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

MG said:
Never heard it. The content of magazinne shareware/shovelware cdroms in the 90's in Europe was unspecified adlib.or primitive sampled soundblaster "stream" tech. Was GUS really superior? What did it do better? I think this whole PC audio branch was a decline of what already existed on 8-bit computers.
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If I recall correctly, GUS started using a kind of "sound fonts", sampled audibles of musical instruments and so on, the earliest for internal sound cards (means, inside chassis of computers) of consumer grade PCs.
 
walterbyrd said:
There are some things, but really not that much. Especially if you are not a gamer.
The typical desktop today probably has, at least, 10X the CPU power, 20X the RAM, and 1000X the disk space.
How many mandatory upgrades since then? Especially if you have been running MacOS or Windows.
If you had high speed internet 25 years ago, there is probably not that much more you can do.
Just an OT random thought.
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Working with large spreadsheets or other CPU-intensive data.
Rendering/media processing.
 
bakul said:
IIRC GUS was much better than soundblaster -- cd quality audio, real instrument patches, hardware channel mixing (upto 32) etc.
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I'm no audio expert. I think the deciding property was the ability to process and output sound data with the highest possibie density to get close to real sound. Both Soundblaster and GUS were from before the time that a compuuter at home was capable of that but the progress of computer tech did the job. We no longer needed a complex synth algorithm to demonstrate a violin. Just play the sound at a detail density beyond human hearing capabilties.
 
BSDsEnjoyer said:
Working with large spreadsheets or other CPU-intensive data.
Rendering/media processing.
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I did both back in 1990s.

My artistic skills frankly sucked (they still do), but I had access to Adobe Premiere and Photoshop and Blender back then on my school's computers.

And I worked with .dbf files, too - they amounted to very large spreadsheets with thousands of rows, easy. Excel was capable of displaying close to 64k rows even back then.
 
astyle said:
My artistic skills frankly sucked (they still do), but I had access to Adobe Premiere and Photoshop and Blender back then on my school's computers.
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In high school I sometimes left study hall and went to a friend's multimedia class; I made a flash animation of stick guys fighting and hand-did every frame, and after a week that friend showed me some tool to automate easier stuff (like sword swinging down; I'd drag the sword down a bit next frame but the tool could interpolate it X frames).

I wasn't a fan of that tool and that was an early experience of manual vs automation (I liked manually doing the individual frames but the tool made it less personal/fun, albeit producing faster results and smoother animations). I continued the animation mostly manual but used the tool if someone was watching 😁


I missed MIDI output hardware when it was relevant (always had cheap onboard audio back then); SoundFonts and software synths are interesting nowadays, but the real Roland stuff seems like it'd be cool with differences between models
 
by the 2000s software emulation could play midi files with instruments samples on an ordinary cheap ms sound system clone.
also the earlier gravis boards sucked/were not that great in games because of weak sound blaster emulation
gravis the company was dead by 2000
 
covacat said:
by the 2000s software emulation could play midi files with instruments samples on an ordinary cheap ms sound system clone.
also the earlier gravis boards sucked/were not that great in games because of weak sound blaster emulation
gravis the company was dead by 2000
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I have a Gravis BlackHawk. It's super. But it has no yaw control.
 
early pc joysticks with analog variable resistors where utter crap (ones that connected to the db15 gameport socket )
i got a 2nd hand dreamcast in 2002 and lots of pirated games. also had an official sega steering wheel (no force feedback)
 
Starlink. I don't think there was any kind of low-cost satellite uplink/downlink available back in 2000. Probably there were military things available, or perhaps things for shipboard applications, but nothing like a cheap satellite groundstation you could set up to get an internet connection in remote areas, where you don't have any landline. There are isolated parts of the uk countryside that are still not cabled up, where people use starlink today.
Starlink is still not as cheap as broadband or 4G/5G routers here, but very useful if you live somewhere remote.

1790759061051.png


And in a similar vein, 4G and 5G networks, being able to use a smartphone as an access point, and dedicated routers using the mobile network. This is a common 4G router available here, for example; they can be very useful when you don't have a broadband connection available. The 5G ones are fast enough to provide a real alternative to broadband.
View: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=i1cyjljh-wg

Neither of those options were available back in 2000, you only had an internet connection where you had a landline phone line. So we now have other options to get online in more out-of-the-way places.

The whole smartphone area is much more developed now too. The first iphone was launched in 2007, and android came along some time after that. I think back in 2000 I had a dumb motorola phone, it's hard to remember. And of course tablets. So there's been a lot of change in the area of mobile devices. And going along with that... ARM are much larger now than they were in 2000, their low power processors have been a great success in that space. It remains to be seen whether ARM chips will get any mainstream presence in PC's, apart from Apple of course. 25 years has seen the evolution of multiple generations of semiconductors.

And, talking about hardware again, we have seen a lot of convergence of PC electronics with the kind of electronics used in smartphones, you really see this in modern ultra-thin laptops. This macbook air motherboard looks far less like a traditional PC motherboard and much more like a tablet or smartphone mainboard, for example. Whereas back around 2000, the tech was still somewhat separate, PC electronics still looked like PC's and phone electronics was somewhat different technology.
Screenshot_20260930_095433.jpg
 
blackbird9 said:
Starlink. I don't think there was any kind of low-cost satellite uplink/downlink available back in 2000. Probably there were military things available, or perhaps things for shipboard applications, but nothing like a cheap satellite groundstation you could set up to get an internet connection in remote areas, where you don't have any landline. There are isolated parts of the uk countryside that are still not cabled up, where people use starlink today.
Starlink is still not as cheap as broadband or 4G/5G routers here, but very useful if you live somewhere remote.

View attachment 27483

And in a similar vein, 4G and 5G networks, being able to use a smartphone as an access point, and dedicated routers using the mobile network. This is a common 4G router available here, for example; they can be very useful when you don't have a broadband connection available. The 5G ones are fast enough to provide a real alternative to broadband.
View: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=i1cyjljh-wg

Neither of those options were available back in 2000, you only had an internet connection where you had a landline phone line. So we now have other options to get online in more out-of-the-way places.

The whole smartphone area is much more developed now too. The first iphone was launched in 2007, and android came along some time after that. I think back in 2000 I had a dumb motorola phone, it's hard to remember. And of course tablets. So there's been a lot of change in the area of mobile devices. And going along with that... ARM are much larger now than they were in 2000, their low power processors have been a great success in that space. It remains to be seen whether ARM chips will get any mainstream presence in PC's, apart from Apple of course. 25 years has seen the evolution of multiple generations of semiconductors.

And, talking about hardware again, we have seen a lot of convergence of PC electronics with the kind of electronics used in smartphones, you really see this in modern ultra-thin laptops. This macbook air motherboard looks far less like a traditional PC motherboard and much more like a tablet or smartphone mainboard, for example. Whereas back around 2000, the tech was still somewhat separate, PC electronics still looked like PC's and phone electronics was somewhat different technology.
View attachment 27482
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You could do mobile data connections in the 1970s.
 
the satellites back then where geostationary and the rtt was close to 1s.
duplex shit was too expensive for enduser but there was a half duplex service where your uplink was dial-up or other ground service and downlink via sat link
the (hdx) system only supported linux (and probably windows).
was popular in internet cafes here back then

we had a city wide wifi service in the early mid to late 2ks but can't really remember the year
you need to pppoe over wifi and they used wpa enterprise
you could buy prepaid service which was cool (had it while switching provides)
 
covacat said:
the satellites back then where geostationary and the rtt was close to 1s.
duplex shit was too expensive for enduser but there was a half duplex service where your uplink was dial-up or other ground service and downlink via sat link
the (hdx) system only supported linux (and probably windows).
was popular in internet cafes here back then

we had a city wide wifi service in the early mid to late 2ks but can't really remember the year
you need to pppoe over wifi and they used wpa enterprise
you could buy prepaid service which was cool (had it while switching provides)
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Remember trying to edit a .bat file over satellite in Notepad on Windows over satellite. Gave up. Just uploaded the whole thing.

I remember people putting wifi antennas in to empty (obviously) tin cans of sausages for better gain.
I had internet only at work for a long time. Downloaded the SW, burned to CD or used floppy disks for html, later USB to bring it home.
There was no need. Banking was offline. Youtube non existent. Movies you ripped from borrowed DVD. And chatting was for girls and old people. Guys?
 
blackbird9 said:
According to this its $350 setup or $200 for the 'mini', then $50 a month for 100 Mbps service. That's actually not too bad, it's come down a bit.
starnetpros.com

How Much Does Starlink Cost in 2026? Equipment, Plans & Installation

Complete breakdown of every Starlink cost: equipment ($349), monthly plans ($50-$120), installation fees, and hidden costs most guides skip. Updated for 2026.
starnetpros.com starnetpros.com
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I told my mobile operator, when Elon puts StarLink in the mobile, they won't see me ever again. Effin triopoly here - Vodaphone, Tmobile and O2. Only good thing is thanks to communism our phone lines were not invested in for decades, so when digital era came, they just invested in the new stuff, so even phone lines had stable hundreds Mbits.
What I have seen in Belgium or Germany just made me sad. And I heard horror stories about USA internet. But to be fair, the distances are a bit different there.
 
I'm still waiting for full fibre to the house here, the company (openreach in the uk) is slowly working there way around installing it in my region. The mobile network routers actually look quite useful although they are obviously slower than broadband, but it gives another option apart from the cable firms and tends to be cheaper. Starlink in the phone... haven't heard of anything like that here yet but it sounds expensive! And what kind of transmitter power do you need in the phone, to talk to a satellite in low-earth orbit rather than to a local 5G mast? We have 5G masts put in all over the place anyway so it's a bit hard to see where starlink would fit in, though I guess again in country areas without 4G/5G coverage, but not many people tend to live there, so not so many customers.
 
I had a similar shower thought the other day on what I did on my computers 20 years ago (not 25), and frankly I did probably 90% the same things. I could connect to my ADSL connected home from work over VNC, start a BitTorrent download of "Lost" and play that directly on my TV when I got home via the Via C3 motherboard that my homeserver ran on. It was all DivX/Xvid back then, but I remember it as very enjoyable still. I'm a grown up now and work as a bureaucrat of sorts, not in IT. I think the most impactful change (apart from smartphones) was the advent of more efficient video codecs and enough bandwidth to cause the default mode of distance communication for humans over from voice to video. This hinges on faster networks, stuff like hardware decoding for h.264 and vastly more powerful GPUs. And the SSD did wonders to the perceived speed of workstations and laptops. Apart from video conferencing, 99% of my work is still done with a word processor and email. I'm not sure productivity is vastly different in my profession, to be honest.

EDIT: Oh, and web browsers! They're basically miniature operating systems at this point. The world wide web and the underlying technologies have changed massively.
 
Around 2005 I think I had a 0.5 mbps adsl router, I think that was the first, yes it was 512 kbps. It was a big upgrade from the 56k dialup us-robotics modem. I used to use freenx to do remote X11 desktop to work over that, which worked ok for 2D GUI, obviously not for things like video. Who remembers limewire... :-) . Rtorrent.. .yes I think that was around. Yes I agree, a lot of what I do today isn't so hugely different. What has changed is things like watching 4K streaming video, I couldn't do that in 2005. It's quite interesting seeing how it's evolved.
 
blackbird9 said:
Around 2005 I think I had a 0.5 mbps adsl router, I think that was the first, yes it was 512 kbps. I used to use freenx to do remote X11 desktop to work over that, which worked ok for 2D GUI, obviously not for things like video. Who remembers limewire... :-) . Rtorrent.. .yes I think that was around. Yes I agree, a lot of what I do today isn't so hugely different. What has changed is things like watching 4K streaming video, I couldn't do that in 2005. It's quite interesting seeing how it's evolved.
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Haha, freenx! Wow, did I curse a lot setting that up to work consistently. Obviously, things are a lot more frictionless now, as regards access to content. I do a lot of self hosting for my media stack, calendar, contacts, emails, photos, backups etc. I often wonder how many in the "self hosting community", if there really is such a thing, were digitally competent when broadband came along in its first iterations, and now take steps to regain a sense of control over the infrastructure because commercial offerings are increasingly an ad-driven AI hellscape in the form of smartphone apps and digital media consumption platforms.
 
They had a commercial version, called, I think 'NX', but my firm were too mean to buy it for me. Yes I had to fight with it to get it to work but it did more or less work. There were a couple of other free x-protocol compressors but freenx was the most effective. The session management (like 'screen' but in X) was the big selling feature along with the X protocol compression. I seem to remember I didn't get the session management working properly on freenx though, but the compression worked well enough to do a full remote kde desktop over the link. Although that was only on a 1024x768 monitor. I used to ssh into the work box from home, then run 'startkde' to run the whole desktop remotely. Doing that meant I could run all the custom gui tools remotely from my home machine. It was pretty cool at the time. Although even back then stuff was being migrated away from GUI's to the browser as webapps, I guess that's another big change that has happened, programs that would previously have been written as separate GUI's get moved into websites and accessed via a browser.
 
Nomachine NX, yes. They had that nifty web client of some kind. I believe it was an ActiveX plugin that worked with Internet Explorer. Never really got it to work. At least you used ssh, I'm sort of surprised I got away with all that unencrypted traffic back then over VNC and plain http and ftp without ever getting "hacked" to the best of my knowledge :)
 
I had free NX too. it rocked. client was netbsd and server linux. for some reason the client did not work under freebsd
later i had the client on a 'lamp' iMac g4 (which i still have)
 
Interesting I don't remember a web client, I used the X client which gave me the remote desktop in a window, a bit like a nested X server, well, that's probably what it actually was. It's scary to think that was 20 years ago. Yes I remember now nomachine was from italy I think. I think I remember trying vnc too but the latency was just too awful, you moved the vnc cursor and the remote widgets s-l-o-w-l-y responded, so then I tried a couple of other things and then came across the nx stuff.
 
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