FBXL Social

I've made this comparison before, but consider this with respect to the speed of technological advancements particularly in the area of computers.

1974 had the first commercially advertised computer that was at a home computer sort of price point. It had a tape interface and memory, but generally was not something that we today would consider to be a home computer.

By 1984, most of the 8-Bit computers that we know of had already been released. The Apple 1, 2, and Lisa had been released, and the Macintosh was released that year. The commodore 64 had been on sale for years. The IBM AT based on the Intel 80286 processor was released that year. The Atari 2600 had been released, had a renaissance, and caused the video game crash. In the ensuing crash Nintendo released their Nintendo entertainment system which was leagues above the Atari 2600, and as well as it's contemporaries the ColecoVision and intellevision.

By 1994, the 32 bit Intel 80486 which contained an integrated math co-processor on the DX model was relatively common. The video games doom and Wolfenstein 3D had already been released for many years, and descent for a fully 3D game have been released that year. The internet already existed, the Netscape web browser had already been developed to some degree, meaning that the World wide Web already existed. The super VGA video standard of the time supported up to 16 million colors at 24 bit color.

By 2004, the first to 64-bit processors had been released. Video cards had already ceased just being 2D accelerator cards and become 3D accelerator cards that could display triangles on the screen very quickly, and years earlier had become the graphics processing units first developed by Nvidia. By 2005, 3dfx had been born, lived, and died. Pixel shaders and vertex shaders were available on all new top of the line gpus. I do have a point of that in spite of 64 Bit having been released at this time, most consumer PCs were still 32-bit.

Here's where you can really start to see some of the stagnation take place, but the innovation moved from one product category to the other. From 2004 to 2014 things got incrementally better, and the top end technologies such as 64-bit and multicore became common in consumer pcs, the amount of RAM in a PC substantially increased, in 2005 you might have 128MB, in 2015 you'd often have 2gb. Besides that though, things had improved a little bit but not the same way. Compare any decade before that, and you can really see the difference. The one thing that had happened from 2005 to 2015 is the development of the entire mobile ecosystem. I have a MotoX 2013 still sitting in a drawer at home, and while it isn't perfect, it is shocking how usable it is even now. Big thing is, for the most part a computer from 2004 isn't great but a high-end one isn't so different from what you'd see in 2014.

Now we finally come from 2014 to today. The last 10 years is probably been the most disappointing 10 years since the 1970s. Most of my websites are hosted on computers made before 2014. My travel computer is computer made before 2014. Although it is cutting across the decade, my computer for gaming is pre-pandemic, and that 5-year-old PC is essentially state of the art. Instead of having a 4060 it has a 2060, but even rtx, as potentially groundbreaking as it is doesn't really matter all that much almost anywhere. You won't be able to run everything at high settings, but in terms of graphics a GTX 980 will still play virtually every game on the market today.

So in this context, you can really see where the sort of enthusiasm about the most advanced technologies just wouldn't be there anymore, because a lot of stuff is just slowed down. There's been some really exciting stuff on the software front such as the fediverse or nextcloud essentially bringing the sort of software that used to be solely proprietary and democratizing it, but once you realize the massive differences in previous decades compared to today there really isn't any comparison.