Ah, the wonderful world of balanced and effective configurations from the bottom of the barrel PCs... So much time, money and CO2 could be saved by another/bigger atick of RAM.
> So much time, money and CO2 could be saved by another/bigger atick of RAM.
I did eventually get a 256 MB stick of RAM.
iirc I was already out of high school at that point.
One point I don't hear being talked about too much
is how hopeful and stupid we were in the late nineties
and early two thousands.
We were supposed to have 10GHz processors by 2005,
or I mean mass market for consumers
by the end of the decade, at the latest?
To put things in perspective,
my parents practically never used the computer.
For all intents and purposes,
the computer was for a child to learn
by parents who were not very computer savvy
in a time when computers were advancing (or at least so we thought)
very rapidly.
> One point I don't hear being talked about too much is how hopeful and stupid we were in the late nineties and early two thousands. We were supposed to have 10GHz processors by 2005, or I mean mass market for consumers by the end of the decade, at the latest?
Sure, but look at the decade prior. I had a 486 DX-50 in 1992. Within a decade, we had processors clocked in the GHz. A decade after that, clock rates had pretty much stagnated as we have shifted to multiple cores. We saw something similar happen with memory capacity (huge jump in the late 1990's, and near stagnation over the past decade). The switch from hard drives to solid state drives actually resulted in a huge step backwards (in terms of capacity, though we got a huge bump in performance).
There has been progress with modern computers, but the benchmarks we used in the late 1990's are practically irrelevant these days.
>One point I don't hear being talked about too much is how hopeful and stupid we were in the late nineties and early two thousands. We were supposed to have 10GHz processors by 2005, or I mean mass market for consumers by the end of the decade, at the latest?
I think a lot of those predictions came from a world unconcerned with cores and threading.
The jump from sub ghz to 1 ghz (p2 to p3) came about suddenly, the jump from 1ghz to 3ish ghz came about suddenly (p3 to p4); and then things moved to prioritizing chip real estate for cores/threading/parallelism.
The chips we have now are great, but it would be damn nice to have a 10ghz core somewhere.
( I eventually upgraded my RAM before ditching the Presario, too, but I think it's because at the time I wanted to play Dark Age of Camelot without lagging to death in team fights.)
I don't understand this sentiment from an HN user. It sounds like you wanted a 5-10x performance boost vs. what we had in 2000.
Today's CPUs are literally like 10-50x faster than CPUs of that era depending on how many cores you're using at once. Storage is an order of magnitude faster as well. Mission accomplished! Software is in general more bloated, so things don't always "feel" faster, but for raw computational tasks like e.g. video encoding they truly are orders of magnitude faster.
I've got plenty of complaints about how the industry has changed since then, but raw hardware performance certainly isn't one.
Not just cores and threading but implementation efficiency, which is a couple of orders of magnitude better today than it was in the late 90s.
Clock speeds were always more about marketing than actual performance.
There are a few power-user applications where a 10X to 1000X speed bump would be very welcome - mostly video, audio, and AI.
For example - if you generate/process audio at 32X or 64X oversampling you can eliminate all of the usual DSP and conversion artefacts, even for difficult processes like non-linear distortion.
But for most applications, most users have more cycles than they need.
> One point I don't hear being talked about too much is how hopeful and stupid we were in the late nineties and early two thousands.
If I aould be in tbe mood and stance I would reply again, but I for what it gives I'm really grateful for my parent who indulged in this thing, despite it being a total terra incognita for them.
long ago this 'category' was referred to as 'grandma gifts' by folks near me on the net : a computer that no one in their right mind would buy themselves, but seemingly everyone had received one from a distance grandma/aunt/uncle who themselves were clueless about computers so they hop in the car and just buy whatever is cheapest on the Circuit City (or equivalent) floor; generally they were Presarios/Inspirons/Pavillions/etc.
If you were real lucky you'd get a Sony VAIO; but fashion be damned it had the same crap specs as the rest of the grandma gifts.
