For context, the emachines “never obsolete” wasn’t referring to this computer, it was a recycling program where you could send your old machine back and get a huge discount on your next one. It was actually a pretty good deal at the time, especially when your average family machine was a lot more expensive than they are today
There were a couple of companies that tried programs like this. PeoplePC was another similar program. You would pay for their services and they would lease you a computer every 3 years.
I wonder how much of a discount OP can get when they send their machine back?
If it’s in perfect condition, and they valued it based on second hand retrocomputing market prices… probably a nice chunk of cash.
These aren’t super valuable. You can get them for about 200-250 bucks.
pretty misleading tbh
Wow, that computer can run Windows 98? Here I am on Windows 11, not realizing that I’m 87 versions behind.
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And added the pipes screensaver
That’s going to be a long update.
F
You conveniently blocked the part of the sticker saying what they mean by “never obsolete” with the red circle. IIRC, they gave you a massive discount to trade in your computer every 2 years for the latest model, so you were always up to date. Kinda like phones now.
I guess it’s just a shit post idk
On lemmy?
Exactly. It was also that trade in program that was their undoing.
Every “trade in and get the latest” has always failed imo.
Either the company ends up being bankrupt. Or the company realizes they really f’d up and the upgrade ends up costing more than had I just bought it flat out on sale.
Source:
I was part of a few of them over the last 10 years. Phones. Tablets. Laptops. Tvs. I did it because I always thought this time, it’ll work out.
Totally useless red circle too. I guess it was intentionally drawn to obscure the context
Still a total lie to say that this computer is never obsolete.
What do you mean, this bad boy is probably powering a semi-critical government system somewhere, definitely not obsolete.
Edit: not even joking or shitting on it, there’s probably a proprietary software system out there somewhere that a contractor was paid to build ages ago. The contractor is out of business or doesn’t support it anymore, but it works perfectly in its one little spot. Also an update is gonna cost a quarter of a million dollars.
I’ve seen disk chart meters at facilities that are 40+ years old and need a new disk chart every so often. You could replace it with a digital meter, but that won’t integrate with the rest of the control panel and a third party took over production of the disks 15 years ago. The system works great and it’s unlikely to be updated unless they stop making the disk charts.
Edit 2: the correct term is circular chart recorder
There are some data recording systems on planes designed in the 90s that still use the original designs. Memory cards that are as big as your hand and only hold megabytes worth of data.
Upgrading would be fairly simple in theory, but getting anything approved to be used on an aircraft is an expensive pain in the ass so they don’t want to go through that. They don’t need any more storage capacity either.
So somewhere out there some companies are making these now ancient parts for now ancient systems, and probably making a killing because nobody else makes them.
I know for a fact that many hospitals are still running 1970s COBOL on beige servers in the corners of basements that have been taken over by ICU wards. Because I has to maintain that shit amongst the dying. Weird job.
See also: Pennsylvania State Emissions Testing System
I had almost this exact scenario happen with a CNC machine for a very old but profitable niche company. Pain in my ass.
Seems like this issue is across a few different industries. I had two CnC machine running software on old PC’s with special cards to interface with the drives. One was running in a Dos box while the other was running windows XP. We could never afford any down time so it was fine some old PC’s that can still run this stuff.
I don’t know if it’s still there but I once did some work getting a plasma cutter back to operational. OS/2. Not even warp!
Oh it’s a pretty solid OS but i mean, damn.
Parallel port hardware key and everything. I do believe in keeping what works working but at some point you gotta let go because you run out of people that can solve problems with it.
I made so much money on this kinda stuff. And even after all updated they still kept those damn chart recorders. Luckily they were standalone and I guess easier than hitting print.
And most of you would be terrified if you knew what they were manufacturing. Ignorance is bliss, trust.
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Why did you have to bring attitude into it?
There are components of various flying machines that are critical and must be made at certain temp and humidity. Else they are out of spec. That’s pretty much it. The people in charge of this are less thorough than you’d like.
Be nicer.
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What are you on about?
I’m actually in complete agreement with you. Yes there are safeties and whatever, I was just saying those safeties aren’t exactly monitored as you would expect. Don’t worry, I’m sure it won’t affect you. Wasn’t this just about chart recorders?
As for the personal stuff, sorry you took it that way. You want to argue about something we agree on and I know exactly how that goes. As such, i suggest we just skip to the part where we chill and do something fun. No you aren’t my child but picking apart my simple comment is sorta… well you know. It’s all good, you might be one in 8 billion but I’m still your friend. Take care.
This is super true. I occasionally visit a TRIGA reactor that was built decades ago, and a good chunk of the computers critical in infrastructure run comically old versions of windows since software used to operate the faculty was a custom job.
In my experience neither computers nor women will accept a 3.5 inch floppy.
That’s why we called them stiffy drives. It’s the 5.25inch disks that were floppy.
5.25 inches floppy, but 3.5 inches when hard. Hmm 🤔
Water-cooling?
God,the number of these I sold at Best buy…rolling my eyes the entire time…and making absolutely sure the customer understood exactly what that phrase meant in this ultra-scammy context…
Ended up not being able to handle that job. Something about literally full-time debunking of lies printed on everything in sight was exhausting for me.
How were they trying to justify that statement?
You bought the computer and paid a subscription to be able to replace the computer with a new one every year or two.
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It actually was a good concept cause you’d get a massive discount on a new PC by signing up for the subscription program. The only thing “scummy” about it was the way it was marketed.
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I sold a bunch of them used… Lol…
They were basically obsolete the minute they were shipped to stores with the shitty Celeron CPUs, virtually no RAM, and tiny hard drives but people still bought them from me a year later for too much money.
Cmon that thing will run Linux like a champ!
if your distro of choice happens to be debian with openbox
I’d bet Debian 12 installs like a champ.
That’ll make a great Hackintosh!
The “never obsolete” refers to a subscription service, where they would periodically send you updates somehow. LGR has a good video on this.
Click here to download more RAM!!
Your link seems to be broken; I’ve clicked like 4375 times…
Computer is coughing
Holy shit my grandfather had this exact PC up until ten years ago or so lol
Why’d he get rid of it? Obviously it wasn’t obsolete.
It obsoletely was
I wonder if it’s possible to get a bunch of these, daisy chain the processors, and span hard drives until it can install and run Monster Hunter World. Lack of VRAM is the only foreseeable issue.
You forgot cache distance. That would also critically hinder performance
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I realize the irony of me talking about latency as a concern given my absurd above suggestion, but I think the bus speed would slow dramatically if it only relied on regular RAM.
Imagine a Beowulf cluster of these.
Mod parent up.
Surely there would be enough latency to make it unplayable, no?
I doubt enough of these exist to make an adequate E-Machine supercomputer
Why mhw in particular?
The PC version has probably the worst optimization of any game I’ve ever played. It’s an incredibly lazy console port, framelocked and all.
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If it can still play SimCopter, the I have to agree.
Did we just become best friends?
Whenever you turn it on the fan plays SimCopter whether you like it or not
What’s the form factor? ATX?
Rip out the guts and slap in a Ryzen with some SSDs. Troll people by playing Farcry or something equally as demanding on it.
Sleeper builds like that are getting pretty popular actually.
A lot of prebuilts from that era made up their own case dimensions.
Add non standard power supply sizes to the list.
By the time they got rid of the AT form factor found around the pentium and early socket 7 era, motherboard sizes and screw hole placement started following the ATX specifications which meant standardization. Manufactures still sometimes did really dumb shit with case designs but they still do that today. For example I once saw this shitty compaq with the psu right over the cpu so you can’t fit a serious cooler. And those iconic Windows XP Dell Dimensions everyone had were only big enough to fit micro atx motherboards even though the case was basically mid tower sized. I can’t even remember how they made such inefficient use of the space but it involved lots of stupid brackets and screws in idiotic places.
At this point, Farcry probably released closer to that computer’s release than today…
This PC has the clocks and it rocks, but it was obsolete before you opened the box.
It’s all about the pentiums baby
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Actually they started fairly early, but it was more like a phase. Just like the Inter Net.
How many sales stickers can one machine have?
Manufacturer mandates a certain amount of flair.
no no no no, it’s not a mandate, it’s just that we encourage self expression here in the PC market. You do want to express yourself, right?
Someone remembers Office Space far better than I do! Lol
Don’t worry, you’re a real straight shooter with upper management written all over you.
37 pieces of flair to be exact.
It’s in the contract that technically 15 would suffice, but who wants to be the company that only does the bare minimum?
