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 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...
1790548561671.png

to this...
1790548601389.png

... 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 got to give some credit to Intel, coz' it's still an Intel cpu that is at the heart of it. I tried to find a spec for the number of transistors in the N100 SoC, I can't find the number published, 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 device 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 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.
 
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.
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top