4 ms·

The 1990 through 2000 stand out to me as the biggest period of innovation and technical acceleration where it comes to PC. While the 80's certainly witnessed th

The 1990 through 2000 stand out to me as the biggest period of innovation and technical acceleration where it comes to PC. While the 80's certainly witnessed the birth and growth of the "personal computer", most of the computers in that decade were still 8086- and 8088-class machines, along with the barely-more-capable 80286 that didn't get popular until the late 80's. But in the 90's we went from 286 and 386 class machines to the scorching-fast 750MHz AMD Athlon. It was very depressing to sink a few thousand dollars into a new mid-range system, only to see it worth about half that a year later. And a doorstop 3 years later. Now we're back to the point where almost any computer you buy will do a good job for common tasks (i.e. not gaming and crypto mining) for at least 5 years or more. My current machine is a 7-year-old laptop and runs all modern software just fine. Unthinkable just a couple decades ago!

bluedino 5y ago
Some people don't realize the 286 came out in 1982, 386 in 1985, and 486 in 1989. The 386 was still being used up until Window 95 came out. It could run on a 4MB 386 but anyone who did probably quickly upgraded to at the very least a 486/66, which still struggled even with 8MB. You really needed a Pentium, or a 100MHz 486 clone.
- midasuni 5y ago
  Windows 95 really struggled on my 486sx/25 with 4mb. Upgraded to a p100 shortly after and that was fine.
aksss 5y ago
Your 7 year old laptop does not run all modern software just fine. c'mon. It runs the software you feel comfortable asking it to run, but this whole comment board is suffused with people mistaking their stagnant demands for stagnant computing performance/software requirements. A 7-year old processor is somewhere around a haswell or broadwell, right? An i7 of that gen had a passmark score of like 950, whereas an i7 of current gen is about 1700. Even ignoring improvements in mobile graphics, power consumption, displays, and memory capacity, a modern laptop provides a completely different experience and level of capability than a 7-year old laptop. As I said in another comment that got voted down to hell and even flagged (for goodness sake) these comments about the adequacy of very old hardware probably tell us more about the owners' unchanging software tooling and work habits more than they convince us that technical advancement has come to a near standstill. WFH in 2020 required many people to add frequent VC on top of their normal workload. A 7 year old laptop would fully show its age if that normal workload was already pressing the laptop's boundaries. God help you if you wanted to add OBS into the mix. I can play an acceptable form of Assassin's Creed on my Tiger Lake laptop. I couldn't comfortably do that with my Skylake laptop. Examples and scenarios are legion. I'll use any resources I can get in a 13-14" mobile platform and then some.
- toast0 5y ago
  > stagnant demands for stagnant computing performance/software requirements I'm going to do mostly the same thing, although I'll certainly acknowledge hardware has gotten faster and more power efficient. It's not nearly the same growth rate as before, of course. But, as a grumpy old person, I don't see a whole lot of change in what people are doing with their computers. Yeah, a new one would be more powerful and often use less energy, but would it change what I can do? Newer games are a real thing, but can I spreadsheet faster? Does it make chatting better or just enable more bloat? I used to send animated gifs to friends with AIM in the late 90s on a pentium 75, and the gifs were really animated gifs. Somehow, a modern chat client needs a quad core machine. Maybe more/different VC stuff, but I usually run VC on a haswell chromebook with 2 cores, so that doesn't seem hard.
  - aksss 5y ago
    https://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=article&item=intel-haswell-icelake&num=7 https://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=article&item=intel-ha... Check out where the broadwell and haswell procs are on this plot relative to a 10th gen processor. You probably couldn't spreadsheet faster on an 11th gen, but you could have more workbooks open, drive a couple large hi-res monitors, do VC with OBS in the middle, while screen sharing, while running several other apps, and add in a few VMs/containers and an IDE on an 11th gen platform (e.g. XPS 9310), all of which you absolutely could not do on a Broadwell or even Skylake platform - I've tried. It's all about what your workload/requirement is, right?
    - Delk 5y ago
      You're not wrong about there being substantive performance improvements in recent CPU generations, or that workloads matter. However, the leaps in the 90's were great enough that you wouldn't have been able to run even the latest OS (or apps written for it) on mid-range 7-year-old hardware, at least not with any kind of comfort. I would have been almost outlandish to even try. Windows 95 should have theoretically run on a 386 from the early 90's, but I'm not sure it would have really been usable. In the late 80's you might have got a 286 -- not much luck running Windows 3.11 four or five years later on that. If you got a Pentium circa 1995, good luck running Windows XP or even Windows 2000 on it. Looking at the charts in the Phoronix article, the overall performance (geometric mean) approximately doubled from Broadwell to 10th gen. That's more than I would have expected based on how incremental the generation-to-generation changes appear, and it's certainly substantial if your workload involves any kind of heavy lifting. However, in the 90's, performance would have doubled every couple of years or so. Within a time frame similar to Broadwell to 10th gen, it would probably have more than quadrupled.

bluedino 5y ago

Some people don't realize the 286 came out in 1982, 386 in 1985, and 486 in 1989. The 386 was still being used up until Window 95 came out. It could run on a 4MB 386 but anyone who did probably quickly upgraded to at the very least a 486/66, which still struggled even with 8MB. You really needed a Pentium, or a 100MHz 486 clone.

midasuni 5y ago
Windows 95 really struggled on my 486sx/25 with 4mb. Upgraded to a p100 shortly after and that was fine.

aksss 5y ago

Your 7 year old laptop does not run all modern software just fine. c'mon. It runs the software you feel comfortable asking it to run, but this whole comment board is suffused with people mistaking their stagnant demands for stagnant computing performance/software requirements. A 7-year old processor is somewhere around a haswell or broadwell, right? An i7 of that gen had a passmark score of like 950, whereas an i7 of current gen is about 1700. Even ignoring improvements in mobile graphics, power consumption, displays, and memory capacity, a modern laptop provides a completely different experience and level of capability than a 7-year old laptop. As I said in another comment that got voted down to hell and even flagged (for goodness sake) these comments about the adequacy of very old hardware probably tell us more about the owners' unchanging software tooling and work habits more than they convince us that technical advancement has come to a near standstill. WFH in 2020 required many people to add frequent VC on top of their normal workload. A 7 year old laptop would fully show its age if that normal workload was already pressing the laptop's boundaries. God help you if you wanted to add OBS into the mix. I can play an acceptable form of Assassin's Creed on my Tiger Lake laptop. I couldn't comfortably do that with my Skylake laptop. Examples and scenarios are legion. I'll use any resources I can get in a 13-14" mobile platform and then some.

toast0 5y ago
> stagnant demands for stagnant computing performance/software requirements I'm going to do mostly the same thing, although I'll certainly acknowledge hardware has gotten faster and more power efficient. It's not nearly the same growth rate as before, of course. But, as a grumpy old person, I don't see a whole lot of change in what people are doing with their computers. Yeah, a new one would be more powerful and often use less energy, but would it change what I can do? Newer games are a real thing, but can I spreadsheet faster? Does it make chatting better or just enable more bloat? I used to send animated gifs to friends with AIM in the late 90s on a pentium 75, and the gifs were really animated gifs. Somehow, a modern chat client needs a quad core machine. Maybe more/different VC stuff, but I usually run VC on a haswell chromebook with 2 cores, so that doesn't seem hard.
- aksss 5y ago
  https://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=article&item=intel-haswell-icelake&num=7 https://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=article&item=intel-ha... Check out where the broadwell and haswell procs are on this plot relative to a 10th gen processor. You probably couldn't spreadsheet faster on an 11th gen, but you could have more workbooks open, drive a couple large hi-res monitors, do VC with OBS in the middle, while screen sharing, while running several other apps, and add in a few VMs/containers and an IDE on an 11th gen platform (e.g. XPS 9310), all of which you absolutely could not do on a Broadwell or even Skylake platform - I've tried. It's all about what your workload/requirement is, right?
  - Delk 5y ago
    You're not wrong about there being substantive performance improvements in recent CPU generations, or that workloads matter. However, the leaps in the 90's were great enough that you wouldn't have been able to run even the latest OS (or apps written for it) on mid-range 7-year-old hardware, at least not with any kind of comfort. I would have been almost outlandish to even try. Windows 95 should have theoretically run on a 386 from the early 90's, but I'm not sure it would have really been usable. In the late 80's you might have got a 286 -- not much luck running Windows 3.11 four or five years later on that. If you got a Pentium circa 1995, good luck running Windows XP or even Windows 2000 on it. Looking at the charts in the Phoronix article, the overall performance (geometric mean) approximately doubled from Broadwell to 10th gen. That's more than I would have expected based on how incremental the generation-to-generation changes appear, and it's certainly substantial if your workload involves any kind of heavy lifting. However, in the 90's, performance would have doubled every couple of years or so. Within a time frame similar to Broadwell to 10th gen, it would probably have more than quadrupled.