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

covacat said:
I had free NX too. it rocked. client was netbsd and server linux. for some reason the client did not work under freebsd
later i had the client on a 'lamp' iMac g4 (which i still have)
Click to expand...
Yeah I was running the client on a linux box at home at the time, I don't think I ever tried it on freebsd.
 
covacat said:
nx was a lot better than vnc or vanilla X. it was comparable or better than msft rdp
Click to expand...
Yes it was much better than vnc. It was a real x-server, not a screen-scraper. I think they implemented it as a nested x-server, from memory.. not certain now, it's a long time since I looked at it. If I do that kind of thing now I just use standard ssh X11 forwarding, and the broadband link is fast enough, it's like being on the lan. But there's probably less need to do that kind of stuff now, again, a lot of stuff that used to be standalone programs with guis got moved into webapps. That's actually another change, not so many people are writing gui's now, I think. If you need a graphical UI, you get someone to write it as a web app and embed a webserver. So the ubiquitous uptake of web technology is another thing that has changed over the last 20-25 years.
 
Yes, I remember something along those lines. The other really powerful feature (than the protocol compression) was the session management, that meant you could disconnect from an X session at one site, move to another site, reconnect and find all your X clients in the same state, so you could continue your work where you left off. In the same way as you would do in a text terminal with screen or tmux, but with a graphical desktop. Perhaps only the commercial version had the full session management capabilities. I have vague memories of trying to get it to work! It's a long time since I looked at that stuff :-)

I do remember the first time I got it to work, and running the remote machine's entire desktop in a fullscreen window on the home machine across the 512 kbps adsl link, and thinking it was f**king awesome 😄
 
The trick with VNC has always been to use a server/client combo that only refreshed what was necessary, combined with a plain color wallpaper and no wiggly stuff on the desktop. I got perfectly reasonable performance with UltraVNC against enlightenment e16 or something like windows 2000 on a 128 kbps uplink. 20 years later, VNC is still the sort of "always works" fallback option. Hell, I even use it today with bhyve to install VMs. no other technology I'm aware of has standardized the same way cross platform. But yes, freenx back then was miles better on what was then a "modern" KDE desktop or the like :)
 
blackbird9 said:
I'm still waiting for full fibre to the house here, the company (openreach in the uk) is slowly working there way around installing it in my region. The mobile network routers actually look quite useful although they are obviously slower than broadband, but it gives another option apart from the cable firms and tends to be cheaper. Starlink in the phone... haven't heard of anything like that here yet but it sounds expensive! And what kind of transmitter power do you need in the phone, to talk to a satellite in low-earth orbit rather than to a local 5G mast? We have 5G masts put in all over the place anyway so it's a bit hard to see where starlink would fit in, though I guess again in country areas without 4G/5G coverage, but not many people tend to live there, so not so many customers.
Click to expand...
StarLink in phone was more of a bluff on my part - the Customer Retention desk needs "excuse" to lower my bill. They did by 10-15Euros. Originally they wanted for me to pay more.
But we will get StarLink in phone one day, I am sure.
My morale got a little boost with Tesla FSD (not mine, I use tram) running around Prague for a week or so. It is doing very well.

I have (coax)cable to the flat but on the street it is fiber. The speeds (I have the smallest limit) are such that my old HDD was the weak link even going through old 1Gbit router.
However, despite having IPv6, they keep changing it, probably so that people still have to pay for static IP. DuckDNS might help but TailScale saved the day.

My friends living on outskirts have only WiFi. It is extremely cheap, very stable unless lightning hits it and the provider keeps improving the speeds without charging more. Even torrenting (linux ISOs) is OK while watching 4k youtube.
At least they don't have to worry about gypsies cutting the fiber while searching for copper.
 
DanielBowman said:
And I heard horror stories about USA internet. But to be fair, the distances are a bit different there.
Click to expand...
blackbird9 said:
According to this its $350 setup or $200 for the 'mini', then $50 a month for 100 Mbps service. That's actually not too bad, it's come down a bit.
starnetpros.com

How Much Does Starlink Cost in 2026? Equipment, Plans & Installation

Complete breakdown of every Starlink cost: equipment ($349), monthly plans ($50-$120), installation fees, and hidden costs most guides skip. Updated for 2026.
starnetpros.com starnetpros.com
Click to expand...
Dunno, this Starlink stuff is pretty much on par with what I'm getting / paying for with XFinity / Comcast in my area. And I hear that some newer commercial airliners have Starlink (or are in the process of getting outfitted with the hardware so that you can have Internet while in the air in the middle of the Pacific. If I look hard enough, I probably will dig up some horror stories about the reliability of Starlink...
 
walterbyrd said:
What can be done with a PC today, that could not be done 25 years ago?
Click to expand...

1. Running multiple OSes simultaneously (VMware Sphere/Workstation, Microsoft Hyper-V, Solaris zones).

2. Keeping your priceless data safe on a self-healing, bitrot-resistant storage (ZFS/ReFS).


Many activities that we do today were technically possible back then, but in practice proved to be completely ineffective, such as online backups, or watching videos online.

Also, it was cheaper (and faster) to visit a local store and buy genuine Windows disc, than to download a copy from Internet.
 
True, virtualisation was much less of a thing in 2000. I'm not sure if even qemu or virtualbox was available back then, I think those came along a bit later, and xen hypervisor. Nowadays, common everywhere. A lot more DRAM in the box now of course and cpus have hardware support for VM's.
 
I just got a quote from that company here for a 4G wireless router at home, it's 15 GBP per month, you have to sign up for a 2-year contract. That's about $20 US per month. Unfortunately I don't have 5G indoor coverage at my location so the 5G option is not available, a shame as that is much faster. The router they supply has a built-in ethernet switch. Probably (hopefully) the purpose-designed router has a bit better throughput and latency than using an old phone to do the same job. It's a ZTE router. For the UK that's not too bad a price, compared to the rest of the broadband market that runs around 30 GBP per month on average. They say you get around 35-40 mbps with 4G so its a bit slower, and it's shared bandwidth so it depends on how many other people are using it at the same time, so it can be slower at peak times. If it was 10 GPB/month I might be tempted to try it. It has one advantage though, you can take the router with you anywhere you go, so it makes moving house or going on holiday pretty easy, provided your're within range of a mast.

On the other hand... a couple of people I know in shanghai have got FREE 100 mbps home broadband, on all new fibre infrastructure, from china telecom. So the UK prices are definitely not cheap.
 
walterbyrd said:
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.
Click to expand...
One thing that was largely missing from commodity desktop computers 25 years ago was a ZFS filesystem.

ZFS added some genuinely important functionality that we now take for granted: snapshots, easy cloning, data integrity and zfs send/zfs receive for efficient replication and backups.

Interestingly, ZFS itself was introduced almost exactly 25 years ago, but that doesn't count as the typical personal computer. ZFS initially ran only on Sun systems, which were workstations and servers rather than PCs.

So while the basic things you do with a desktop computer haven't changed all that dramatically, the storage layer has gained some pretty significant capabilities since then.

Another major addition is virtualization on commodity desktops.

For example, FreeBSD's Bhyve first appeared in FreeBSD 10 in 2014, so it's only about 12 years old. Today, running multiple virtual machines on a desktop is almost routine, whereas this was certainly not a typical capability of a commodity PC 25 years ago. Hardware virtualization on Intel came out in 2005, this is just 21 years ago.

So I’d add desktop virtualization to the list alongside ZFS. Some of the most significant improvements are not only having more CPU, RAM and disk space, but about what the system can actually do with those resources.
 
blackbird9 said:
I just got a quote from that company here for a 4G wireless router at home, it's 15 GBP per month, you have to sign up for a 2-year contract. That's about $20 US per month. Unfortunately I don't have 5G indoor coverage at my location so the 5G option is not available, a shame as that is much faster. The router they supply has a built-in ethernet switch. Probably (hopefully) the purpose-designed router has a bit better throughput and latency than using an old phone to do the same job. It's a ZTE router. For the UK that's not too bad a price, compared to the rest of the broadband market that runs around 30 GBP per month on average. They say you get around 35-40 mbps with 4G so its a bit slower, and it's shared bandwidth so it depends on how many other people are using it at the same time, so it can be slower at peak times. If it was 10 GPB/month I might be tempted to try it. It has one advantage though, you can take the router with you anywhere you go, so it makes moving house or going on holiday pretty easy, provided your're within range of a mast.

On the other hand... a couple of people I know in shanghai have got FREE 100 mbps home broadband, on all new fibre infrastructure, from china telecom. So the UK prices are definitely not cheap.
Click to expand...
LandLine cable/fiber:
Screenshot_2026-10-01_23-16-54.png


Capital city. Fibers everywhere. Price: 18,5 EUR/Month including modem rental (whatever that is) in combo with phone.
Currently renegotiated the whole phone (unlimted but slowest, mostly 4G) and home Internet (no TV), speed see above, to total slightly under 40 Euro/month.
Probably gonna split the services and change operator on phone at least. If newcomers get much better deal, no need for loyalty. And me, loyal customer, needing to make 3 phone calls to shave pennies - I am insulted. If StarLink comes along or some shed boys manage to get wifi in to the valley, I will not even spit on current ISPs. They have a state protected gold mine and still are greedy.
 
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.
 
Argentum said:
One thing that was largely missing from commodity desktop computers 25 years ago was a ZFS filesystem.

ZFS added some genuinely important functionality that we now take for granted: snapshots, easy cloning, data integrity and zfs send/zfs receive for efficient replication and backups.
Click to expand...
RAID existed in rudimentary forms since the 70s and 80s. See VAXcluster, and Ken Oiuichi's parity-based RAID patent from the 80s. The term "RAID" was coined by Garth in 87 or 88. PC-based RAID cards were available in the 90s. But: few people used them for small and home systems.

File systems with snapshots existed in the 90s. The extreme example was Alistair Veitch's Elephant file system (which never forgets), which was in the mid or late 90s. Again, normal PC consumers were happy to have NTFS and ext2.

Argentum said:
Another major addition is virtualization on commodity desktops.
Click to expand...

That's another technology that took a slow start. Full-on virtualization is a product of the 60s, and IBM's VM operating system. Where every user gets their own operating system (called CP/CMS), and hundreds of users share one computer. Now in the 70s, that computer was physically huge, it took a mainframe to run VM. By the 90s, most of the big computer companies were selling some virtualization technology ... LPARs (IBM), Domains (Sun), and so on.

The real breakthrough here was Mandel Rosenblum's work: In the early 90s, Intel's x86 machines were taking over the world for personal and commodity computers. Everyone thought they could never be virtualized, because the instruction set was such a horrible mess. Rosenblum and his grad students proved "everyone" wrong, and turned that into a lot of money with VMware. Today Intel virtualization is everywhere.

Argentum said:
Some of the most significant improvements are not only having more CPU, RAM and disk space, but about what the system can actually do with those resources.
Click to expand...
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".
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top