What can be done with a PC today, that could not be done 25 years ago?

I hardly use my printer or scanner today, not very often. The laser printer cartridge lasts for years. Everything is softcopy now... that's another thing that has changed from 25 years ago.
 
Don't know if it's been mentioned yet but the other very big difference is the broadband or fibre router sitting in the corner and high speed network link to the outside world. Back in 2000... I think I was using 56k dialup, and it was slow as a really slow thing. Did we have early adsl back then? I can't remember... I think maybe that started coming in a few years after 2000, but my memory is a bit hazy. I think it was still 56k dialup in 2000, or maybe even 33k.

I'm so used to having this fast internet link, I hardly think about it, it's just merged into the background. But getting that has been a major change compared with 25 years ago. I would say it's dramatically increased the usefulness of the PC, the range of things I can do with it.
 
One more, which I think is a bit of a loss. I used to browse usenet a lot, there were various free nntp servers and there were lots of very good groups for programming and tech in particular (comp.lang.c.. :-) ). The last free nntp server (aioe) went under a few years ago, and I can't find one to use at all now; and it was becoming obvious that it carried a lot less activity than in the past. And many of the forums that used to be on usenet are now web based. The same thing goes for irc, now I think about it. Well... and gopher, although gopher never got to be all that big. But the conversations that used to be carried out on usenet and irc have mostly migrated to the web and social media platforms, many of which weren't around back then. In many ways I prefer the old stuff, though I guess you get a lot more varied types of content on web-based platforms, rather than just text. Yes I know you could get images from usenet but it was predominantly a text-based system. The slrn newsreader is still one of my fave pieces of software. I wish I could find a halfway-decent free newsserver today, though.
 
I should have using 64kbps ISDN (when I'm lucky enough to grab another B channel with it, 128kbps) on 2000. And around there, I got chance to try 100Mbps FTTH (trial by an local ISP) for half an year, and switched to 100Mbps FTTH around the end of 2002 and still on the FTTH line.

The FTTH trial for me used simple media converter (on other areas, some other connections were tried), but the production service uses EPON (now physically GE-PON with restricted line speed).
 
DanielBowman said:
25 years ago a PC cost you an arm and leg...and possibly kidney if you lived outside Western World.
Click to expand...
Very true. I bought my current small N100 minipc for just over 100 GBP a couple of years ago, direct from Shenzhen. It had 16GB RAM, 512GB SSD, gigabit ethernet, wifi, bluetooth, build-in soundcard, graphics hardware support for up to three 4K monitors(!!), built-in usb hub, and a 4-core cpu that I found I could compile a kernel on in about the same time as a 2015-era xeon, which is to say, pretty good. That spec would have been a monster machine in 2000, if you could even buy one that powerful back then. I think I paid something like 130 GBP for the new one, including shipping to UK; whereas the 2000-era machine would have cost thousands. Absolutely astonishing, if you stand back and think about it. Of course this is a tiny box by comparison with no expansion slots etc, but it's still very impressive compared to the year 2000 PC. Unfortunately the prices seem to have doubled over the last year, I looked up how much they cost a couple of months ago and it's more than double what I paid two years ago.

But compared to how much you had to spend to get a pc in 2000... its a drastic change, especially if you think of it in terms of the number of hours you have to work to buy one. And the difference to an original 1983 IBM PC-AT with it's 10 MB hard drive, 640k dram, and 286 cpu, is stark.

It's gone from this, back in the early 80's...
1790586414676.png

to this, around the year 2000...
1790548561671.png

to this, today...
1790548601389.png

... and the new one is much more powerful, and with greater capacity, than the old ones.

So... what has enabled this change? Shrinking lithography geometries, achieved by massive invesment in the production technology by companies like ASML, TSMC, the dram and flash manufacturers, and we have got to give full credit to Intel, coz' it's still an Intel cpu that is at the heart of it, and indeed the architecture and reference design will all come from Intel (and perhaps microsoft has some input); IBM is mostly out of the picture now, since they dumped their PC divison, whereas in 2000 they would still have played a major role. I tried to find a spec for the number of transistors in the N100 SoC, I can't find the number published anywhere, but it would not surprise me if it's of the order of 5-10 billion transistors on the chip. The real magic, then, is the production technlogy, that permits a chip like that to be economically manufactured, with a high enough yield, permitting it to be sold at a low enough price, such that that the machine itself can be profitably retailed for just over 100 GBP.

Another observation is that the amount of material in the thing is much smaller than the 2000-era PC, which means less junk ultimately going into landfill, which can only be a good thing. Hopefully the spoil-heap and chemical pollution arisiing from the minerals and hydrocarbons they had to mine and refine to build the thing is also much smaller, along with the energy consumed in the manufacturing process.

Another remarkable feature that hardly ever gets mentioned is that the new one is backwards compatible to the old one, which means that the software written 25 years ago can (mostly) still be run on the new one today. Which is also something that we are so used to that we hardly notice it, but is a very important feature. Hang on to your open architecture, kids... if they ever take that away, you'll be paying a heck of a lot more.

And one more... the modern machine consumes only about 10W in normal operation, I've measured it with a power meter. That year 2000 PC probably burned around 80-100W, or more, by comparison. Which makes a big difference if you're running 1000 of them across your company.

It would be fascinating to know the factory gate price, and the factory BOM; I wonder how much Intel sells the N100 for in quantity. The industry in south china appears to be split between a group of companies that specialize in making the motherboards, and another group of firms that design and build the finished units, and then finally retailers, although often the assemblers themselves seem to retail the boxes directly. I've noticed that you can usually find 3 or 4 different label 'makes' on aliexpress, all selling similar looking machines, that have the exact same hardware spec, and obviously are being built using the same motherboard. The assemblers differentiate their products by the mix of components they put in the box and things like the level of bios customisation and support, the one I have actually has quite a good bios with lots of settings available. The motherboard in my "Soyo" branded machine comes from an oem called Weibu https://www.weibu.com/index.php?catid=16 , which looks like being a big OEM. So the final assembler designs the case, specs the box, buys in the motherboard and other components, and does the build, test and homologation (assuming they do that stuff!).

Which makes me wonder how much of the production is subsidised by their government, and to what extent these low-priced goods are being dumped on western markets, essentially at below the cost of production. That retail price I paid two years ago would be pretty much impossible for any western manufacturer to achieve. And I don't think it's down to labour costs now, since labour is only a small fraction of the build cost today, as most of the production is highly automated. It's a real shame there aren't any british firms making these, I'm sure we have the companies that could do it it if made business sense to do so. AFAIK there are no US or european manufacturers of these boxes either, perhaps Taiwan still make some, I don't know about South Korea. Even at this year's prices which are around double what I paid two years ago, I think a western manufacturer would struggle to make any real money on these kinds of products. So I can understand, to some extent, why IBM got out of that market, for example.

And I almost forgot... software! That box as sold comes with a full copy of the latest version of windows installed. When I bought it I looked up the retail price of the equivalent version of windows, say if I had wanted to build my own machine and install windows on it... and I think it cost almost as much as the price of the whole finished mini-pc. So Microsoft are in there somewhere too, they must have done a deal with the south china firms to allow this to be shipped with a valid copy of windows. I'm pretty sure they're not installing pirated versions of windows like they did in the old days, it all looks fully legit. So that's another part of this picture; it's all pretty remarkable. Of course freebsd went onto mine as soon as I got it. :-) We are so used to this kind of progress that we don't notice it until you actually sit down and figure it out. There has certainly been very big changes in PC technology since the year 2000.
 
25 years ago... 2001 ?
what couldn't do?
Kubernetes and other cloud services, watch HD streaming, fast storage drives, bluetooth 1.0 was released 1999, first commercial Logitech BT keyboard and mouse devices in 2002 and first Sony BT headphones got release in 2004 so I would say BT devices.
Browse the internet in a laptop at the beach or in a park as there's no mobile data that time, I mean fast and at an affordable price. There was mobile data already, of course, but it was so limited and slow, not everyone could afford it.
 
blackbird9 said:
I hardly use my printer or scanner today, not very often. The laser printer cartridge lasts for years. Everything is softcopy now... that's another thing that has changed from 25 years ago.
Click to expand...
I got a color laser printer with scanner because of that. Every once in a while I want to be able to print something.

But, the built in document scanner is fairly good at taking stacks of papers and scanning them. I just wish that it was smart enough to be able to do both sides. I had to use awk and xargs to rename the files so that the fronts started with sequential odd numbers and the back started with sequential even numbers.
 
That's one thing I would like, a sheet feeder. Mine is only the base model, I have to put each sheet in by hand to scan it. But even if I had one, it probably wouldn't get used much.
 
bgavin said:
Many years ago I spoke at a chamber of commerce event about malware.

A heckler asked me why Apple only had 5% of the malware. I relied because Apple had 5% of the market.

Windows has the huge majority of the market so the vendors write for windows. Apps and drivers.

I avoid using UEFI on machines that have it because I have no need for it at all.
Click to expand...
Comparing Mac to anything is a bit insencere.
Making OS run on few types of hardware is easy mode.
I bet if FreeBSD or Linux had that
a] 90% of problems would go away
b] It would be crazy efficient - it already is waaay more efficient than MAC or Windows in most cases, despite driver challenge
 
blackbird9 said:
Very true. I bought my current small N100 minipc for just over 100 GBP a couple of years ago, direct from shenzhen. It had 16GB RAM, 512GB SSD, gigabit ethernet, wifi, bluetooth, build-in soundcard, graphics hardware support for up to three 4K monitors(!!), built-in usb hub, and a 4-core cpu that I found I could compile a kernel on in about the same time as a 2010-era xeon, which is to say, pretty good. That spec would have been a monster machine in 2000, if you could even buy one that powerful back then. I think I paid something like 130 GBP for the new one, including shipping to UK; whereas the 2000-era machine would have cost thousands. Absolutely astonishing, if you stand back and think about it. Of course this is a tiny box by comparison with no expansion slots etc, but it's still very impressive compared to the year 2000 PC. Unfortunately the prices seem to have doubled over the last year, I looked up how much they cost a couple of months ago and it's more than double what I paid two years ago.

But compared to how much you had to spend to get a pc in 2000... its a drastic change, especially if you think of it in terms of the number of hours you have to work to buy one. And the difference to an original 1983 PC-AT with it's 10 MB hard drive, 640k dram, and 286 cpu, is stark.

It's gone from this...
View attachment 27455
to this...
View attachment 27456
... and the new one is much more powerful, and with greater capacity, than the old one.

So... what has enabled this change? Shrinking lithography geometries, achieved by massive invesment in the production technology by companies like ASML, TSMC, the dram and flash manufacturers, and we have got to give some credit to Intel, coz' it's still an Intel cpu that is at the heart of it, and indeed the architecture and reference design will all come from Intel (and perhaps microsoft has some input), IBM is mostly out of the picture now, since they dumped their PC divison. I tried to find a spec for the number of transistors in the N100 SoC, I can't find the number published anywhere, but it would not surprise me if it's of the order of 5-10 billion transistors on the chip. The real magic, then, is the production technlogy, that permits a chip like that to be economically manufactured, with a high enough yield, permitting it to be sold at a low enough price, such that that the machine itself can be profitably retailed for just over 100 GBP.

Another observation is that the amount of material in the thing is much smaller than the 2000-era PC, which means less junk ultimately going into landfill, which can only be a good thing. Hopefully the spoil-heap and chemical pollution arisiing from the minerals and hydrocarbons they had to mine and refine to build the thing is also much smaller, along with the energy consumed in the manufacturing process.

Another remarkable feature that hardly ever gets mentioned is that the new one is backwards compatible to the old one, which means that the software written 25 years ago can (mostly) still be run on the new one today. Which is also something that we are so used to that we hardly notice it, but is a very important feature. Hang on to your open architecture, kids... if they ever take that away, you'll be paying a heck of a lot more.

And one more... the modern machine consumes only about 10W in normal operation, I've measured it with a power meter. That year 2000 PC probably burned around 60W-80W, or more, by comparison. Which makes a big difference if you're running 1000 of them across your company.

It would be fascinating to know the factory gate price, and the factory BOM, I wonder how much Intel sells the N100 for in quantity. The industry in south china appears to be split between a group of companies that specialize in making the motherboards, and another group of firms that design and build the finished units, and then finally retailers, although often the assemblers themselves seem to retail the boxes directly. I've noticed that you can usually find different 3 or 4 label 'makes' on aliexpress, selling similar looking machines, that have the exact same hardware spec, and obviously are being made from the same motherboard. The assemblers differentiate their products by the mix of components they put in the box and things like the level of bios customisation and support. The motherboard in my "Soyo" branded machine comes from an oem called Weibu https://www.weibu.com/index.php?catid=16 , which looks like being a big OEM. So the final assembler designs the case, specs the box, buys in the motherboard and other components, and does the build, test and homologation (assuming they do that stuff!).

Which makes me wonder how much of the production is subsidised by the government, and to what extent these low-priced goods are being dumped on western markets. That retail price would be pretty much impossible for any western manufacturer to achieve. And I don't think it's down to labour costs now, since labour is only a small fraction of the build cost today, as most of the production is highly automated. It's a real shame there aren't any british firms making these, I'm sure we have the companies that could do it it if made business sense to do so. AFAIK there are no US or european manufacturers of these boxes either.
Click to expand...

What will happen in next 25 years?
FSD (cybercab), Ai and robots aside, what PC technology would you like to emerge?

Me:
  • Long term storage in crystals (a few CDs just went bad on me and cloud can't be trusted, especially with ClawBots running there under root)
  • Starlink in mobile phones (mobile providers are getting too greedy)
  • or better yet, Reticulum/LoRa parallel options
  • Microkernel OS for mobile phones - drivers in userspace => more options than Android and iOS, which are tightening the space by day
  • Mobile phones which are smaller like they used to be - not everybody has a handbag to put it in - I would be OK wearing it folded around my wrist as thin gauntlet.
  • E-INK - one company makes the base tech and probably has the copyright too. My (super-expensive) Eink watches last 20 days on charge.
  • Small Battery banks which can charge and output without switching => cheap micro UPS for my Rapsberry.
  • Low wattage NPU chips with ton of cheap memory to run local models capable enough to control and program smart home appliances and itself.
  • Graphene coating for fiber cables or something- hate to change the cabling every time cleaning lady goes over them with vaccuum.
 
I actually wonder how close we are to putting the whole thing, that is currently a small motherboard, onto a single SoC; cpu, gpu, sound chip, usb, network, power controller, configuration eeprom, glue logic, and the DRAM, say 16GB. Then you just plug in the mass storage and you're done.

Bascially, put everything you can see on both sides of a small mobo, like this, along with the DRAM chips that are mounted on the back of it, onto a chip, or at least, into a single package. It might not be that far off.
Perhaps there's an intermediate stage where you integrate the whole motherboard, except for the dram, leaving that for a following generation.

1790590210114.png


Apple have been moving towards DRAM integration with the M-series, although I believe they still integrate multiple dies into one package in their processors, rather than having the whole thing on a single die.

The next limiting factor after that would be sockets, connectors and cables; so another major jump would be video across the air, as is currently done with low-bandwidth devices like keyboard, mouse and more recently audio; so you eliminate all connectors and cables, apart from power. Or perhaps you don't need to do that if you build the thing into the monitor.

Perhaps the one remaining separate part you would need would be the wireless adapter, because of the RF electronics. And perhaps some power supply components, because of heat dissipation. It will be interesting to see how it develops over the next 10 years.
 
blackbird9 said:
I actually wonder how close we are to putting the whole thing, that is currently a small motherboard, onto a single SoC; cpu, gpu, sound chip, usb, network, glue logic, and the DRAM, say 16GB. Then you just plug in the mass storage and you're done.. Apple have been moving towards something like that with the M-series, although I believe they still integrate multiple dies into one package in their processors, rather than having the whole thing on a single die. The limiting factor then would be sockets and connectors, so another major jump would be video across the air as is currently done with low-bandwidth devices like keyboard and mouse, so you eliminate all connectors apart from power. It will be interesting to see how it develops over the next 10 years.
Click to expand...
...until we find out that even the non-ionizing radiation is still creating enough havoc with our dendrites.
And the reason everyone is so miserable for the last 100 years is due to prevalent extra electromagnetic waves bouncing all around :)
 
It hasn't stopped them in the past! Yes, sitting right next to yet another small microwave transmitter might not be such a great idea. Perhaps you won't notice yourself slowly getting progressively more stupid, as your braincells cook, while the intelligent AI personal assistant running on the PC in front of you, lets you outsource them. That sure sounds like a recipe for building dependency, too, consumer lock-in; the manufacturers are going to love this. 😂
 
There must be a rule of diminishing returns that applies here too. So you've got the price down from 1980's $10000 to 2000's $1000 and then to $100 now. What is the economic incentive for reducing the retail price further to $10? At what point does it hit a wall where people, even in government subsidised China, say its not worth going further? Send your answers on a postcard... :-)
 
blackbird9 said:
It hasn't stopped them in the past! Yes, sitting right next to yet another small microwave transmitter might not be such a great idea. Perhaps you won't notice yourself slowly getting progressively more stupid, as your braincells cook, while the intelligent AI personal assistant running on the PC in front of you, lets you outsource them. 😄 That sure sounds like a recipe for building dependency, too, consumer lock-in, the manufacturers are going to love it 😂
Click to expand...
I used to spend time in Faraday cages (before tech was running there) and I can report no change in mood or IQ.
Having or not having sex previous night and proper nicotine fill had greater impact on both.
Speaking of nicotine usage. Maybe it is not coincidence the Renaissance started with the import of tobacco. And the best engineers I knew where smoking like chimneys. My best ideas also coincide with cigarette in hand.
 
My first PC was in 1989. The hardware didn't fascinate me; the software did because it could help with my office work. This was the aim for 25 years: changing the OS and software.

Windows 95 was an amazing improvement until I found Linux in 1996. In 2011, GNOME extensions provided the direction I had been looking for, allowing to select helpful tools and apps to improve and speed up the work. The final discovery, in 2019, was FVWM, which provides an endless platform for creating the right tools without the usual Desktop Environments' slowness and rigidity.

What is still missing after 25 years is an efficient and easy-to-find file manager.
 
Hmm, I'm not convinced about the nicotine effect. Some of the best engineers I've known, have enjoyed a few beers in the evening though! 😄
And then in SV I heard they have a fad for 'microdosing' all kinds of junk.. I've never tried any of that stuff. Coffee is the drug of choice. :cool:
 
blackbird9 said:
There must be a rule of diminishing returns that applies here too. So you've got the price down from 1980's $10000 to 2000's $1000 and then to $100 now. What is the economic incentive for reducing the retail price further to $10? At what point does it hit a wall where people, even in government subsidised China, say its not worth going further? Send your answers on a postcard... :-)
Click to expand...
You can dish out branded PCs as gifts then for marketing purposes.
Like they do with USB sticks now (or until recently).
256GB as a marketing prop? Are you kidding me? I used to clean cars to save for few 1.44MB floppy disks.
 
blackbird9 said:
Hmm, I'm not convinced about the nicotine effect. Some of the best engineers I've known have enjoyed a few beers in the evening though! 😄
And then in SV I heard they are 'microdosing' all kinds of junk.. I've never tried any of that stuff. Coffee is my drug of choice! :cool:
Click to expand...
Besides afternoon nap :] , the best hack for productivity I found is circumventing Ego(fear essentially) generated inner chatter & Co.
It can be achieved by entering so called flow state when focusing on tech problem or hurling yourself down the dangerous road (RL or Video game) but it is rather difficult, fragile and not really necessary.
Simple Zen is faster and more lasting.
 
rasat said:
My first PC was in 1989. The hardware didn't fascinate me; the software did because it could help with my office work. This was the aim for 25 years: changing the OS and software.
Click to expand...
I don't think software has seen anywhere near the same rate of improvement as hardware, over the last 25 years. There have not been the same generational leaps in software that I can see in hardware. Maybe it will come though, with AI. Then again... software is a much harder problem to crack. Although maybe I'm not being fair to the hardware engineers!
 
DanielBowman said:
Besides afternoon nap :] , the best hack for productivity I found is circumventing Ego(fear essentially) generated inner chatter & Co.
It can be achieved by entering so called flow state when focusing on tech problem or hurling yourself down the dangerous road (RL or Video game) but it is rather difficult, fragile and not really necessary.
Simple Zen is faster and more lasting.
Click to expand...
I remember a few times, playing simple repetitive games like asteroids... subjective sense of time passing kind of disappears, and when you finally stop playing, its like your mind has had a big rest and feels clearer. Somehow, occupying your brain playing the game gives your mind a rest, almost like sleep. I remember thinking it was interesting at the time, I guess there's some cognitive thing going on. Then again, sleep is pretty good too. I've definitely had the experience of waking up and the solution to some hard problem I've been working on, has popped into my head, and somehow my mind has been working on it while I've been asleep. It's quite interesting.
 
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