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The decline of computers as a general-purpose technology

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Re: The decline of computers as a general-purpose technology

#31

Post by vanderZwan »

javajosh wrote: post #25
brainless wrote: post #6

This is what I personally feel is just missing these days. I was never part of the leading edge of hobby computing. I was very far off, geographically, growing up a teenager in India. But back then, 1998 - 2006 ish, I feel the Internet was a lot more about experiments. I would read up on some software or hardware group all the time. LUGs were way popular. I used to be on chat rooms from MIT or other unis every other…

Software is economically worthless without making it artificially scarce. A lot of "software innovation" is not about building better software, but building software you can charge for , which means "walled gardens", patents, DRM, license servers, anti-tampering mechanisms, and the like. In essence all content (music, movies, software, books, etc) follows the same pattern. Note that profit-driven entities can give aw…

> Software is economically worthless without making it artificially scarce. A lot of "software innovation" is not about building better software, but building software you can charge for, which means "walled gardens", patents, DRM, license servers, anti-tampering mechanisms, and the like. In essence all content (music, movies, software, books, etc) follows the same pattern.

You remind me of Cory Doctorow's "The Coming War on General Computation" keynote, which interestingly didn't notice that streaming and similar cloud-based services would become the DRM of the last decade.

Or, as it turns out, the rising appeal of non-general purpose devices that are more efficient.

[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HUEvRyemKSg

[1] https://joshuawise.com/28c3-transcript

Re: The decline of computers as a general-purpose technology

#32

Post by shaan7 »

vladvasiliu wrote: post #14
brainless wrote: post #6

This is what I personally feel is just missing these days. I was never part of the leading edge of hobby computing. I was very far off, geographically, growing up a teenager in India. But back then, 1998 - 2006 ish, I feel the Internet was a lot more about experiments. I would read up on some software or hardware group all the time. LUGs were way popular. I used to be on chat rooms from MIT or other unis every other…

I hear people saying this a lot, and I admit I sometimes think it myself. But I'm not sure how true it is, as opposed to just a perception. > Not even to the level that I, a curious teenager, had experienced in those years I think therein lies the rub. Teenagers curious about computers aren't very common. And even back then (early 2000s), my experience in Europe was the same [0]. Most of the people in my school didn'…

> But phones? I just can't be bothered to care about them. Can I make calls and check some maps? It's great!

I understand where you are coming from, and it makes 100% sense if you own a PC/laptop as well. But guess what? In a lot of places the majority of population (including younger people) do NOT have them. Their first and only experience of computers is a mobile phone. Even though "teenagers who care about computers" is a low number, now a lot of them won't realize that something like a general purpose computer exists (until way later, if they end up using a computer at work).

I grew up being fascinated with how useful and flexible computers are and fell in love with creating software. I'm quite sure that I would not have happened if I was born during the last 10 years.

Re: The decline of computers as a general-purpose technology

#33

Post by jonathanaird »

h2odragon wrote: post #3

Where is all the unpaid innovation happening, where are people creating for the joy of creating? 8 bit micro controllers and little SoCs.

It’s happening in the tools for thought community on Twitter. It’s more about the software layer and innovations in human computer interaction design. A lot of the ideas from the 60’s and 70’s are having a resurgence like Memex, backlinks, moldable dev environments etc.

Re: The decline of computers as a general-purpose technology

#34

Post by sneak »

harlanji wrote: post #20
blowfish721 wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

From my perspective I think it might feel that way because back then it was mostly tech curious people who used the internet. Now it’s mainstream and everyone is connected which means most of the content is produced for massconsumation. Back when I got my first computer and got online, in around 1996 I think, the computers were still quite expensive and I would have killes to have access to the information and tinker…

Maybe we could make an Internet for Age 35+ or so. Remember when one could take over Yahoo chats with Javascript? With containers and stuff, the Internet could be a lot of fun again. App battles in the park by old timers on the chess tables.

It's called the internet. The things you describe are still happening across a thousand IRC servers you've never been invited to.

Re: The decline of computers as a general-purpose technology

#35

Post by TheOtherHobbes »

vladvasiliu wrote: post #14
brainless wrote: post #6

This is what I personally feel is just missing these days. I was never part of the leading edge of hobby computing. I was very far off, geographically, growing up a teenager in India. But back then, 1998 - 2006 ish, I feel the Internet was a lot more about experiments. I would read up on some software or hardware group all the time. LUGs were way popular. I used to be on chat rooms from MIT or other unis every other…

I hear people saying this a lot, and I admit I sometimes think it myself. But I'm not sure how true it is, as opposed to just a perception. > Not even to the level that I, a curious teenager, had experienced in those years I think therein lies the rub. Teenagers curious about computers aren't very common. And even back then (early 2000s), my experience in Europe was the same [0]. Most of the people in my school didn'…

I don't think it's curiosity about computers - it's more general curiosity about how certain kinds of systems work. It isn't even about appliances and mass consumption. That's a relevant view, but not a very revealing one.

Computers are an idealised example of an organised system which is assembled/operated by solving puzzles. Some people enjoy solving those kinds of puzzles. Most people don't. The first kind of person doesn't really understand the second kind of person - and vice versa.

Something interesting and disturbing has been happening over the last twenty years. The Internet stopped being a technological puzzle and became a social and political puzzle.

This kind of "cultural engineering" - where the currency is attention, influence, patronage, and sometimes actual spending, not puzzle prowess - appeals to a completely different kind of person. And these people have been driving the development of the Internet for a while now.

People who like solving computer puzzles have been completely blindsided by this and continue to act as if technology is still somehow primary - when it isn't, and hasn't been for a while.

Re: The decline of computers as a general-purpose technology

#36

Post by jacquesm »

brainless wrote: post #6

This is what I personally feel is just missing these days. I was never part of the leading edge of hobby computing. I was very far off, geographically, growing up a teenager in India. But back then, 1998 - 2006 ish, I feel the Internet was a lot more about experiments. I would read up on some software or hardware group all the time. LUGs were way popular. I used to be on chat rooms from MIT or other unis every other…

The mainstream was never going to be part of the tinkerers and hackers. But the depressing thing is to what extent todays hackers have become consumers.

But, we've still got linux and a lot of hardware support for that. I'll likely be the last bastion of general purpose computing.

Re: The decline of computers as a general-purpose technology

#38

Post by vladvasiliu »

shaan7 wrote: post #32
vladvasiliu wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I hear people saying this a lot, and I admit I sometimes think it myself. But I'm not sure how true it is, as opposed to just a perception. > Not even to the level that I, a curious teenager, had experienced in those years I think therein lies the rub. Teenagers curious about computers aren't very common. And even back then (early 2000s), my experience in Europe was the same [0]. Most of the people in my school didn'…

> But phones? I just can't be bothered to care about them. Can I make calls and check some maps? It's great! I understand where you are coming from, and it makes 100% sense if you own a PC/laptop as well. But guess what? In a lot of places the majority of population (including younger people) do NOT have them. Their first and only experience of computers is a mobile phone. Even though "teenagers who care about comput…

I do get your point, but I don't agree it supports the thesis that there's a "regression" happening.

Broadly, I could see two situations in which people only get a phone and have no computer: either "poor" countries, where they can't afford a computer and will get a phone that's better than nothing, and very affluent ones where they'll just get a phone or tablet and not care. Although I'm not sure that this second category has no computer.

While I do sympathize with this, and I think that it would more likely than not allow people to discover this curiosity by, as you say, being fascinated with how flexible phones would be, my point is somewhat different: this isn't "going back". Phones never were open. And I'm pretty sure that the people who can't afford a computer now couldn't afford one in the 90s.

As such, for me, this is more of a lost opportunity to progress rather than a regression.

Re: The decline of computers as a general-purpose technology

#39

Post by brucehoult »

SiVal wrote: post #28

There's no doubt that we're getting an ever-widening variety of clients, but this "general purpose" notion is a bit slippery. I remember when "general purpose" meant that not only did computers crunch numbers for science and engineering, but they could finally handle more general business computing such as accounting and text-heavy business data processing, which was much larger than number crunching--more general pu…

You are trying to define tasks as "general purpose". They aren't and never can be.

The point is that the basic modern computer design works well (enough) for almost all of those tasks. For the most part all that you need is the basic operations on 32 or 64 bit "integers": move, compare, add, subtract, and, or, xor, shift left, shift right.

With this you can do spreadsheets, word processing, database, accounting, desktop publishing, web browsing, email, instant messaging, decoding MP3 audio and JPEG photos and MPEG video. And show it all on a GUI on a high resolution bitmapped display.

You can increase the efficiency of some of those tasks with hardware and special purpose instructions for floating point arithmetic (though spreadsheets for example hardly benefit) and SIMD processing for media. See my other (top level) post.

But you don't need them, especially if you have many general purpose CPU cores.

Don't forget the original Macintosh did basically all of those tasks with just a simple integer-only CPU running at 8 MHz. No FPU, no GPU, no media instructions.

A modern multi-GHz CPU can do all those tasks acceptably using only simple integer instructions as long as you don't insist on very high resolution video (and games) at high frame rates.

Re: The decline of computers as a general-purpose technology

#40

Post by lotsofpulp »

TheOtherHobbes wrote: post #35
vladvasiliu wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I hear people saying this a lot, and I admit I sometimes think it myself. But I'm not sure how true it is, as opposed to just a perception. > Not even to the level that I, a curious teenager, had experienced in those years I think therein lies the rub. Teenagers curious about computers aren't very common. And even back then (early 2000s), my experience in Europe was the same [0]. Most of the people in my school didn'…

I don't think it's curiosity about computers - it's more general curiosity about how certain kinds of systems work. It isn't even about appliances and mass consumption. That's a relevant view, but not a very revealing one. Computers are an idealised example of an organised system which is assembled/operated by solving puzzles. Some people enjoy solving those kinds of puzzles. Most people don't. The first kind of pers…

> Something interesting and disturbing has been happening over the last twenty years. The Internet stopped being a technological puzzle and became a social and political puzzle.

The “internet” as a thing is still capable of the same things it was 20 years ago. The proportion of people using the internet who care more about the social and political puzzle rather than the technological is what dramatically increased.

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