On Wed, Aug 4, 2021 at 5:46 PM Dave McGuire via vcf-midatlantic <vcf-midatlantic@lists.vcfed.org> wrote:
This is very subjective. To some kids today, a Pentium 4 is vintage.
I think to people like us, "it depends".
That is very much at the core of the argument. There is a personal/subjective element to the definition and the wider the age-range of the group making such a determination, the less likely there will be concensus. There is a sweet spot at about 20-25 years for people because they are of an age for nostalgia to emerge and they hearken back to either the machine they had at a certain age (usually between 7 and 17) or the machine they _wish_ they had back then. That becomes the center of what constitutes "vintage". For myself, I have a hard time accepting anything that runs Windows 95 or newer as "vintage". Pentiums and newer are just "old". I'm not all that keen on commodity PCs being vintage, but at 40 years, the IBM 5150 has attained some sort of status. And I agree that not everything is in lock-step. Just because you pick "a year" doesn't mean all things made in that year are equally "vintage", especially comparing the last model of X with the first model of Y. 1995 _is_ a turning point in computing just because of the release of Windows 95 as breaking away from plain DOS and older versions of Windows, so I agree it makes a good place to draw _a_ line for evaluation. Lots of words to say pretty much "me too". -ethan