all these asks are pretty solid because i don't have direct answers to any of them. i support this
i'm not sure if this is a "what won't you do on moral grounds" because the answer to that is "raid shadow legendz" so i'm gonna go with "what won't you do that people might expect from a channel Like Yours"
the best answer I can give is "reviews of new things," insofar as I just can't see myself doing it. there's no way I can do as good a job as anyone else when talking about, like, a laptop or something; frankly, i'm just bad at objectively assessing things.
what I love about discussing old stuff is that A) it doesn't really matter if i'm subtly wrong about things because it won't affect anyone's decisionmaking, and B) my focus is usually on how the consumer public received something, so if i'm being blunt and shortsighted or just plain ignoring the obvious, that's great, because it's a reflection of those same problems in the general public.
the on-point answer is more conceptual though: you'll never see me doing "standard retrocomputing."
forgive the term, but i don't know what anyone sees in macs or SGIs or suns. the machines themselves are no more interesting than PCs, in that they have no unique intrinsic functions. they turn on and boot an OS. I can't really get excited that their CPUs are in some way weird - x86 CPUs are weird too. i can't get excited that their OSes are in some way weird - Windows is weird too. it's all behind the scenes stuff; computers mostly work the same way, otther than implementation details.
the visceral experience is really dull to me too. i've used like six kinds of unix workstation in the flesh, and it's just crappy linux in every way that matters. "cool, grep without any useful flags" doesn't do anything for me. there were never more than like 10 apps available for any of the unix systems, and they all got ported to windows NT anyway, so i can just go to internet archive and download isos that'll run in a VM. motif looks neat but i can have that look in linux with five minutes of effort. it's just a look anyway. there's nothing to say, i don't have the ability to wax poetic about aesthetics. i often wish I did!
almost everything that makes these platforms "interesting" either lives in an engineer's brain (and makes no sense to me) or is associated with some other piece of equipment that's long since gone to the landfill, or some bespoke piece of software that's long since gone to the landfill, and would probably be unusable without a bunch of externalities.
the joke my friends always make about mainframes is "they're just for making invoices" and there's truth to that. if i got some IBM AS/400, it would be neat for like 30 minutes until i got into the software and learned that it doesn't do anything unless you have sales data flowing in from cash registers at 300 Safeway locations. and even then, all it does is generate stock order reports.
as for macs... i mean. the aesthetics are neat i guess, but... it's just a computer. it runs programs, pretty much like the new ones do. i used to tell myself that i was really into macs, so i spent many dozens of hours chewing through all the software on macgarden etc. but almost none of it interested me. "cool, it's office 97, but worse." alright, i guess. i mean, old things are going to be primitive, that's not news. the platform also had almost no interesting peripheral hardware compared to the PC, so pretty much every machine has identical capabilities.
so, you're never going to see a video from me where i go "look at this performa," for the same reason you'll never see one where I talk about some random packard bell: if I can't come up with a thing it can do that something else couldn't, then it doesn't belong on my channel.
there are surely exceptions: i would be interested in showing off a Mac if it had the DOS card, because i'm truly curious how well the interop worked. i'd be interested in an SGI if it came with Davinci's color grading system. and if you ever see an Amiga in a video, it'll almost certainly be running the Video Toaster or some other external device. otherwise, these things are just computers to me.
even among PCs, i can't talk about a packard bell, because it just boots up and says C:, so i got nothing to say. on the other hand, consider "PC, but it has strange features nothing else supported," or "one-off 80186 system that won't run most PC software." both of those speak to me of possibilities, futures that didn't happen. i am fascinated by the idea of someone getting talked into buying a PC-incompatible x86 machine after 1982, what their life might have looked like, why they did it, or what unique things that machine could (or couldn't!!) do.
hope this doesn't make anyone feel Judged, it's not my intention. if you can actually enjoy it, then i have no beef with Huffing Vibes, it just does nothing for me.
