Vintage technology and why some people still use it

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-55808632

90 125 5 years ago

bbc.co.uk

rbanffy3• 5 years ago

I was thinking about it the other day. We got a C64 Maxi (a full-sized C64 emulator) and my 8yo daughter loves some of the C64 games and was exploring a little bit the BASIC environment and realizing she can make a machine do her bidding by telling it what to do. I feel that screen time on it is far less worrying than on YouTube or Roblox.

prionassembly• 5 years ago

I thought Roblox was a Minecraft-like with building aspects to it?

sokoloff• 5 years ago

It's an open game similar in some ways to Minecraft, but the amount of pre-canned games means it's more likely for a kid to lazily consume rather than work towards creating. (In a way that's slightly worse than Minecraft, IMO.)

chaostheory• 5 years ago

It does. While it is more powerful than Minecraft's creation side (and your child programming in Lua has an entrepreneurial motivation for Roblox bucks which translates to real dollars), the downside is that it feels more separate from Minecraft's creative side, which is baked into the gameplay itself

jandrese2• 5 years ago

Roblox games tend to be stuffed full of microtransactions, which is really annoying as a parent because kids eat that stuff up.

mhh__2• 5 years ago

Its hard to explain, but minecraft is more like an oliver postgate program like Bagpuss or the Clangers compared to one of the newer kids animated TV shows were stuff is exploding all the time.

michaelbrave• 5 years ago

Minecraft is a single game with the option of mods. Roblox is like a game marketplace with an engine where kids can make their own stuff and play each other's stuff (also microtransactions and the option for the kids to make money from said microtransactions).

Aldipower• 5 years ago

Similar thing here. I even got a real C64C with games on floppies. My young daughter loves Giana Sisters, like me back in the days. Now a got another one. But with the fire button on port II defective. I repaired it on my own by replacing the according chip. What a great feeling. And the living retro scene is helping a lot! C64 forever!

clcaev• 5 years ago

Do they have corresponding books where you can type in the programs, building it progressively?

kevbin• 5 years ago

The 1541 was "vintage" even before it was released :)

gdubs• 5 years ago

Steve Woz in his biography talks about the uniqueness of his era, where you could know every single aspect of the machine you were working on — and how that let you squeeze every last drop out of it, often through really creative ways.

foobar333333• 5 years ago

Thats still quite possible. Buy yourself an arduino board and the chip manual and you can know just about everything about it. Some slightly more sophisticated boards can even do video output and run modern programming languages while still not having an OS or complex firmware.

If anything its even easier now because its dirt cheap and there are hundreds of hours of tutorials available for free. And the arduino tools have removed a lot of the pointless complexity like telling your compiler what clock speed and revision your chip is.

uncledave3• 5 years ago

I have quite a lot of vintage test and radio equipment. It’s cheap, completely dangerous and unreliable and fun to fix. I couldn’t be happier playing with it.

the_only_law• 5 years ago

I have a lot of retro telecom equipment (mostly WAN line analyzers tbf) and I guess you could call a lot of it cheap, but a lot of it is curiously expensive too.

uncledave3• 5 years ago

Very cool. There’s some of that curiously expensive stuff in here too. My oscilloscope and plug-ins cost about $70k new. I paid $200 for it :). It’s amazing that stuff I couldn’t afford I can now

52-6F-62• 5 years ago

I had the pleasure of using a 35-50 year old high-pot tester when I worked for a rental company in the film industry.

It was horribly dangerous but still nobody seemed to get hurt.

Enough current to explode one’s innards in two wands you just go and touch ground pathways to make sure they don’t leak on high voltage/high current portable distribution terminals and lamps.

That job was a really fun experience.

css• 5 years ago

Vintage technology is often far more repairable than modern. My turntable and all the equipment I use with it included schematics and booklets with information about how they operate. Even cars used to be like this, but that has mostly been lost in the interest of operational simplicity.

Almost all of my old household appliances included schematics, but new stuff only includes operational instructions. It makes me sad we have lost this culture of tinkering.

johnzim2• 5 years ago

Plus we can rely on survivor bias! The stuff that’s still working was clearly built very well. The stuff that wasn’t isn’t working.

“flight proven”

varispeed2• 5 years ago

This is because you cannot copyright schematics (you can only as a painting - connections between components can't be copyrighted, except if something was very unique you could get a patent). So the instant someone produced a successful device, a clone was being made. It was more difficult when products used microcontrollers etc, but some companies in China would just copy the original firmware, and maybe change here and there.

AdmiralGinge• 5 years ago

My main sound system is a Leak Delta 70 from the early 1970s. It was an absolute joy to work on and bring back to life, especially the turntable which is a rebadged Lenco with a wonderful drive system I'd never seen before. It uses an idler wheel (which is still the original, it hasn't perished like they often do in cheaper ones) on a cone-shaped rotor. The speed selector is a slide with little protrusions at 16, 33, 45, and 78 rpm which slides the idler wheel along the cone-shaped rotor. That means you can choose any speed between the common ones giving you pitch control way before that was common.

Despite being nearly half a century old and an uncommon design it was literally an afternoon to get it up and running again after it'd spent over a decade in my neighbour's garage. Ridiculously well made bit of kit.

foobar333333• 5 years ago

On the other hand, I now have less things. I don't own a turntable anymore and no product replaced it. My phone has replaced tens of products which would have been dedicated devices before. Now I have one unrepairable phone that I replace every 4 years but thats probably less waste than buying things individually.

madaxe_again• 5 years ago

It’s really hard to see an MP3 player from 2010 as “vintage technology in use” when there are PDP-11s still in use in nuclear power plants. Hell, I seem to recall there’s some plumbing company in the US that still uses a 1940s IBM electromechanical tabulator for their accounts.

neuralRiot• 5 years ago

there’s some plumbing company in the US that still uses a 1940s IBM.

Maybe not to that extreme but you’d be surprised how many industrial machines still running on early OSes and even with CRT monitors. If it’s not broken don’t fix it.

nonford150• 5 years ago

Almost all of the equipment I've bought for SMT assembly is still Windows NT driven. I've got 2 Juki pick and place machines running Japanese DOS - built like a tank and never had issues.

taylodl• 5 years ago

If it works and fits your needs then why not continue using it?

grishka2• 5 years ago

Imagine the world if most software developers were thinking like that in regard to their technology choices. That would've been a good world. A world where software uses hardware to its full potential.

bayindirh10• 5 years ago

I agree. After seeing demoscene and high performance computing, I refuse to accept "hardware is cheap, network is reliable" mentality, and using the latest and coolest stuff.

Even a small amount of extra effort in the correct places makes a lot of difference.

I still use Eclipse, btw.

rhn_mk12• 5 years ago

On the other hand, if software makers kept using the same software, we'd still be programming in assembly, and play games in DOS :)

schnevets• 5 years ago

When lockdown-related stresses got to me, I found a lot of comfort in my old Nintendo DS Lite. I never saw the appeal of retro game collecting, but that combination of comfortable design, good battery life, and gentle screen display was exactly what I needed to ignore the doom scrolling and stresses triggered my more modern technology.

I have been tempted to get an emulator console, but they all have brighter, higher resolution screens and shorter battery lives, so I don't actually know if I'll get in the same "flow". Maybe I'll reassess after I finish this stack of JRPGs (which may take a decade).

Once everything became "connected" (around 2010), obsolescence became inevitable. That Psion5 or Zen Stone can remain timeless because they will never sync a contact list or download a patch. The owners know what they do, and seem confident that they will not fail.

illwrks• 5 years ago

I picked up a WiiU in 2018 but never really gave it much attention until lockdown. Wii Sports was a good bit of entertainment at times with my family, but I spent many nights playing Mario kart online with strangers, or playing Zelda Breath of the Wild and a few others. Being in lockdown is frustrating but the opportunity to explore a digital world and engage with other people online is a good distraction.

T-hawk• 5 years ago

I've been doing what you describe with emulator consoles during the lockdown as well. I got the NES and SNES classic versions, and they do indeed have that same effect for me. I use them on a TV with no other computer or cable hookups, and it's perfectly comfortable to get into the flow of the game with no doom-scrolling temptations or other distractions.

alasdair_2• 5 years ago

If you want a fun emulator project, try building a RetroPie arcade. I just finished one with my son for about $150, including the raspberry pie, the joysticks and buttons Amazon for $35), the wood for the enclosure and a super cheap screen and speakers.

I’ve found so many fun arcade games that I never had a chance to play in a real arcade as well as galaga and other classics. Highly recommend!

tarek_computer2• 5 years ago

That is great. Any good tips on the wood part ?

0xabe• 5 years ago

Which JRPGs?

damontal2• 5 years ago

The sound on the DS Lite is really good too even compared with the 2DS and 3DS. If you hold it at the right distance you can get a really nice stereo surround effect.

kumarsw2• 5 years ago

I also have a few vintage-ish computing devices from the pre-2010 non-connected era. One is an AlphaSmart Dana "smart" keyboard that runs a version of PalmOS which I use for notetaking. It emulates a USB keyboard so it's easy to send notes to any computer. I can write equations in Pandoc markdown and render in PDF later. The other is a Garmin GPSMap 62s from the late 00s/early 10s. Unfortunately, I'm unaware of open software to interact with it, but Garmin has shockingly kept the GPSMap 6x series in production and still provides updates for both the BaseCamp desktop software and firmware.

cosmotic3• 5 years ago

How can a lossy compressed minidisc be "cleaner" than a lossless CD or similarly lossy but higher bitrate and more efficiently compressed digital file?

jandrese2• 5 years ago

It was mastered from a higher quality source? There could also be errors in the CD mastering, like setting the gain too high and chopping off the top of the song just to make the whole thing "louder". The digital files may have been taken from the CD since nobody can be bothered to go back and find the masters anymore.

TacticalCoder• 5 years ago

The digital files may have been taken from the CD since nobody can be bothered to go back and find the masters anymore.

All my music collection is FLAC files, bit-perfectly ripped from my CD collection. So, sure, they're digital files, compressed, but lossless. It is, for all practical purposes, just as good as a CD (as long as my external DAC is as good as the CD players' built-in DAC).

The original CD may have been badly engineered but that's another topic.

3 000 CDs fits in more or less 1 TB in lossless (but compressed) CD quality (just to give an idea of how tiny it is using modern storage standards).

Some people only use FLAC as archives but these files are so tiny in this day and age that I don't bother converting the FLAC to mp3s: I sent directly the bitperfectly ripped FLAC files to my DAC / stereo setup.

cosmotic3• 5 years ago

The two issues you referenced are also applicable to minidisc.

bayindirh10• 5 years ago

MiniDisc user here. It's for a couple of reasons.

First of al, ATRAC is a strange format. It's optimized for perception as far as I understood it. It doesn't color sound but can reproduce the dynamics and details very well. It's important to understand ATRAC has quality levels: SP, LP2, LP4. SP fits 80 minutes to a 80 minute MD. LP2 fits ~160 minutes, LP4 fits ~320. SP is extremely detailed and transparent. LP2 is really pretty good. LP4 is not good. Is not bad, but for listening on the move. It's not suitable for joy-listening on higher resolution systems. The deficiencies will be definitely heard.

This sound quality has another reason. The DSP/DAC combo on MD players itself. Earlier versions were called Type-R, improved versions are called Type-S. Latter one can reconstruct sound very impressively. It can make SP and LP2 sound really good. It also has a digital amplification section. So, It's only converted to analog at the latest stage. Result is a very dynamic and clean sound. Especially if you convert to ATRAC from CD or any lossless source.

My Hi-Fi (Sony CMT-HX3) also has a 35W version of that DSP/Amplifier combo. It really sounds fantastic* with CD, MP3 and AC3. Didn't try ATRAC, but it won't disappoint I presume.

Sony's higher end systems and DSPs are a work of art. They sound clean, crisp and detailed. They can sing through a pair of good headphones or through 2x85W behemoths. This is why they're timeless and regarded highly. With just Bass & Treble settings, it beats a lot of presumably higher end portable players.

A similar sound quality was present in Creative's Muvo^2. It was plain enjoyable to listen. Apple's iPods famously use Burr Brown DACs but, the sound was too flat and dull in the earlier versions, lacking punch and energy. They fixed it after iPhone 5.

TL;DR: Sony's DSP/DAC/Amp stuff makes any well designed audio codec shine. ATRAC can store dynamics very well. This is why being a Hi-Fi company pays in the portable space.

*: I have a more conventional, but vastly higher powered system. This small guy is not a match for it, but for a small hi-fi it really hits above its league. If you scale this design up (to 80+ watts) with proper speakers, I'm sure that it'll make a lot of more expensive systems sweat.

cosmotic3• 5 years ago

The DAC isn't part of the format; although I respect the desire for a good DAC. I believe all lossy compression codecs from the past 20 or 30 years are perception based; ATRAC may have been one of the first ones, but it sure doesn't beat a CD which has no loss at all, unless ATRAC/minidisc regularly used higher bit depths than are supported by CDs. The sample rate is already "perfect" (in that humans could never hear a difference)

setpatchaddress• 5 years ago

This is getting into wooden volume knob territory, but MiniDisc did sound remarkably good compared to MP3 at the time.

astrange5• 5 years ago

None of this stuff is real unless you can pass an ABX test. I doubt it's real just reading it.

ATRAC is not optimized for anything that other codecs aren't (and technologically it's quite bad, especially compared to Opus but even compared to AAC). And there aren't magically better DACs any more than there are better power cables; they're all good enough as long as they're electrically compliant with your headphones.

genewitch2• 5 years ago

I used to record, in stereo, everyday life. i started with a 32MB smartmedia recorder, then to a cheap-ish compact flash recorder, to a minidisc "net" recorder - the audio i recorded with that netMD is still impressive to me, it feels like you're actually in the recording that i haven't ever replicated, even with the same microphone on other, more advanced devices like tascam dr-05 and the tascam quad channel, or even line in / mic on a computer, regardless of the sound card. I can go put a pair of headphones and a single AA battery into my MD device and be transported back to my college campus, a few of the industrial companies i worked at, the concerts/performances i was asked to record for friends, or even a small gathering/party/game night.

the only stuff i've heard that was recorded by amateurs that comes close (and possibly surpasses, depending on who's running the conversion / editing) is DAT recordings using the microphones shaped like a human head, for "perfect" stereo separation.

anecdotal, for sure, but the "compression" - ATRAC - was extremely good, especially at that time. I am aware that CDs have "no compression" on the data, so obviously DAT -> CD would sound better than MD -> CD, but this is my opinion.

dehrmann2• 5 years ago

Hipsters.

bangonkeyboard• 5 years ago

I maintain a clutch of pre-iOS 7 devices to remind myself what good design was.

hc-taway• 5 years ago

Agreed that iOS7 was a big UX downgrade. It went from being the only OS I'd be halfway-comfortable turning older tech-illiterate relatives loose on, to yet another OS that would leave them confused and lost much of the time. Discoverability and intuitiveness plummeted with 7.

WalterBright2• 5 years ago

I still run my Carver stereo and Dahlquist speakers all day every day I bought back in 1981 or so. Connected to it is my Technics SLQ2 turntable I bought new in the disco era. But the only time I use that is to rip a vinyl, snap crackle pop and all. The stereo gets its signal from a LAN music server.

0xdeadbeefbabe• 5 years ago

Physicists still use those vintage laws of motion. I still use this vintage keyboard layout.

jjav4• 5 years ago

And these vintage A/C outlets and power cords.

Imagine if we had to rewire the house and all appliances with the frequency of USB connector changes!

unkoman• 5 years ago

I can now afford the high end tech of a bygone era which is leads to high end products that do not break as they have survived for over 30 years.

MarkusWandel• 5 years ago

I love older high-end technology. For a couple of decades my stereo receiver was a Sony STR-7800SD. Absolute top of the line from the late 1970s, built like a tank, and component level repairable (the one time it needed fixing - a custom Sony part no less) parts were still available two decades after the thing was new.

Got it at a garage sale for a song in the early 1990s.

Given away since. I don't do stereo components any more, just listen with bluetooth headphones from a smartphone like everyone else.

Klwohu2• 5 years ago

like everyone else

Believe it or not stereo systems are still frequently purchased even in 2021.

lowbloodsugar• 5 years ago

Right? My speakers are nearly thirty years old. My current set up, new, would be $30k, adjusted for inflation.

rootsudo• 5 years ago

I've been buying older macbook pros and am pleasantly surprised how easy they were to repair and service.

They still are great machines today if your main usage is an ide, browser and video.

Don't get me wrong, I love my new mbp, but, I don't see any true difference in daily usage besides weight, and screen resolution.

frosted-flakes• 5 years ago

I love the repairability of the old iMacs and Apple displays. When something got jammed in the disk drive, I was shocked at how easy it was to pull the glass off the screen (no tools, it's held on with magnets), and then remove the 8 or so Torx screws holding the screen on, unplug a couple of cables, and have full access to everything inside it. The downside is that those machines are all extremely heavy.

DubiousPusher• 5 years ago

One of my personal favorites. Practically a prehistoric "IoT" censor at this point. It needs access to your wifi and an email address. No apps, no flows, no unsupported platform nonsense.

https://www.amazon.com/Zircon-Leak-Alert-Contactor-Pack/dp/B...

bullen• 5 years ago

How you can write an article about old hardware without mentioning the C64 is beyond me.

Today there are more scene releases for C64 than for any other device, including PC.

AFAIC Apple 1 & 2 where just prototypes for the final 8-bit computer with SID (audio) and VIC2 (graphics) chips that blew everything else away until 16-bit!

jjav4• 5 years ago

I use a lot of technology I guess some would consider vintage. It is not due to any specific preference for vintage or as a vintage hobby. It's just that a lot of the older products are so much better for the consumer.

It makes me sad because we have the technology and resources as an industry to make so much better products than ever before, but we just don't focus on quality for the consumer anymore. Can we collectively care to do better?

Today main product design drivers are collecting usage data and selling it to advertisers, enforcing dependency on cloud services, preventing repairability and ownership (vs. ongoing licensing). All these factors improve recurring revenue for the producing company but all of them are anti-features for the consumer.

All my cars are older and will forever be. No TV screen on the dash to go bad, no integrated CAN bus making diagnostics and repair a nightmare, no fly by wire nonsense. No phone-home spyware or OTA update horrors. If a relay goes bad it's a physical relay I can swap, easy. And so on, everything is fixable.

I unpacked my old Wii to play with my son. All the games are on DVD, so I own them, they won't disappear from the cloud, no dependency on internet connectivity, no subscriptions to pay.

For music in the house I run many squeezebox devices. The server is self-hosted and open source, no dependency on anything external, no subscriptions or cloud service to be suddenly cancelled.

cwyers3• 5 years ago

All my cars are older and will forever be. No TV screen on the dash to go bad, no integrated CAN bus making diagnostics and repair a nightmare, no fly by wire nonsense. No phone-home spyware or OTA update horrors. If a relay goes bad it's a physical relay I can swap, easy. And so on, everything is fixable.

Fuel efficiency is worse in older cars:

https://www.bts.gov/content/average-fuel-efficiency-us-light...

So are emissions:

https://www.epa.gov/automotive-trends/highlights-automotive-...

Safety standards, too. All of those things are quality benefits for the median consumer (who doesn't even know what a CAN bus is).

d1zzy• 5 years ago

Yeah, but on the other hand... http://www.bbc.com/autos/story/20160809-your-car-is-not-your...

cookie_monsta2• 5 years ago

Fuel efficiency is worse in older cars

But the emissions footprint in producing the new, fuel efficient car to replace your old one is quite staggering

jjav4• 5 years ago

Fuel efficiency is worse in older cars

On fleet-wide average, for sure. But not for all cars.

One of my cars (daily commuter pre-pandemic) is a late 80s Honda CRX, it gets nearly 40 MPG. Even in 2021 many (probably most) cars can't match that kind of efficiency.

(Energy cost per mile is lower than for my partner's electric Fiat 500e!)

The car that makes me sad and almost angry is the original CRX HF (mine is not an HF). This is a car that got over 50MPG with mid-80s engine technology!

https://jalopnik.com/1986-honda-crx-hf-393147

If Honda had continued developing the HF engine, what kind of mileage could an evolved 2021 CRX HF be getting today? We'll never know, but I'd guess over 70MPG.

Klwohu2• 5 years ago

There’s more to life than fuel economy and emissions. One trip of a bulk freighter carrying wood chips to be made into toilet paper produces more emissions than hundreds of thousands of people driving their cars all year long. If you decide that you want increased fuel economy and better emissions, well that’s your choice. As for me I will purchase things I don’t have to throw away. New cars are actually pretty shitty compared to ones from a couple decades ago, this is common knowledge among auto enthusiasts.

damontal2• 5 years ago

My mechanic complains about newer cars with all these electronics. If a car is officially totaled but still repairable it can be a big problem. Say the car is totaled and someone buys it to fix it. The door lock needs to be fixed but you need an electronic code from the manufacturer to make the repair. But since it was totaled, the vin has been removed from the manufacturer’s database so they can’t provide the code.

Or you have one of these cars with sensors in the windshield to detect other cars on the road and your windshield cracks. That’s going to cost a hell of a lot more to fix than a regular windshield.

1vuio0pswjnm7• 5 years ago

I am starting to contemplate that with older computers, energy efficiency and other such sacrifices may actually be worth it in some cases. The internet connectivity issues is particularly annoying because its "primary beneficiary" is often not the hardware purchaser.

I believe the "latest technology" today, as in the stuff discussed on HN, is often less reliable than what came before. Convenience is interesting, but if asked to choose, I would choose reliability over convenience. I also fear that younger generations are being conditioned to accept lower threshholds of reliability.

pabs33• 5 years ago

At some point I feel like ICE cars might become outlawed, so it might be a good time to start building your own electric car.

rsj_hn2• 5 years ago

That would be near impossible in the Federal system we have. It is the purview of the state to license vehicles on its roads and to determine what characteristics the vehicles must have in order to be given a license. But as much as some areas are concerned with emissions, 17 states don't even do any emissions testing and of the remaining 33 states that do, only 10 require emissions testing statewide instead of in just a few areas.

I can see some of the blue areas banning all sorts of things, but the red areas wont, and there are constitutionality issues with trying to stretch the commerce clause to things like forcing states to ban certain types of technology. Even the Federal highway speed limits have been a constitutional nightmare and many states no longer follow the national speed limits, which were also designed to improve on fuel economy and reduce emissions (e.g. https://www.newsweek.com/kentucky-judge-rules-states-speed-l...)

rchaud• 5 years ago

The best thing about old school tech was a feeling of permanence. Pop a cassette out of the walkman, and it'll pick up where you left off.

If you wanted to make a mixtape, you had to record each song one by one in your CD-Cassette combo boombox. The last Walkman I owned was in 2001. After that it was all discman players and non-iPod MP3 players.

I still have relatively strong memories attached to each of them as they were permanent fixture on my person prior to smartphones arriving. I've tried to recapture it on my Neocities page here: https://bad-mood-rising.neocities.org/mp3.html

airhead969• 5 years ago

Stanford University Student Housing facility maintenance used to be one of the largest hold-out users of Apple Newtons, up until 2004-2005. Ask me how I know.

Edit: I drive an '85 VW Vanagon camper with the original 1.9L motor, fuel injection, and control system that lacks OBD2.

yarone• 5 years ago

Psion 5 had one of the best tiny keyboards of all time. Amazing little device.

johnzim2• 5 years ago

He uses a Psion! OPL was my first programming language after basic!

I made some fun games in OPL. It was a really wonderful basic variant, perfect for the device.

varispeed2• 5 years ago

Vintage tech does not track you, you don't have to sign up to manufacturer website in order to use it, you don't have to pay subscriptions. If something goes wrong, you can easily access schematics and often spare parts are still available (electronic components) and the build quality is often exceptional comparing to today's brittle devices made to be replaced within a year.

whatever1• 5 years ago

I am using vintage hard disk back ups of my files after I lost my research/work OneNote notebook due to the Amazing cloud-only design of the (Windows 10 / modern / metro or whatever they call it these days) OneNote app.

Never again.

pabs33• 5 years ago

Is anyone making "vintage" tech on modern silicon process nodes? Then those AA batteries could last even longer.

mrweasel2• 5 years ago

After I been watching a ton of videos about retro-computing, mostly C64 and Amiga, I've been wondering if it would be possible to remake the custom Commodore/MOS chips. You can't get the original schematic and masks obviously, but the chips are pretty big by modern standards. Surely you could send a functional chip to China and have it reverse engineered.

You also don't need 5nm processing nodes to remake them, even a 130nm would be an improvement, and I have the feeling that even on 40nm there would be ample fabs able to make them.

It's probably more difficult than I imagine, and less efficient than just replacing the whole system with a FPGA.

patrickk• 5 years ago

Have a browse on /r/iPod. People love the iPod classics and the earlier generations in particular are becoming collectors items.

nbzso• 5 years ago

Good design is human centric, it serves the function of delivering meaning, added value and positive experience longterm. Todays designs are corporate centric, they convey "value for the consumer" but in actuality use legislation loopholes and design dark patterns to maximise corporate profits.

I drive classic cars (under 3k yearly) and every trip is a delightful. No distractions, no absence of control. Craftsmanship and quality of materials.

Driving Electric cars will be mandatory, I plan to convert my classic cars. No tracking, no data gathering and corporate overlords for me.

Vintage technology and why some people still use it

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