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1. sockbo+o5[view] [source] 2026-02-03 05:28:20
>>Galaxy+(OP)
Over Christmas I tried to actually build a usable computer from the 32-bit era. Eventually I discovered that the problem isn't really the power of the computer. Computers have been powerful enough for productivity tasks for 20 years, excepting browser-based software.

The two main problems I ran into were 1) software support at the application layer, and 2) video driver support. There is a herculean effort on the part of package maintainers to build software for distros, and no one has been building 32 bit version of software for years, even if it is possible to build from source. There is only a very limited set of software you can use, even CLI software because so many things are built with 64 bit dependencies. Secondly, old video card drivers are being dropped from the kernel. This means all you have is basic VGA "safe-mode" level support, which isn't even fast enough to play an MPEG2. My final try was to install Debian 5, which was period correct and had support for my hardware, but the live CDs of the the time were not hybrid so the ISO could not boot from USB. I didn't have a burner so I finally gave up.

So I think these types of projects are fun for a proof of concept, but unfortunately are never going to give life to old computers.

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2. tomber+1c[view] [source] 2026-02-03 06:29:44
>>sockbo+o5
> Computers have been powerful enough for productivity tasks for 20 years

It baffles me how usable Office 97 still. I was playing with it recently in a VM to see if it worked as well as I remembered, and it was amazing how packed with features it is considering it's nearing on thirty. There's no accounting for taste but I prefer the old Office UI to the ribbon, there's a boatload of formatting options for Word, there's 3D Word Art that hits me right in the nostalgia, Excel 97 is still very powerful and supports pretty much every feature I use regularly. It's obviously snappy on modern hardware, but I think it was snappy even in 1998.

I'm sure people can enumerate here on the newer features that have come in later editions, and I certainly do not want to diminish your experience if you find all the new stuff useful, but I was just remarkably impressed how much cool stuff was in packed into the software.

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3. jama21+fc2[view] [source] 2026-02-03 18:26:40
>>tomber+1c
“Powerful enough for productivity tasks” is very variable depending on what you need to be productive in. Office sure. 3D modelling? CAD? Video editing? Ehhhhh not so sure.
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4. dsr_+Vd2[view] [source] 2026-02-03 18:32:20
>>jama21+fc2
I hate to tell you this, but people were doing CAD and CNC work on PCs back when a 33MHz 80386 with 8MB of RAM was an expensive computer.

And they did video editing on Amigas with an add-on peripheral called a Video Toaster.

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5. tomber+Ug2[view] [source] 2026-02-03 18:43:23
>>dsr_+Vd2
I don’t know enough about CAD to comment but video editing is considerably more expensive now for a bunch of reasons and I don’t think an Amiga could handle it now.

Video compression is a lot more computationally complex now than it was in the 90s, and it is unlikely that an Amiga with a 68k or old PowerPC would be able to handle 4k video with H265 or ProRes. Even if you had specialized hardware to decode it, I’m not 100% sure that an Amiga has enough memory to hold a single decompressed frame to edit against.

Don’t get me wrong, Video Toaster is super awesome, but I don’t think it’s up to modern tasks.

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