10 year rule

[Gordon JC Pearce]

Doc Shipley wrote:
> Computer Collector E-Mail Newsletter wrote:
> 
>> The terms are too similar, people will just get more confused.
>>
>> All I intended to do when I started this discussion topic was to point 
>> out the
>> obsurdity of considering things like the Web and Pentiums as "vintage" 
>> (or any
>> other synonym).  But then others observed back that I was being 
>> short-sighted
>> -- if you ignore that actual age, "vintage" just means "anything 
>> considered
>> obsolete by the mainstream," and that's a good enough answer for me.  
>> But I do
>> think that 15 years, not 10, is a better divider between what's just 
>> "old" and
>> what's truly vintage.
> 
> 
>   I think you're all looking at this completely backwards.
> 
>   The rate of electronic evolution (OK, change) has *accelerated* over 
> time, meaning that computers are obsoleted much more quickly than their 
> older counterparts.  Therefore the age limit for this list should be 
> *lowered* to about 8 years now.

I would not quite describe my IBM Workpad Z50 as a classic, but it 
certainly is unusual.  OK, it is basically just a big WinCE PDA (or is 
it a very small MIPS laptop?), but they are interesting, and not exactly 
a common commodity.

I wonder if my old Compaq P60 would be classified as a classic yet? 
Again, not that old, and "beige box", but very cool and unusual in that 
it had built-in SCSI, and a keyboard with a mike and speaker built in. 
Lots of other little wierd things like that too...

Gordon.