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

fahrenheit said:
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
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This is sort of what I mean. As I remember, you could play Quake in 2001. Also, 21 inch monitors were not uncommon. Two 21 inch monitors was not that bad a setup.
In 2001, I used a browser, maybe some word processor, and spreadsheets. Got email. I watched videos, listened to music, maybe played a few games: quake, doom, wolfenstein. Google was out.
I played with Linux and FreeBSD back then, but I don't think either was really great for a desktop back then.

There was no roku or dlna back then. There is that. Although even that was around by 2010. We also had flat screens, usb, and hdmi, by 2010. Even phones are not that much different than from 2010.

Google AI "Gemini" did not exist, but I think that would work on a 25 year old box, and a 25 year old OS.

Computers are far more powerful now. But for all the frantic pace of hardware improvements, and software upgrades, I still do about the same things.
 
MG said:
Storing 50MB on not 20 floppy disks was progress.
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Remember always the last one was somehow corrupted. Floppy disks didn't like tram drives.
But the pain of setting the reading head in cassette player on Sinclair or Commodore or Atari was really bad. Every cassette had different position to read it correctly. Experience folk just put epoxied glue on the screw and refused to budge for anyone.
 
I could not draw such complex drawings in CAD. It was simply not possible with the hardware. Now I can do it even through linuxulator and it's still fast.
But yeah, fundamentally not that much has changed. Mobile computing took over the consumer market, but big ol computers are fundamentally the same, only more powerful.
 
So.. what everyone forgets about purchasing PCs 25 years ago is... back then they were building "WINDOWS O/S ONLY" PC machines.

So the PC network cards, PC graphic cards, etc would (NEVER WORK) for FreeBSD, Linux, etc because the software drivers for the internal cards were proprietary and bolted only on to the Windows O/S. These "Windows only" machines were "cheap" -- aka the trick was you were LOCKED IN to whatever Windows version was delivered with the PC, but the vendor sold them to you at a cheap price.

So get around that, I used to build my own PC's from the ground up (case, motherboard, ram, hard drives, CD/DVD, etc) -- and (my) final box cost $$$$ was A LOT more than I would have paid for a Windows Only machine, but my self build worked great and I could run "other O/S" on it.

In particular with FreeBSD - I always put the latest NVidia card into the self built PC and it always worked ! NVidia has always been a great supporter of FreeBSD.
 
Speaking of music again - sample playing on a PC wasn't possible.

The sample player for Piano was the Kurzweil keyboard, which had lots of custom chips and very clever sample playing. Of course you could always buy a Synclavier or a Fairlight CMI - which were about $100k.

Today you still need more than average RAM but otherwise a vanilla PC or Mac can play who symphony orchestras from samples.
 
CShell said:
So.. what everyone forgets about purchasing PCs 25 years ago is... back then they were building "WINDOWS O/S ONLY" PC machines.
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I've been using OS/2 before I've switched to FreeBSD (actually, I've tried all RELEASES of FreeBSD from 2.1.6 or 2.2.6 through switching to track stable branch with src upgrading), and on both platforms, it's hard to know "does this card run on {OS/2|FreeBSD|anything non-Windows}".

So my strategy was to confirm chips supported by {OS/2|FreeBSD|anything non-Windows I want to try} and find common ones, then, looks for the cards that states using the chip. Yes, it IS a kind of gamble.

When Nifty Serve (something like CompuServe in Japan) still existed, informations about what worked and what didn't was actively exchanged between OS/2 users in Japan including myself. And anyone drew "non-working" cards were called Hitobashira (人柱, mean, victims) and been thanked, as everyone read the person's post can avoid the non-working cards.

And specific for GPUs, as all manufacturers started aggressively adding new mandatory-to-run features, out-of-TIME drivers no longer workable for newer GPUs, thus, made AMD/Intel GPUs quite hard to use, but NVIDIA alone almost continuously (there were relatively narrow unfortunate periods years ago) providing their driver, in sync with Linux versions (but without non-graphics-specific parts like native CUDA) without delay. This is why I contribute to maintaining ports for the drivers as early as I can.

Hope AMD and Intel to do the same for FreeBSD!
 
T-Aoki Well of course but he said you couldn't do that with Windows PCs and I'm showing that's not true. In fact, that machine sits in my basement and earlier this year still boots into 9.0
 
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