12 ms·

I’d say things got “boring” quite a while after the pentiums. All the peripherals like the cd burner got faster. Memory got larger and faster. Video got substan

I’d say things got “boring” quite a while after the pentiums. All the peripherals like the cd burner got faster. Memory got larger and faster. Video got substantially faster. Network went from 10mbits to 1gb over time. Smarter power management started to exist. USB came online. Wi-Fi started to exist. I’d say things got “boring” after the clock wars. Now says the clock is basically the same as it was 5 or even 10 years ago (though massively more parallel, etc). Average memory size seems to have peaked around 16gb (though substantially faster and more parallel). Average disk size has remained about the same (though way, way, way faster thanks to SSD’s). Also things have gotten much smaller and more energy efficient. Back in the day your motherboard had all kinds of discrete shit on it. The board was huge in comparison to a modern board. Note: it’s been a good 10 or 15 years since I’ve built a desktop PC from parts… I kinda miss it.

deckard1 4y ago
Boring maybe. But I'll take the sheer joy of plugging in a random USB device and having it just work over the absolutely pain it was dealing with serial and parallel ports and I/O addresses, DMA channels, IRQ conflicts, etc. And everything talks WiFi today. It's amazing. I have 64GB on my main machine. I can run (virtual) machines within machines! That's a goddamn miracle if you ask me. I bought some cheap HDMI capture stick for $10! I plug it in to USB and the thing just works. And in Linux. How?! I had Hauppauge WinTV PCI capture card in the late '90s and that thing barely worked (with their awful proprietary drivers and software) in Windows, never mind Linux support. > The board was huge in comparison to a modern board. The ATX form factor is still the most popular. Mini ITX is around today, but based on the fact that vendors only make a few models compared to their ATX selection tells me most builders still use ATX. I guess the AT form factor was larger, but ATX has been around since '95 or so.

deckard1 4y ago

Boring maybe. But I'll take the sheer joy of plugging in a random USB device and having it just work over the absolutely pain it was dealing with serial and parallel ports and I/O addresses, DMA channels, IRQ conflicts, etc. And everything talks WiFi today. It's amazing. I have 64GB on my main machine. I can run (virtual) machines within machines! That's a goddamn miracle if you ask me. I bought some cheap HDMI capture stick for $10! I plug it in to USB and the thing just works. And in Linux. How?! I had Hauppauge WinTV PCI capture card in the late '90s and that thing barely worked (with their awful proprietary drivers and software) in Windows, never mind Linux support. > The board was huge in comparison to a modern board. The ATX form factor is still the most popular. Mini ITX is around today, but based on the fact that vendors only make a few models compared to their ATX selection tells me most builders still use ATX. I guess the AT form factor was larger, but ATX has been around since '95 or so.