processor. How fast would that run? I probably would die of thirst because I couldn't make a cup of tea while waiting for a file to be saved.

dilwyn wrote: <takes off grumpy old man hat and goes back to work on QL software >.

Surely one is not possible without the other?!

Qpac2 runs on a QL with 384Kb ram.

I doubt most Windowing GUI WIMP system would ever run on that amount of ram.

The Amiga A500 and the Atari ST has 512K ram, and ran out of mory very quickly

The QL Windowing system beats them all.

I used has an Amiga A500 and would use the CLI to programme it not the awlful GUI system.

Fast forward 2022, I can just bear to use the Cinnamon Desktop in Linux Mint, I found Windows awlful a tad behind Amigdos, and as for MACOSX... no thanks.

Today's systems may seem decadent from a QL/Amiga/AtariST user's perspective, just as QL/Amiga/AtariST may seem decadent from a PDP-7 user's perspective...