From watches to passwords on paper, everything that's old is new again

KETTLE Windows XP is turning 25, and with AI still causing a memory crunch we're really missing the days of low-overhead OSes from Microsoft that just worked.

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This week on The Kettle, host Brandon Vigliarolo is joined by FOSS reporter Liam Proven and Microsoft reporter Richard Speed to talk about why XP might have been peak Windows, but that's not the only retro thing we're chatting about in this episode.

Along with reminiscing about Windows of days gone by, we're also looking at Casio's remake of its classic digital watch to add some basic smart capabilities without losing a two-year battery life, and we're reexamining the long-held belief that putting passwords on paper is a bad idea.

After all, you can't hack a paper notebook.

A lightly edited transcript is below.

Brandon (00:01) Hello, everybody, and welcome to the latest episode of The Register's Kettle Podcast.

I'm Reg Reporter Brandon Vigliarolo, and this week we're finally going to step away from the AI industry for a few minutes to talk about something decidedly more old-fashioned that we've been covering lately.

And with me to discuss these stories are our open source reporter Liam Proven Liam Proven (00:20) Hello.

Brandon (00:20) And Microsoft reporter Richard Speed.

Thanks for joining me, guys.

Richard Speed (00:24) Hi Brandon.

All right, first up, Richard, we hit a pretty momentous date in Windows history this week with the silver anniversary of Windows XP's release to manufacturing.