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

[DanielBowman]

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.

StarLink would make sense for you then?

 

[DanielBowman]

I pay 85 EUR for 150/150 fiber, so someone is cleary getting much better deals. No other options where I live.

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.

 

[Argentum]

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".

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.

 

[Argentum]

I pay 85 EUR for 150/150 fiber, so someone is cleary getting much better deals. No other options where I live.

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]

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.

 

[Argentum]

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.

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.

 

[natterangell]

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.

Yeah. I run a IPv6 dual stack. I've been considering the consequences of hosting my webserver on IPv6 only.

 

[blackbird9]

StarLink would make sense for you then?

Too pricey, right now. I'll sit tight and wait for the fibre install. Or possibly 5G, whichever comes sooner.

 

[EternalBeing]

...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

Very rarely do I run into anyone who even acknowledges anything along this line. Our bodies "emit" an electromagnetic field. In times past, it was recognized as an "aura". Sadly a lot of people seem to tie a religious connotation to it from what I've experienced; as well as surmised from discussions.

Its called a "bio-field" in modern scientific terms. This entirely ties into the tech that is coming out now, if not emerging soon. If anyone is skeptical, please check it out for your self, because up until this time last year, I didn't know anything about any of this. I want this to remain relevant to the thread, so I'll briefly mention wireless communications as it ties into this subject and the corresponding IEEE standardization and carry on afterwards.

IEEE 802.15.6 was ratified in 2012, in case anyone does want to check that out. "Human Body Communications" (HBC) is another searchable term. It's all being marketed (primarily) towards security applications and "wireless health-care" it seems. Bioelectromagnetics "is a branch of science studying the interaction between electromagnetic fields and biological entities." (All Wikipedia Links)

What comes to my mind in regards to the thread, is that you couldn't (easily) go your entire day (unless you were tethered to your desk) connected to the internet; Or be exposed to certain frequency bands all day because these bands (Certain/most WIFI bands, LTE/4G/5G) were not in wide usage, nor even standardized 25 years ago. Seeing as one thing that most people do with their pocket-PC (phone) today "is be connected to the internet 24/7", id say that is a drastic change; Considering that, as people have previously mentioned, depending on location/country, connection was scarcely available. Everything today seems to be dependent upon being connected 24/7, and its frustrating to me personally, primarily due to the data that is being generated by these BAN devices and how much information can be gathered by these things being on and connected to a human body all day and night.

On the other hand, I do wonder how much damage this excessive exposure to artificial (because all things are electromagnetic) EMF waves does to our biology in the long term... Its one of those things that keeps me up at night now-a-days...

Hope none of the links are against the forum rules (as I am new here). If anyone is actually interested, a good book on the EMF exposure subject is "The Invisible Rainbow" by the late Arthur Firstenburg. (Archive . org link).