For some reason, I'm doubtful.

For context, the emachines "never obsolete" wasn't referring to this computer, it was a recycling program where you could send your old machine back and get a huge discount on your next one. It was actually a pretty good deal at the time, especially when your average family machine was a lot more expensive than they are today

There were a couple of companies that tried programs like this. PeoplePC was another similar program. You would pay for their services and they would lease you a computer every 3 years.
I wonder how much of a discount OP can get when they send their machine back?
- If it's in perfect condition, and they valued it based on second hand retrocomputing market prices... probably a nice chunk of cash.
pretty misleading tbh

Wow, that computer can run Windows 98? Here I am on Windows 11, not realizing that I'm 87 versions behind.

You conveniently blocked the part of the sticker saying what they mean by "never obsolete" with the red circle. IIRC, they gave you a massive discount to trade in your computer every 2 years for the latest model, so you were always up to date. Kinda like phones now.

I guess it's just a shit post idk
- On lemmy?
Exactly. It was also that trade in program that was their undoing.
- Every "trade in and get the latest" has always failed imo.
  
  Either the company ends up being bankrupt. Or the company realizes they really f'd up and the upgrade ends up costing more than had I just bought it flat out on sale.
  
  Source:
  
  I was part of a few of them over the last 10 years. Phones. Tablets. Laptops. Tvs. I did it because I always thought this time, it'll work out.
Totally useless red circle too. I guess it was intentionally drawn to obscure the context
Still a total lie to say that this computer is never obsolete.

What do you mean, this bad boy is probably powering a semi-critical government system somewhere, definitely not obsolete.

Edit: not even joking or shitting on it, there's probably a proprietary software system out there somewhere that a contractor was paid to build ages ago. The contractor is out of business or doesn't support it anymore, but it works perfectly in its one little spot. Also an update is gonna cost a quarter of a million dollars.

I've seen disk chart meters at facilities that are 40+ years old and need a new disk chart every so often. You could replace it with a digital meter, but that won't integrate with the rest of the control panel and a third party took over production of the disks 15 years ago. The system works great and it's unlikely to be updated unless they stop making the disk charts.

Edit 2: the correct term is circular chart recorder

There are some data recording systems on planes designed in the 90s that still use the original designs. Memory cards that are as big as your hand and only hold megabytes worth of data.

Upgrading would be fairly simple in theory, but getting anything approved to be used on an aircraft is an expensive pain in the ass so they don't want to go through that. They don't need any more storage capacity either.

So somewhere out there some companies are making these now ancient parts for now ancient systems, and probably making a killing because nobody else makes them.
I know for a fact that many hospitals are still running 1970s COBOL on beige servers in the corners of basements that have been taken over by ICU wards. Because I has to maintain that shit amongst the dying. Weird job.
I had almost this exact scenario happen with a CNC machine for a very old but profitable niche company. Pain in my ass.
- I don't know if it's still there but I once did some work getting a plasma cutter back to operational. OS/2. Not even warp!
  
  Oh it's a pretty solid OS but i mean, damn.
  
  Parallel port hardware key and everything. I do believe in keeping what works working but at some point you gotta let go because you run out of people that can solve problems with it.
- Seems like this issue is across a few different industries. I had two CnC machine running software on old PC's with special cards to interface with the drives. One was running in a Dos box while the other was running windows XP. We could never afford any down time so it was fine some old PC's that can still run this stuff.
See also: Pennsylvania State Emissions Testing System
I made so much money on this kinda stuff. And even after all updated they still kept those damn chart recorders. Luckily they were standalone and I guess easier than hitting print.

And most of you would be terrified if you knew what they were manufacturing. Ignorance is bliss, trust.
This is super true. I occasionally visit a TRIGA reactor that was built decades ago, and a good chunk of the computers critical in infrastructure run comically old versions of windows since software used to operate the faculty was a custom job.

God,the number of these I sold at Best buy....rolling my eyes the entire time...and making absolutely sure the customer understood exactly what that phrase meant in this ultra-scammy context...

Ended up not being able to handle that job. Something about literally full-time debunking of lies printed on everything in sight was exhausting for me.

How were they trying to justify that statement?
- You bought the computer and paid a subscription to be able to replace the computer with a new one every year or two.
I sold a bunch of them used... Lol...

They were basically obsolete the minute they were shipped to stores with the shitty Celeron CPUs, virtually no RAM, and tiny hard drives but people still bought them from me a year later for too much money.

Cmon that thing will run Linux like a champ!

if your distro of choice happens to be debian with openbox
That’ll make a great Hackintosh!
I'd bet Debian 12 installs like a champ.

The "never obsolete" refers to a subscription service, where they would periodically send you updates somehow. LGR has a good video on this.

Click here to download more RAM!!
- Your link seems to be broken; I've clicked like 4375 times...

Holy shit my grandfather had this exact PC up until ten years ago or so lol

Why'd he get rid of it? Obviously it wasn't obsolete.
- It obsoletely was

I wonder if it's possible to get a bunch of these, daisy chain the processors, and span hard drives until it can install and run Monster Hunter World. Lack of VRAM is the only foreseeable issue.

You forgot cache distance. That would also critically hinder performance
lack of VRAM is the only forseeable issue

Not at all - VRAM isn't nearly as important as people make it out to be. It's actually kinda weird how all of sudden Reddit and Lemmy became obsessed with VRAM.

The actual bottleneck in this infinite chain of obsolete computers would be the link speed between each client, as eventually the mere length of cable would be enough to delay signals to the point their pooled computation would be slower than a frame requires, but also the sheer processing power required to even assign load and regroup the information calculated by each system.
- I realize the irony of me talking about latency as a concern given my absurd above suggestion, but I think the bus speed would slow dramatically if it only relied on regular RAM.
Imagine a Beowulf cluster of these.
- Mod parent up.
Surely there would be enough latency to make it unplayable, no?
I doubt enough of these exist to make an adequate E-Machine supercomputer
Why mhw in particular?
- The PC version has probably the worst optimization of any game I've ever played. It's an incredibly lazy console port, framelocked and all.

What's the form factor? ATX?

Rip out the guts and slap in a Ryzen with some SSDs. Troll people by playing Farcry or something equally as demanding on it.

Sleeper builds like that are getting pretty popular actually.
A lot of prebuilts from that era made up their own case dimensions.
- Add non standard power supply sizes to the list.
- By the time they got rid of the AT form factor found around the pentium and early socket 7 era, motherboard sizes and screw hole placement started following the ATX specifications which meant standardization. Manufactures still sometimes did really dumb shit with case designs but they still do that today. For example I once saw this shitty compaq with the psu right over the cpu so you can't fit a serious cooler. And those iconic Windows XP Dell Dimensions everyone had were only big enough to fit micro atx motherboards even though the case was basically mid tower sized. I can't even remember how they made such inefficient use of the space but it involved lots of stupid brackets and screws in idiotic places.
At this point, Farcry probably released closer to that computer's release than today...

If it can still play SimCopter, the I have to agree.

Did we just become best friends?
Whenever you turn it on the fan plays SimCopter whether you like it or not

This PC has the clocks and it rocks, but it was obsolete before you opened the box.

It's all about the pentiums baby

How many sales stickers can one machine have?

Manufacturer mandates a certain amount of flair.
- no no no no, it's not a mandate, it's just that we encourage self expression here in the PC market. You do want to express yourself, right?
- 37 pieces of flair to be exact.
  
  It's in the contract that technically 15 would suffice, but who wants to be the company that only does the bare minimum?

Seems like about every pubic US university was selling those back in the late 90's. So overpriced, even for the time!

pubic US university

Wonder what they teach there

Damn son you got dem AGP graphics! At least that is 1 thing that can be upgraded.

This was a computer for idiots even when it came out.

Reformat it and upgrade the RAM and it did pretty good.

Reminds me of my first desktop PC.

Intel Pentium II 266Mhz, 64MB of RAM, 2.99GB HDD.

Of course a 3.5" floppy drive was also included, and a CD-R Reader.

I had to purchase a 33.6k modem separately, tho.

I played C&C on an Intel 486DX4 100MHz.

Much speed. Great game!
- For me it was StarCraft / Broodwar, Warcraft (when it still was a RTS) AOE / AOE2, and Caesar III.
- Man that overdrive chip was off the hook. Took me from playing Descent frame by frame on my 486 DX 33 mhz machine to smooth as butter frame rates.
- I got vague memories of Mega Man and Wolfenstein on my families first computer, Dell 286
Did it have the turbo button?
- Nope. What was it for?

It will still run Windows 98 just fine.

Just don't connect it to the net. Bots will hardlock the machine in less than a second
- Just like when it was new.
- Can you elaborate on this more?
  
  Is this really an issue? I mean it makes sense with the security updates being non-existent for a long time now, but would bots really hardlock the machine fairly quickly?

I think we had this exact computer when I was growing up.

Yep I know my grandparents did. Played minesweeper and that cat mouse cheese and wine game like all day.

My families first computer was a Goliath of an IBM tower. Similar gross color I believe. If someone came home suddenly when you were wackin' it you had to just unplug it because it took too long to get the porn off the screen and onto something else. It also would give you away at night with it's insane modem sounds when connecting to the Internet.

antiX linux on a zip drive

Most of people use computers just for memes and emails, so yea, it is never obsoleted

How you gonna post memes on a machine that doesn't support modern browser protocols? This thing can't even load the Google home page or probably any Lemmy/kbin instance.
- I mean, it's not like they managed to get AI assistants running on win3.1 or anything...
  
  https://www.dialup.net/wingpt/
  
  People should appreciate old but serviceable hardware. There is nothing about net communication that exceeds what an 566mhz core can do. At that point it's just a question about porting a TLS/SSL library...
- You don't. You post animated gifs
- I have a Nokia NGage with mobile browsing capability and the google homepage still works. I think it's the only website that still works..

Common ig has a Celeron!

It always baffles me when like the old hard drive fit in the RAM of am average today PC. What will it be in 10-20 years, 2TB RAM in an average PC?

Chrome will still eat half of it.
- All of it.
The first hard drive I used was a whole 5MB.

The OS (a variant of CP/M) couldn't really deal with it though, so it was partitioned as an awful lot of floppies.
Man, I remember when everyone on planet Earth said "8 GB is all you need." Anymore, 8 GB is pretty low spec. I had to upgrade an old laptop (from 2016) from 6 GB to 16 because the CPU is just fine for what I do with the laptop (surf yt, check email) but the lack of RAM was making it hang up because it was constantly having to dump stuff into and out of swap.
- Yeah I recently upgraded from 8. I wish I’d just gotten 16 years ago, but I got 32 for what I paid for the 8. Turns out my games weren’t bad, my pc was
My first PC had a 170 MB (!) hard disk and 4 MB RAM. After an upgrade to 8 MB it could (barely) run Windows 95.
Moore's law will speeddown and then die, tech advancement per space will stagnate. Also, no home PC needs 2 TB of RAM.
- 640K should be enough for anybody.
- I'm reading the other comments, and wondering why do people need to be binary like that? Yes, diminishing returns are a thing, so we shouldn't expect the same degree of improvements, but stating hard limits is also something that usually gets laughed several years later.
- We old-timers have heard that exact argument for like forever. Didn't happen.
  
  Even Intels chief engineer thought that after 3um there would be impossible to reach 1um.
  
  1um = 1000nm BTW and we're at like 3nm

Wasn't there a time when it was considered unfeasible that anyone would ever need more than a few kilobytes?

"640k should be enough for anybody "

Bill Gates (in 1985, defending the limit for the dos os)

eMachines were obsolete two years before they were even built.

The sticker was supposed to be "Newer obsolete".

My cousins has an eMonster PC and I thought that was just the most insanely powerful PC.

Holy Hell, i'm pretty sure that's fridge kick's doom 2 in at 30fps with a translucent ATX Case Upgrade (￣～￣)

What's the problem here? That unit will do all your floppy disc needs until the end of time

they just mean, you just need to replace each component and it will be good as new!

you know, motherboard,ram,ps,cpu. those drives prolly work today if you have an ide and floppy headers.. might need some molex power adapters

it connects to the internet, dude, just download more ram
Computer tower of Thebes.
- I think you mean computer of Theseus.
- my grandfathers 'puter! runs like new!

The first PC I used growing up was the family e-machine. If nothing else it had good recognizable branding with that E power button design.

there was a point in time, between the mid 90s to the mid-00s, in the U.S., where you could be a very manipulative piece of shit, wthout knowing anything, except how to get these crap computers running again.

actually they probably run some old ass linux fine even now. i hate to see the internals trashed for a junkyard - that trashed computer could be running the junkyard.

that said, i went looking for parts for my car on the internet, at local junkyards. i think they are running the old-ass computers.

It's still good for some great retro gaming. Or maybe a server of some kind. So yeah, it's not obsolete yet.

i've got a couple old emachines mintowers here, one was redone with a new (at the time) athlon ii.

solid cases for reuse, just a little tight on space inside and zero airflow intake from the front (across where the hdd bracket is). neither really matter if you're not trying to put in a big video card and use ssd instead of hdd. so i just hang on to them in case i come across something new-ish to put in them.

I remember buying an eMachine on credit. It used crazy expensive RDRAM

My emachines etower 566 is my daily driver, am i my alone here? It's current year, and this thing is still not obsolete.

Lol... Wow. Its a trip to see what we thought we be future proof back then.

This actually was eMachines program where you could ship your old computer and get significant discount on new model.

It had nothing to do with what they think would be future proof.
- Thats interesting. We do the same thing with phones now. Lol.