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

W

walterbyrd

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.
 
cracauer@ said:
Running LLMs. Even if they existed back then you couldn't run them at home.
Click to expand...
Did they exist 25 years ago?

Honestly I think "nothing" But how well it runs on 25 year old hardware? That's a different story.
Think of the difference between running a batch job overnight to compile vs real time in an IDE.
 
And there's one thing the modern machine can't do. They've taken away my cup holder!

1790446197993.png
 
Display resolution is different. Graphics Card/memory of old would not be able to display this UHD , even if CPU could keep up.
Last 25 years were spoiled by the relatively cheap HW compared to programmers time. Resulting in very inefficient resource usage coding.
With incoming Ai coding as help or even senior, this can change. And maybe even flip - relatively more expensive HW and much cheaper coders. It might create efficient resource using programs like in the days of 64kB to max 4MB of RAM.
 
OK, a slightly more serious answer. Building any large project. Compiling any decent sized codebase, say a million lines of C, used to take an inordinate amount of time on the processors of 2000. Even if you built the biggest rack mount server you could and filled it up with the best chips, it was still as slow as a carrot walking across a field. And large and fast SSD's didn't exist back then, spinning rust was still the mainstay. Nowadays spinning rust is mostly a memory and SSD's give orders of magnitude better speed while using much less power. Then if you consider the increase in power of GPU's... another area that has seen huge improvments. It's more a question of 'how on earth did we do what we did, with the limited hardware of 25 years ago'. Much faster processors, vastly greater amounts of RAM in the box... modern machines make the pc's of 2000 look like toys by comparison.
 
Several audio processing things come to mind.

25 years ago you had DAWs, instruments (software synthesizers) and effects (filters).

But you could only use those that had minimal CPU usage. Today's instruments and effects are of a different class by way of having much more CPU at their disposal. u-He Zebra 3 would not have been possible to run 25 years ago even if you wrote the software.
 
blackbird9 said:
Watching <ahem> videos in 4K.
Click to expand...
Did they have digital videos in 4k 25 yrs ago?

I think there is a distinction between "can I run modern stuff on 25 yr old hardware" and "what modern stuff would 25 yr old hardware support"

Maybe doesn't sound like much, but to me it's the difference between playing Pong on Atari 800 systems and CoD on modern hardware. Both are games, but different requirements
 
Charlie_ said:
QUXGA (3840x2400) Matrox Parhelia "HR" 256 was released in 2003.
Click to expand...
I find this refreshing.
"25 years ago" is 2001.
How many here graduated college around 1986?
I've worked with people that were born after I graduated college.

Look at the definition of "antique" cars in most states. 25 yrs? In the US, Chrysler K-Cars (1970s) would be "antique" but growing up they were a piece of crap.
 
I remember seeing a demo of these IBM very high resolution (for the time) monitors. It required, I seem to remember, 4 matrox G450 graphics cards to drive it, each card drove one vertical strip that was 1/4 of the glass. The panel was a joint venture between IBM and Toshiba, I think, or possibly Sharp, from Japan, anyway. I remember the thing was about 3 inches thick and pretty heavy. I think they got used for things like medical imaging and space / remote sensing, but it was a commercial failure overall, of course it was super-expensive. However, that was just about the highest res monitor you could get back then. That was back when IBM was still a serious player in PC hardware.
en.wikipedia.org

IBM T220/T221 LCD monitors - Wikipedia

en.wikipedia.org en.wikipedia.org

Someone made a video review here
View: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V4plO00m6Gs
 
One of the problems with those huge monitors was you had to pull the desk away from the wall to accommodate the depth of the monitor. Or you ended up with just an inch or so of desk left at the front of the monitor. Yes those things weighed a ton.
 
blackbird9 said:
One of the problems with those huge monitors was you had to pull the desk away from the wall to accommodate the depth of the monitor. Or you ended up with just an inch or so of desk left at the front of the monitor. Yes those things weighed a ton.
Click to expand...
I used to borrow my parents color TV to play commodore games in color in my room. I had to haul it from living room to my room. I almost died - if I banged it on something our year budget would go out of the window. That TV was smuggled through West Germany by my father at great cost and personal risk - it was expensive there but extremely expensive for circumstances in our commie shithole.
 
mer said:
Did they have digital videos in 4k 25 yrs ago?

I think there is a distinction between "can I run modern stuff on 25 yr old hardware" and "what modern stuff would 25 yr old hardware support"

Maybe doesn't sound like much, but to me it's the difference between playing Pong on Atari 800 systems and CoD on modern hardware. Both are games, but different requirements
Click to expand...
Don't know in which resolution the renderings are done, but visual effects of the Matrix (released at 1999) is known to be rendered using 32 Dell Precision 410 Dual P-II/450 Processor systems running FreeBSD as the core CG Render Farm.

Maybe this workloads could be achieved by most powerful single "gaming" PCs with sufficient disk spaces.

But maybe cannot (with limitations of hardware resources) be finished using single 25 years old (newer than the ones used for the movie) PCs within time span the core CG Render Farm were allowed to finish the jobs.
 
In general terms I think we do most of the same things now that we did back in the early 2000's. I know I do. In broad general terms it was work and play. We can now do stuff with more pixels using less volume and some of this stuff is now faster (beach ball of doom, hourglass of doom, etc) others appear depressingly the same or worse (the internet is not objectively better).
As for arkanoid, tetris and even pong, yeah, still good :p
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top