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#1
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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. |
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#2
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Win95
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 |
#3
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Win95
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 |
#4
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Win95
"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. |
#5
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Win95
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 |
#6
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Win95
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.) |
#7
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Win95
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. |
#8
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Win95
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. |
#9
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Win95
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 |
#10
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Win95
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 |
#11
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Win95
"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. |
#12
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Win95
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. |
#13
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Win95
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 |
#14
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Win95
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 |
#15
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Win95
"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. |
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