[vcf-midatlantic] How old is "vintage"? (was: Found an IBM XT in my garage.)

[Ethan Dicks]

On Wed, Aug 4, 2021 at 5:46 PM Dave McGuire via vcf-midatlantic
<vcf-midatlantic at 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