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

blackbird9 said:
Both of those are much faster (and also quite a lot cheaper, especially Romania) than what I'm getting here. I get download speed about 50-60 mbps and upload is only around 9 kbps, and that costs me around 27 GBP a month, so it's really not very good. There's not much I can do about it unfortunately, I'm waiting for full fibre to be installed in my area, until then that's about as good as I can get. I still have copper to the house and it's probably all old cabling that's been in the ground for decades. I know some other people living around ten miles away have got fiber to the house now, but the telecomms company hasen't got around to putting fibre in my area yet. Perhaps that's one penalty of living outside of a big city.
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StarLink would make sense for you then?
 
natterangell said:
I pay 85 EUR for 150/150 fiber, so someone is cleary getting much better deals. No other options where I live.
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But you pay like half that for one scope of ice cream too, lol. My biker friends went on trip to Norway. One stop at ice cream parlor almost bankrupted the whole mission.

Symmetrical line, hmmm. The upload is neat feature.

Disregard our Romanian friend covacat numbers. They still believe they live in Free market capitalism...and even ISPs are playing along.
 
ralphbsz said:
At the systems layer (underneath applications, meaning operating system, networking, and storage), the story of the last 25 years has been "democratization", with technologies (such as described above, plus high-speed networking and TCP/IP) becoming available to both the masses of individuals end devices and small servers, and to farms of small servers forming what today we call "the cloud".
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Exactly, that was my point. These technologies are not necessarily new. What changed over the last 25 years is that they became practical and affordable on commodity PCs for a much wider audience.

RAID controllers certainly existed in the 1990s, but they were relatively expensive, and RAID is not ZFS. Modern ZFS provides capabilities that a typical 25-year-old RAID controller did not provide.

The same applies to virtualization. It existed long before, but not as a practical commodity-PC technology. Once x86 hardware virtualization support became available in mainstream Intel processors, virtualization became something ordinary for PC users.
 
natterangell said:
I pay 85 EUR for 150/150 fiber, so someone is cleary getting much better deals. No other options where I live.
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Here in Estonia, I pay roughly the same amount per month, but that includes 400/400 fiber, TV service with recording, and two mobile phone plans and an extra IP phone. The fiber itself costs EUR 31, although it would be more expensive if purchased as a standalone service.

The fiber service is actually very good, with extremely low latency and full IPv6 support. A full gigabit connection over the same fiber costs EUR 56. The operator also offers a 2.5 Gbps plan for EUR 95, but that would require me to replace my router (and network adapter in my computer).
 
natterangell said:
Haha, yes, we pay through our nose. Starlink is actually half the price. But I'd lose my static IPv4 and get much slower uploads from what I gather.
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Personally, I think IPv4 has outlived its usefulness. Here, I even have to pay extra for a static IPv4 address, while IPv6 addresses are automatically static.

I hope IPv4 will eventually disappear altogether. I already have a few virtual machines that are IPv6-only, and I'm quite happy with how well that works.
 
Argentum said:
Personally, I think IPv4 has outlived its usefulness. Here, I even have to pay extra for a static IPv4 address, while IPv6 addresses are automatically static.

I hope IPv4 will eventually disappear altogether. I already have a few virtual machines that are IPv6-only, and I'm quite happy with how well that works.
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Yeah. I run a IPv6 dual stack. I've been considering the consequences of hosting my webserver on IPv6 only.
 
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