Blogs What exactly is 'old-school modding'?

Orac³ got me here. It'll always have a special place in my heart. I even made my girlfriend go through all articles just last year. Couldn't accept the fact she didn't know this masterpiece!

WMD and Dark Blade too were both special and should be mandatory reading for all aspiring young modders. Same goes for basically all Mod of the Month/Year articles here.

 

Orac³ is my favourite PC mod ever, of all time. It's so beautiful in it's chaos and you never see clear acrylic cases anymore, everyone's got to hide everything nowadays.

 

Is it the PC itself, or the method used to create it that you are trying to class as old school? If it's the PC, then old school could just mean old-looking. If you're talking about the method of creating or modding the PC, then old school (to me) would be using hand tools and perhaps a power drill. With tech nowadays, notably CNC machines and 3d printers, it can be much easier to create or mod things in the home, instead of outsourcing to a professional firm, so you still get the feeling of "Yes, I made this myself", which you did.

Cygnus X1 was my favourite of all time, and all done by hand if I remember correctly.

 

Old school techniques and innovation rolled into one - one name springs immediately to mind, Wayne Wilkinson aka Waynio.

The guy will always remain a legend in my eyes.

 

To me, Orac 3 is a mess in a plastic box but, Cygnus X-1 is a work of art. Maybe, one day, I'll make my own wooden case...

 

No Half Life mention. Tell me this article isn't an attempt to summon the elder gods.
For me, old school is an optical drive housed in tupperware.

 

Cygnus x-1 was my favorite mod of all time. It was a real event drooling over the updates. Truly exquisite workmanship. Did you see the decking he did at his home as well?...wow!

 

Old school? To me old school was very much make do and mend - not buying the bits off the shelf.

Making a cooling loop using a car's AC evaporator or oil cooler as your radiator, with black rubber hosing hooked up to your aquarium pump with jubilee clips.

Using distilled water with radiator inhibitor as a your cooling medium.

Or how about making your window edging by cutting the coloured insulation out of a length of 2.5mm twin & earth cable with a craft knife.

The point is, I am often thoroughly underwhelmed by pristine hardline loops and RGB, but just as often blown away by the guy who pulls out an inspired feat of engineering to get round a problem that threatened to halt the entire project. The guy willing to take a dremel to his radiator, to make it fit inside his custom built chassis, rather than cough up £2k and just replace everything.

 

Old school is using a caravan window rubber to mount a window

 

I agree with you on both points, also Cygnus X-1 is absolutely gorgeous too. It just happens that Orac is a mess in a plastic box that I adore.

 

So largely I’m seeing that old-school equates either to low effort solutions or shoddy work, gotcha, makes sense now.

 

Oof harsh words, although what you described is very much ghetto modding.

 

Sorry Alex, but that post comes across as being both blatantly arrogant and contemptuous.

 

Dunno if it was meant that way, but I definitely read Maki's post with a wink smiley at the end of it.

 

To me, "old school" modding was when there wasn't a modding section in the stores. When you had to make other things do what you needed. Like I did with a Peugeot 206 heat exchanger because it had better fin density than any available radiator, and it fit in the gap I had.

These days it's just a case of finding the right rad from one of the many retailers.

Old school was when people wanted different fin arrangement on their CPU block so they made their own out of a block of copper. Or a different coloured cover, so they bought the acrylic, measured six ways to Sunday and made their own.

That's not to say "modern" modding is bad. It's just different. It, I think, opened up the artistic aspect of it all because you're not spending money and time making the components fit, instead you're spending the time on the look. Of course, there were people who did both back in the day, but it's enabled those of us with less skill/dedication/time to achieve similarly impressive results.