Win95

25 years on, we are reminded of the big changes Win95 showed
compared to the preceding Win3.1 (I'm talking of home/consumer
versions). 25 years is a long time - what is it, 12-15 Moore
periods? Shouldn't we expect rather more change in the hardware as a
result? Software has come a long way, we have AI and virtual reality
on the horizon, but the hardware seems to have stagnated. The basic
vision behind 'one computer for each home/desk' hasn't changed.

mechanic,

but the hardware seems to have stagnated

You would probably have more success trying to start a discussion (if thats
what you are after) if you would specify *how*you think it has stagnated /
what you expected to see instead.

But I both agree and do not agree with you.

My first PC running W95 was a slow beast, my current one is probably a
factor 1000 faster. On the other hand, the time that I'm waiting on my
'puter to do something, *anything* (including waiting for it to boot) seems
to have gone up, not down.

Also, the hardware has "progressed" to be *less* secure instead of more
(ref: USB, firewire) - even though thru times several attempts have been
made to make the hardware locked to certain software (which is *not* a good
thing).

Regards,
Rudy Wieser

mechanic wrote:
25 years on, we are reminded of the big changes Win95 showed
compared to the preceding Win3.1 (I'm talking of home/consumer
versions). 25 years is a long time - what is it, 12-15 Moore
periods? Shouldn't we expect rather more change in the hardware as a
result? Software has come a long way, we have AI and virtual reality
on the horizon, but the hardware seems to have stagnated. The basic
vision behind 'one computer for each home/desk' hasn't changed.



I've made that 25 year journey, and I've noticed a vast improvement; RAM
chips mega growth, HDs quantum leap growth, Net speeds rocketed,
monitors vastly improved; plus tablets, phones, watches, smart homes.
And much more. And what you probably don't see is all the
behind-the-scenes development work that's produced it.
Now then, major point; the giant IT industries are still with us, and
they need new things to survive; new hardware, new software, new
markets. The phenomenal growth of IT over the last three decades has put
them on a steep upward curve, and a new gizmo will nett millions; which
has entailed vast sums put into research.
What will the new thing be? It's bound to come; organic chip technology,
8K video God knows how high, or what? They won't let us know until
they have it, ready for the markets.

Ed

"mechanic" wrote

| 25 years on, we are reminded of the big changes Win95 showed
| compared to the preceding Win3.1 (I'm talking of home/consumer
| versions). 25 years is a long time - what is it, 12-15 Moore
| periods? Shouldn't we expect rather more change in the hardware as a
| result? Software has come a long way, we have AI and virtual reality
| on the horizon, but the hardware seems to have stagnated. The basic
| vision behind 'one computer for each home/desk' hasn't changed.

Are you thinking you'd like to be a Borg? You have one
computer at your desk because you live in a human body
and that computer, with mouse and keyboard, is designed
to be used by a human body. If you're dumb enough you
can also have a computer in your frig and your thermostat,
so that Samsung can sell your dietary habits and crooks
can know when you've gone away. What more do you need?

Early computers were very limited. It would take several
seconds for a program to start. It could take an hour to
download a picture. Now we can download videos in seconds
and it requires a number of brilliant software programmers to
bloat a program sufficiently to slow down a modern CPU.
Maybe you don't remember how much waiting there was in
the 90s? Every click was followed by a pause.

AI is marketing. Virtual reality is masturbation. The software
from the 90s is not essentially different from the software now.
It's still built up of binary operations. On a simple level you
can pick between 0 and 1. When it gets more fancy you can
display "Y/N" on a screen and let someone input their choice.
Later we got GUIs with buttons. Then we got 3-D buttons. And
of course, Apple had the cutest buttons.
Now you can probably get Cortana, dripping wet, circuit boards
flashing, chest heaving, to ask you in a sexy voice, "Are you
sure you want to delete that file, Big Boy? Yes or no?" In another
decade maybe she'll reach out of the monitor and stroke your face
while she pouts. But the operation hasn't changed. Only the
masturbation options. You're still deleting a file.

I find it amusingly twisted that we have such a tendency to
want to be anyplace but where we are. People are so excited
about the possibility of pretending to drive or pretending to
walk in a mall, or pretending to be in a battle. The more it fools
your senses, the better. The thrill is based on one fundamental
misconception of freedom: That we can change reality given
the right circumstances and equipment. It's not true. The only
true freedom is the freedom to relate to your life. The rest is
just quad-core ostrich behavior and compulsive fantasy. The
3-D trollop might be very sophisticated technology, but the
hypnotic fascination with it is no more sophisticated than a
baby staring at a mobile.

On 8/25/2020 5:45 AM, Mayayana wrote:

Early computers were very limited. It would take several
seconds for a program to start. It could take an hour to
download a picture. Now we can download videos in seconds



Download times had nothing to do the limitations of those earlier
computers. It had to do the speed of the internet connection.

--
Ken

On Tue, 25 Aug 2020 11:29:22 +0100, mechanic
wrote:

25 years on, we are reminded of the big changes Win95 showed
compared to the preceding Win3.1 (I'm talking of home/consumer
versions). 25 years is a long time - what is it, 12-15 Moore
periods? Shouldn't we expect rather more change in the hardware as a
result? Software has come a long way, we have AI and virtual reality
on the horizon, but the hardware seems to have stagnated. The basic
vision behind 'one computer for each home/desk' hasn't changed.

Remember installing Win95 from a pile of floppies. It still seems to
take about an hour to install/update Windows though. Hardly any
software is distributed on physical media these days. My first Amazon
purchase was a copy of Nero 5 in 2001. In 2003 I bought a 17in LG TFT
monitor (also from Amazon) for £340. Just spent less than that on an
iiyama 32in IPS monitor.
I might still have a tower pc under the desk but I also have an
extremely powerful computer in my phone and a less powerful one in a
box under the TV to record TV programmes, concepts that were (almost)
unheard of in 1995.
(Had a friend who bought a mobile phone with a battery so big that he
had to carry it in a case hung from his shoulder. The phone wasn't
small either.)

On 8/25/20 11:07 AM, this is what Peter Johnson wrote:
On Tue, 25 Aug 2020 11:29:22 +0100, mechanic
wrote:

25 years on, we are reminded of the big changes Win95 showed
compared to the preceding Win3.1 (I'm talking of home/consumer
versions). 25 years is a long time - what is it, 12-15 Moore
periods? Shouldn't we expect rather more change in the hardware as a
result? Software has come a long way, we have AI and virtual reality
on the horizon, but the hardware seems to have stagnated. The basic
vision behind 'one computer for each home/desk' hasn't changed.

Remember installing Win95 from a pile of floppies. It still seems to
take about an hour to install/update Windows though. Hardly any
software is distributed on physical media these days. My first Amazon
purchase was a copy of Nero 5 in 2001. In 2003 I bought a 17in LG TFT
monitor (also from Amazon) for £340. Just spent less than that on an
iiyama 32in IPS monitor.
I might still have a tower pc under the desk but I also have an
extremely powerful computer in my phone and a less powerful one in a
box under the TV to record TV programmes, concepts that were (almost)
unheard of in 1995.
(Had a friend who bought a mobile phone with a battery so big that he
had to carry it in a case hung from his shoulder. The phone wasn't
small either.)

My father-in-law was in PR. He carried one of those phones over his shoulder. Big clunky, I remember how I thought it would never get
anywhere.

I also remember my first Commodore 64 and thought nobody would ever have more than one of these in a house, WHY?!

Al.

This post contains hypertext message that contains the main information. Your machine can't handle this correctly so you'll be better off plonking my posts once and for all rather than wasting time trying to read it.


--

With over 1.2 billion devices now running Windows 10, customer
satisfaction is higher than any previous version of windows.

On 8/25/2020 6:29 AM, mechanic wrote:
25 years on, we are reminded of the big changes Win95 showed
compared to the preceding Win3.1 (I'm talking of home/consumer
versions). 25 years is a long time - what is it, 12-15 Moore
periods? Shouldn't we expect rather more change in the hardware as a
result? Software has come a long way, we have AI and virtual reality
on the horizon, but the hardware seems to have stagnated. The basic
vision behind 'one computer for each home/desk' hasn't changed.


won't 128bit computing have to be quantum?

--
Minister Dale Kelly, Ph.D.
https://www.dalekelly.org/
Board Certified Holistic Health Practitioner
Board Certified Alternative Medical Practitioner

dale wrote:
On 8/25/2020 6:29 AM, mechanic wrote:
25 years on, we are reminded of the big changes Win95 showed
compared to the preceding Win3.1 (I'm talking of home/consumer
versions). 25 years is a long time - what is it, 12-15 Moore
periods? Shouldn't we expect rather more change in the hardware as a
result? Software has come a long way, we have AI and virtual reality
on the horizon, but the hardware seems to have stagnated. The basic
vision behind 'one computer for each home/desk' hasn't changed.


won't 128bit computing have to be quantum?


You can make a 128 bit CPU right now if you want.

But, it won't run at 5GHz.

That's the problem.

No quantums necessary.

Paul

"Ken Blake" wrote

| Download times had nothing to do the limitations of those earlier
| computers. It had to do the speed of the internet connection.
|

Sure, technically. But if you're waiting for a JPG
of someone's pet cat to download for 45 minutes
on a 200 MHz machine, that's a limitation. You're
probably not going to be able to do much of
anything else.

In article , Mayayana
wrote:

| Download times had nothing to do the limitations of those earlier
| computers. It had to do the speed of the internet connection.
|

Sure, technically. But if you're waiting for a JPG
of someone's pet cat to download for 45 minutes
on a 200 MHz machine, that's a limitation. You're
probably not going to be able to do much of
anything else.

download it in the background, not that jpegs back then were anywhere
near that big.

On 8/25/2020 3:23 PM, Mayayana wrote:

"Ken Blake" wrote

| Download times had nothing to do the limitations of those earlier
| computers. It had to do the speed of the internet connection.
|

Sure, technically.

Technically? It has nothing to do with "technically." It's a simple
statement of what has to do with download times.


But if you're waiting for a JPG
of someone's pet cat to download for 45 minutes
on a 200 MHz machine, that's a limitation. You're
probably not going to be able to do much of
anything else.


Right, that's a limitation. But such a limitation has nothing to do with
download times.


--
Ken

Mayayana wrote:
"Ken Blake" wrote

| Download times had nothing to do the limitations of those earlier
| computers. It had to do the speed of the internet connection.
|

Sure, technically. But if you're waiting for a JPG
of someone's pet cat to download for 45 minutes
on a 200 MHz machine, that's a limitation. You're
probably not going to be able to do much of
anything else.

I think, given the hardware acceleration (DMA engines
or the like), that you can download at a spritely clip
with a 200MHz processor.

At work, I managed to handle 8000 packets a second with
a 1MHz processor. Two hundred times that many, is a lotta
something.

On the old computers, the PCI bus was the limit for that
sort of thing. If you had a 200MHz processor on a PCIe
bus (bus not a limit), check out what rates that
could manage.

On LAN transfers, with file sharing, the use of encryption
might slow things down. If you want to do a bar bet, you'd
use FTP to get as pure a packet transfer on your LAN as possible.

Eventually, the 200MHz processor will be processing 10,000
interrupts a second and the interrupt limiter (whatever it is
set to today), would cap the performance. But modern NIC
devices also have interrupt consolidation.

"If you're leaning in the right direction, everything else
is leaning in the right direction too."

What you don't want, is the Windows 10 background activity
to be present. The test should be run on a "purity" OS,
one that does not faff about needlessly. Like cutting
my Hashdeep64 performance by a factor of seven, just
to **** me off. I have to take special precautions
(kick Windows Defender in the nuts), if trying to get
a decent performance from something. That's why they
removed the controls to stop me from doing that easily,
because they'd rather I just trashed Windows Defender
permanently as a solution. Makes sense to me.

Paul

"Paul" wrote

| I think, given the hardware acceleration (DMA engines
| or the like), that you can download at a spritely clip
| with a 200MHz processor.

What I meant was that with a browser working on a
download you probably couldn't do much else. We're talking
single core 200 MHz. The download itself was limited by
the modems and dialup speeds. At one time it was a pet
peeve to complain about people sending images in email
because it would tie up the computer until it was downloaded.
And that could sometimes be close to an hour. That was the
era *before* you'd equivocate about downloading a 20 MB
package because it would take 45 minutes and there was
a good chance the download would fail before you got the
whole thing.... And of course it was uphill both ways.