5 ms·

It honestly wasn't during this period. in 2001, computers did not last as long as they do today, with performance doubling often every year to 18 months. Ask an

• derefr 4y ago
  You're talking about the period starting in 2001. I'm talking about the period ending in 2001. 2001 was a transition point from slow progress to the sort of performance-doubling progression you're thinking of. PCs running Windows 3.1 stuck around, doing what they do, until ~2002. People kept making games for DOS until ~2002! Then that all stopped. But someone planning a product for release in 2001, would tend to have been planning in mind of the previous era, not that new era. Except Apple, of course — as they tend to have their finger on the pulse of those sorts of changes (thus removing the floppy drive in the iMac, etc.) > If you didn't have CD-ROM in 2001, you literally couldn't buy or run most software, and again, CD-ROM had been standard in most pcs since around 96/97. While yes, this is true, most people didn't buy most software. I think you may have lived in a bit of a tech bubble. At the time, "retail-boxed PC software" was a thing only PC enthusiasts bought! In that era, outside of a few coastal US cities with great Internet connectivity, most home PCs were used permanently disconnected from the Internet, with only the software that came loaded by the OEM (which is why, to this day, OEMs still feel an obligation to do that.) This is also why > Microsoft Office 97 was last version to come with floppy disk release alongside the CD-ROM (46 floppies too...) ...because, if you look at PCs after 1996, they all had enough hard-drive space to ship with OEM-preinstalled copies of Microsoft Office. And they almost always did. But most people of that era weren't buying new PCs. Most people of that era still only had the same PC they bought possibly nearly-a-decade prior, to be the fancy electric typewriter for their kids' book reports. Because nothing was demanding quite yet for them to upgrade. Because they weren't keeping up with new software. It was a "cycle of stagnation", per se. It was only once Internet connectivity started improving in rural areas, and the web started developing multimedia killer apps with resource requirements that made old PCs feel slow, that the rest of the world started catching up, looking around, and wondering whether they indeed needed a new PC. (And even then, there was a lot of pushback, from a crowd who had up until that point got by with for years with the same first PC they ever bought; who was entirely unused to technology that changes out from under them. Especially when it was a teenager who wanted access to these killer apps — their parents often didn't get it. "Why do we need a new PC? The old one still works! This is like replacing a refrigerator that's still refrigerating!") In short, this is why everything other than the iPod, in this era, was still using parallel. Consumer electronics people knew that for every one Silicon Valley technophile who has home broadband, there were 100 teen girls in Kansas with no Internet running Windows 98SE, who might nevertheless be swayed to buy an MP3 player — perhaps to then load it with music ripped from tapes using the PC's line-in jack with a program (distributed on an accompanying floppy!) that does some awful kind of low-bitrate but low-CPU-usage streaming compression. It wasn't just that it took until 2003 for Apple to secure the IP rights necessary to launch the iTunes Music Store. It really just wouldn't have made sense in 2001. Too few people online to buy music to make sense of the licensing fees. But the adoption curve was clear (and clearly exponential); so Apple started work early, and got the deals done by 2003, when it would start being a profitable venture. Other companies, meanwhile — ones with large IP-rights-holders as partners — had tried the same thing years earlier! But those companies couldn't turn a profit. (At least outside of the few very special "even grandmas here are ahead of the rest of the world" markets of the time, like Japan.) > Ask anyone who lived this period To be clear, I'm probably older than you. I'm describing what I saw around me, at my house and my friends' houses and my school and my parents' offices and so forth, as someone who lived in a somewhat-rural area [town of ~50k people] from ~1995 until ~2007.
  • anthk 4y ago
    I'm from 1987, and born in Spain. Most DOS games (mainly shareware ones from magazines) were dead by ~1998-1999. Multimedia software exploded since 1996 even for multimedia CD's in Spanish, such as encyclopedias, cooking guides, video guides, tourist VR views, Trivia games and so on. No one mentally sane would develop for DOS in 2001. Period. By 1999 everyone who was a PC user had a CD drive for it, at least to install Windows 98 and any modern game. That's it. Floppies were only used to share small documents and maybe some split(1)/Hacha splitted software from cybercafes into some floppy stacks. And to boot from floppy on unsupported PC's. Bear in mind that most Pentium MMX based PC's had a CD drive. Even the ones still running in 2002 were CD based.
  • radnom 4y ago
    *2001 was a transition point from slow progress to the sort of performance-doubling progression you're thinking of.* You are way off here. Lets check a contemporary source to understand the public sentiment at the time: "My new computer's got the clocks, it rocks But it was obsolete before I opened the box You say you've had your desktop for over a week? Throw that junk away, man, it's an antique Your laptop is a month old? Well that's great If you could use a nice, heavy paperweight" Weird Al - 1999 You also are totally incorrect about internet connectivity adoption at that point.
    • derefr 4y ago
      > "My new computer's got the clocks, it rocks But it was obsolete before I opened the box You say you've had your desktop for over a week? Throw that junk away, man, it's an antique Your laptop is a month old? Well that's great If you could use a nice, heavy paperweight" Yes, all that is true... for people who were frequently trying to do anything "interesting" with their computers. Most people didn't try to do anything interesting with their computers! Most people — your average plumber in a small town in Ohio, for example — bought a computer for "productivity" (i.e. running Word); never played a single game on it other than the ones that came with Windows; and forgot it existed basically 99% of the time. Eventually, maybe they got AOL because of the free trial CD/floppy, and checked their email once a month. (But not more often than that; they didn't want to tie up their phone line!) For these people, buying a piece of consumer electronics like an MP3 player, that forced them to use their computer to populate it (or, indeed, to do anything other than using Word), was a confusing incursion into what had previously been an analogue affair of tape dubbing, suddenly surprising them that the machine they thought would be just fine, had suddenly "gone bad" (i.e. gone obsolete) despite having been left mostly untouched. > You also are totally incorrect about internet connectivity adoption at that point. You are aware that in plenty of places that theoretically had the capacity for Internet connectivity, there were still many people who didn't bother to actually get Internet access, because they had no use for it, and that (unlike today) nothing out there demanded they get online to e.g. file their taxes, right? Or that, even for many people "with Internet", they were still essentially using a captive portal experience (like AOL) at that point, with no web browser, FTP client, or anything else that would ever lead them to try to download a piece of software or anything else 1MB or larger, right? Also, you know there are places outside the US, right? And that consumer electronics manufacturers care very much about selling into non-US markets? Look at global Internet penetration in 2001. Think about what you'd have to do to sell a consumer electronics device to someone in India or Indonesia in 2001. My point wasn't that any of these factors pertained to the specific technosphere bubble that Apple released — and still releases — its products into. My point was, in fact, the opposite: that Apple is distinctive among consumer electronics manufacturers for a product marketing strategy involving addressing only that technosphere bubble. Everyone else used to target the lowest common denominator — that Ohioan plumber with the "antique paperweight", or even whatever someone might be using as a computer somewhere in Nigeria or the Philippines at that time.