My answer is more hardware+software than OS only, but when I look at the time I really got into computers (the 1980s).. A "good computer' in 1985 was substantially more capable than a "good computer" from 1980. And again, by 1990-1992, a "good computer" was again substantially better than that 1985 "good" computer. To me vintage is when you go back far enough that the paradigm / capability is substantially less (or "several times less") than whatever is contemporary. If we're focused on Windows -- XP seems like the end of an era. Real pivoting in both how we use computers (iPhone, actual good tablets, 64-bit OSes on desktop, SaaS, etc.) largely happened as XP was getting long in the tooth. If XP was it's own era, the next older era of capability prior to that would be the mid to late 1990s OSes -- OS/2, Windows 9x, Classic MacOS, some flavors of UNIX, and perhaps Palm Pilot OS. These all seem vintage to me, but XP era PCs definitely have a lot of legacy .. I feel like there's also a couple of logical Linux divides that could support this argument, though to me the hardware drove a lot of OS capability for a very long time. (i.e. Pentium 3 with SSE was fast enough for useful speech recognition on a desktop PC, and a 100+ MHz 486 could start to play MP3s well). Longer discussion here of course. Hope this helps.. On Wed, Jun 26, 2024 at 4:22 PM Gregg Levine via vcf-midatlantic < vcf-midatlantic@lists.vcfed.org> wrote:
Hello! I am again trying one of my blue sky ideas, one to work on between right now, and again of the next repair weekend. That will be onsite.
Would any of you good people remember the time period for a representative OS for when we can call it a Vintage Operating system? Last time I checked it was 1995.
No velociraptor, he is visiting relatives in California, and Oregon and WA. ----- Gregg C Levine gregg.drwho8@gmail.com "This signature fought the Time Wars, time and again."