4 ms·

We also seem to have picked up a few features along the way. Rendering screen resolutions beyond 640x480, network speeds above 9600 baud, video, displaying imag

We also seem to have picked up a few features along the way. Rendering screen resolutions beyond 640x480, network speeds above 9600 baud, video, displaying images that each would fill one of the hard drives of that age, video and music editing, running programs that were unthinkable in terms of features set. Clearly, inefficiencies have crept in, but it’s not as if the software today wasn’t way more capable than what we had at that time.

mixmastamyk 2y ago
We had much better specs than this available at an aerospace company in the mid 90s, not to mention LAN storage and direct T1 to the internet.
- elliottkember 2y ago
  I bet those cost more than today’s cellphones…
  - mixmastamyk 2y ago
    Couple thousand per, in the 90s.
- nox101 2y ago
  lan storage at 10mbs? T1 is only 1.544 Mbps. Those are incredibly slow by today's standards
  - mixmastamyk 2y ago
    We often had 100baseT and it was quite snappy for text heavy coms and reasonably sized images from the net. 9600 was already faster than you can read, this was an order of magnitude faster. Quake deathmatch was incredible, I remember getting almost twenty folks on a server once. :D At some point I procured a 1600x1200 monitor… but not until a later job after 2k with an SGI was my computer able to handle that resolution comfortably.
    - Bluestein 2y ago
      > was already faster than you can read, You make an interesting point: This *is* some sort of breakthrough point: When "average human textual input bandwidth" was matched ... (This might be comparable to AI: Now we are trying to match "average human processing capacity" ...
      - mixmastamyk 2y ago
        Yep, I think my first modem was 2400 baud and even that was slightly faster than I could read. Sluggish modem websites have no one to blame but themselves.
Bluestein 2y ago
> images that each would fill one of the hard drives of that age This really puts things in perspective ...

mixmastamyk 2y ago

We had much better specs than this available at an aerospace company in the mid 90s, not to mention LAN storage and direct T1 to the internet.

elliottkember 2y ago
I bet those cost more than today’s cellphones…
- mixmastamyk 2y ago
  Couple thousand per, in the 90s.
nox101 2y ago
lan storage at 10mbs? T1 is only 1.544 Mbps. Those are incredibly slow by today's standards
- mixmastamyk 2y ago
  We often had 100baseT and it was quite snappy for text heavy coms and reasonably sized images from the net. 9600 was already faster than you can read, this was an order of magnitude faster. Quake deathmatch was incredible, I remember getting almost twenty folks on a server once. :D At some point I procured a 1600x1200 monitor… but not until a later job after 2k with an SGI was my computer able to handle that resolution comfortably.
  - Bluestein 2y ago
    > was already faster than you can read, You make an interesting point: This *is* some sort of breakthrough point: When "average human textual input bandwidth" was matched ... (This might be comparable to AI: Now we are trying to match "average human processing capacity" ...
    - mixmastamyk 2y ago
      Yep, I think my first modem was 2400 baud and even that was slightly faster than I could read. Sluggish modem websites have no one to blame but themselves.

Bluestein 2y ago

> images that each would fill one of the hard drives of that age This really puts things in perspective ...