Sometimes it's easy to forget, and also I think a lot of people never knew what computing used to be like. Here's some little bits of reality about how things used to be:
1. People talk about obsolescence today, they don't even know what they're talking about. A computer from 10 years ago can do basically anything that a current computer can do. There have been incremental improvements of course, but in 2013 most people already had multi-core processors and fairly powerful gpus. By contrast, every 10 years before that you end up with a fundamentally different thing being considered a computer. In 2003, the very first 64-bit CPU was released on x86, the opteron. So almost all PCs were 32-bit single core x86. In 1993, the most powerful PC you can buy would be a 486 which that didn't have many of the features even if the pentium, let alone the Pentium 2, Pentium 3, Pentium 4. In 1983, the from IBM XT was first released, rocking an Intel 8088 and either text based monochrome graphics or cga, the ugliest graphic standard on the face of the planet ever. In 1973, personal computer industry such as it is effectively didn't exist. Through a few hobbyist companies you could buy kits to build your own but it was a real niche thing.
So we worked our way backwards, but let's look at graphics. In 1973 you had nothing, in 1983 you had either text or the ugliest graphics you've ever seen, in 1993 you had 256 color frame buffer, in 2003 you had highly mature gpus including pixel shaders and vertex shaders, and in 2013 you had something that was a lot more powerful but basically the same sort of thing, except it had unified shaders. Today our graphic cards are just faster versions of what we used to have, other than RTX, a relatively niche feature at the moment.
Depending on the specific moments 20 years ago that you bought a computer, it wasn't just obsolete in terms of there was a faster one available, it could be obsolete in terms of it literally did not have the hardware on board to be able to run the latest software. Even though certain things existed, it it's really hard to get across how even if you chose the wrong brand of thing you could end up completely screwed. Matrix was a very well regarded brand, but if you bought their 3D accelerator card thinking you were going to get something on par with a voodoo, they didn't support alpha blending or bilinear filtering. The current Intel extreme graphics chip but actually blow the pants off of most of the gpus released throughout history, and many 3D cards released weren't even gpus, and many video cards released didn't even do 3D.
2. A lot of stuff didn't even work. You might buy a game, and bring it home and the disc failed and you were out of luck. He might bring it home, and the disc was just fine, the game just didn't run on your computer because the gods were against you that day. @ActionRetro (check out his channel on YouTube, its great) just did a retrospective of an old version of Linux red hat, and some of the things that he clicked on didn't even work out of the box. Like, they didn't even try to start, and they weren't some fancy 3D thing, they were basic 2D applications that just didn't work. And that was an example from linux, but MS-DOS and windows had the same thing. Back then one of the reasons you would buy gaming magazines is they would include a game disk. There are games I had copies of the demo and despite having a wide variety of hardware the demo just didn't work. Half the fun was spinning the roulette wheel and seeing which demos on this month's CD would work. In this sense we really are in The Best Time ever with respect to things operating. Virtually any video card you buy is going to run virtually any game, and virtually any hardware you buy is going to run virtually any operating system, and we even have it where a lot of Windows games run on Linux thanks. You had a few outliers in the past but nothing like today.
There were things that you don't even have to think about today. You know that you can plug a SATA hard drive and something that's compatible with SATA. For early hard drives you often had to keep the hard drive with the interface card together because you knew that mfm drive and controller card worked together, but if you started to mix things up he'd often end up with things that just don't work together.
Then there was a bunch of configuration stuff that most people don't know about today, such as having to calibrate the interleave of your hard drive. If you didn't properly calibrate your hard drive, it could work 90% slower than it was supposed to.
This whole conversation also reminded me of things like jumpers. Today, usually you just plug in a thing and it figures out how to work, back in the old days you might have 20 different unmarked jumpers on a card, and if you didn't have a manual (and before the days of the internet you had no way to get one) you might be playing trial and error with a bunch of jumpers to try to figure out how to get everything to a point that it actually runs.
When you installed windows, you knew it was temporary. Sometimes you would install Windows 95, and it would be immediately broken and you would just have to immediately reinstall and there was no reason for it. Then you'd have everything running nicely, and something would happen and your computer would crash and all of a sudden your windows is broken time to start reinstalling! But some of the dodgy technologies we had like drivespace, everything on your computer was basically stored in one big file, and. If there was any corruption in that file you just lost everything and it was time to reinstall again. By contrast, today once you get Windows up and running unless you break it specifically it's going to keep on running.
3. People don't remember this, history has sort of rewritten itself. With the Advent of the internet and in particular stuff like facebook, computer nerds became kind of cool. Back when I was growing up, "computer nerd" was an insult. People want to talk about how people are excluded from all these different things, but the reality is computer nerds were the ones being excluded from things. "I like you but I can't be seen with computer nerds" was a common sentiment. Being into computers was something you didn't want to get out there because it was social suicide.
So there's a lot to be thankful for today. Hardware has substantially plateaued so when you buy a new computer if it's good it's probably going to stay good for a while. Unlike the past, most stuff works without incident, and with the internet there's all kinds of resources to help out. Socially being into computers isn't nearly the big deal it used to be.
1. People talk about obsolescence today, they don't even know what they're talking about. A computer from 10 years ago can do basically anything that a current computer can do. There have been incremental improvements of course, but in 2013 most people already had multi-core processors and fairly powerful gpus. By contrast, every 10 years before that you end up with a fundamentally different thing being considered a computer. In 2003, the very first 64-bit CPU was released on x86, the opteron. So almost all PCs were 32-bit single core x86. In 1993, the most powerful PC you can buy would be a 486 which that didn't have many of the features even if the pentium, let alone the Pentium 2, Pentium 3, Pentium 4. In 1983, the from IBM XT was first released, rocking an Intel 8088 and either text based monochrome graphics or cga, the ugliest graphic standard on the face of the planet ever. In 1973, personal computer industry such as it is effectively didn't exist. Through a few hobbyist companies you could buy kits to build your own but it was a real niche thing.
So we worked our way backwards, but let's look at graphics. In 1973 you had nothing, in 1983 you had either text or the ugliest graphics you've ever seen, in 1993 you had 256 color frame buffer, in 2003 you had highly mature gpus including pixel shaders and vertex shaders, and in 2013 you had something that was a lot more powerful but basically the same sort of thing, except it had unified shaders. Today our graphic cards are just faster versions of what we used to have, other than RTX, a relatively niche feature at the moment.
Depending on the specific moments 20 years ago that you bought a computer, it wasn't just obsolete in terms of there was a faster one available, it could be obsolete in terms of it literally did not have the hardware on board to be able to run the latest software. Even though certain things existed, it it's really hard to get across how even if you chose the wrong brand of thing you could end up completely screwed. Matrix was a very well regarded brand, but if you bought their 3D accelerator card thinking you were going to get something on par with a voodoo, they didn't support alpha blending or bilinear filtering. The current Intel extreme graphics chip but actually blow the pants off of most of the gpus released throughout history, and many 3D cards released weren't even gpus, and many video cards released didn't even do 3D.
2. A lot of stuff didn't even work. You might buy a game, and bring it home and the disc failed and you were out of luck. He might bring it home, and the disc was just fine, the game just didn't run on your computer because the gods were against you that day. @ActionRetro (check out his channel on YouTube, its great) just did a retrospective of an old version of Linux red hat, and some of the things that he clicked on didn't even work out of the box. Like, they didn't even try to start, and they weren't some fancy 3D thing, they were basic 2D applications that just didn't work. And that was an example from linux, but MS-DOS and windows had the same thing. Back then one of the reasons you would buy gaming magazines is they would include a game disk. There are games I had copies of the demo and despite having a wide variety of hardware the demo just didn't work. Half the fun was spinning the roulette wheel and seeing which demos on this month's CD would work. In this sense we really are in The Best Time ever with respect to things operating. Virtually any video card you buy is going to run virtually any game, and virtually any hardware you buy is going to run virtually any operating system, and we even have it where a lot of Windows games run on Linux thanks. You had a few outliers in the past but nothing like today.
There were things that you don't even have to think about today. You know that you can plug a SATA hard drive and something that's compatible with SATA. For early hard drives you often had to keep the hard drive with the interface card together because you knew that mfm drive and controller card worked together, but if you started to mix things up he'd often end up with things that just don't work together.
Then there was a bunch of configuration stuff that most people don't know about today, such as having to calibrate the interleave of your hard drive. If you didn't properly calibrate your hard drive, it could work 90% slower than it was supposed to.
This whole conversation also reminded me of things like jumpers. Today, usually you just plug in a thing and it figures out how to work, back in the old days you might have 20 different unmarked jumpers on a card, and if you didn't have a manual (and before the days of the internet you had no way to get one) you might be playing trial and error with a bunch of jumpers to try to figure out how to get everything to a point that it actually runs.
When you installed windows, you knew it was temporary. Sometimes you would install Windows 95, and it would be immediately broken and you would just have to immediately reinstall and there was no reason for it. Then you'd have everything running nicely, and something would happen and your computer would crash and all of a sudden your windows is broken time to start reinstalling! But some of the dodgy technologies we had like drivespace, everything on your computer was basically stored in one big file, and. If there was any corruption in that file you just lost everything and it was time to reinstall again. By contrast, today once you get Windows up and running unless you break it specifically it's going to keep on running.
3. People don't remember this, history has sort of rewritten itself. With the Advent of the internet and in particular stuff like facebook, computer nerds became kind of cool. Back when I was growing up, "computer nerd" was an insult. People want to talk about how people are excluded from all these different things, but the reality is computer nerds were the ones being excluded from things. "I like you but I can't be seen with computer nerds" was a common sentiment. Being into computers was something you didn't want to get out there because it was social suicide.
So there's a lot to be thankful for today. Hardware has substantially plateaued so when you buy a new computer if it's good it's probably going to stay good for a while. Unlike the past, most stuff works without incident, and with the internet there's all kinds of resources to help out. Socially being into computers isn't nearly the big deal it used to be.
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