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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

#111

Post by StavrosK »

kuschku wrote: post #77
stavros wrote: post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In the past, there were only enough components to fill a few shelves. Also, you can get many, many components from local stores now, if you're willing to pay the 4x-10x premium. Not many people are, so local stores aren't as common.

In 2010, the local store had more components than I can order at reichelt, and was cheaper than aliexpress (if you include shipping). I really miss having a place (back then we even had ad dozen of them in a few km distance) with a huge selection carrying every component you might ever need, and with enough technical expertise that you could show your circuit diagram and get feedback how to improve it. This is someth…

How much is AliExpress shipping for you? It's free (or a few cents) for most of the world, AFAIK.

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

#112

Post by ekianjo »

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…

> 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 day.

> Nowadays most people I see of that age group

These are not the same people at all.

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

#113

Post by ekianjo »

koonsolo wrote: post #48
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…

Why the negative outlook? The world now is way more awesome for hackers than it was back then! 1. You can find any information you want, in an instant. 2. Hardware is very cheap, computers can be tiny, you can order components from anywhere 3. Robotics and electronics are way cooler now, with drones etc. 4. Software development is way more productive with all the libraries and tools we have right now. 5. When I was a…

> 5. When I was a kid, games were made by 1 or a few people. It quickly evolved into big studios. But nowadays, a solo or tiny team can release super successful games.

And games will look exponentially better considering the tools we have at disposition now. Also, selling millions of units of one game is "possible" even for Solo developers (while it's obviously going to be a superstar kind of probability). in the 90s reaching that kind of market was impossible without a huge corporation support.

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

#114

Post by [deleted] »

mattkevan wrote: post #106

Thing is, in the ‘olden days’, the only thing you could do with a home computer was tinker - the job of a computer was to be a computer but little else. And the number of people interested in doing that was small. Today, the job of a computer is everything. Computers are in everything and do everything. They are our interface to the world. Their value is what they enable - writing, tax returns, video consumption, gam…

[deleted]

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

#115

Post by Terretta »

mattkevan wrote: post #106

Thing is, in the ‘olden days’, the only thing you could do with a home computer was tinker - the job of a computer was to be a computer but little else. And the number of people interested in doing that was small. Today, the job of a computer is everything. Computers are in everything and do everything. They are our interface to the world. Their value is what they enable - writing, tax returns, video consumption, gam…

Look at cars, consider both tinkering and “right to repair, but with no guarantee on know-how”.

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

#116

Post by mrob »

MarkusWandel wrote: post #103
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 was a computer geek from about 1981 onwards, starting with Commodore PETs at high school. These machines were uniquely accessible. You could do surprisingly creative graphics using only the graphic characters hardwired into the machine (no bitmaps, colours or sprites). But these characters were printed right on the keyboard, and could be used in normal BASIC "PRINT" statements to do quite performant animations and…

>there is just no hope of making something "cool" you can impress your friends with

I believe there is hope of making cool graphics effects with GPU shaders. GPU tech is still advancing similar to how CPUs were back then, so people have not yet explored all the possibilities of the hardware. You can do impressive things just by experimenting even if you don't have a lot of theoretical knowledge. Sites like shadertoy.com make it easy to get started.

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

#117

Post by higerordermap »

mattkevan wrote: post #106

Thing is, in the ‘olden days’, the only thing you could do with a home computer was tinker - the job of a computer was to be a computer but little else. And the number of people interested in doing that was small. Today, the job of a computer is everything. Computers are in everything and do everything. They are our interface to the world. Their value is what they enable - writing, tax returns, video consumption, gam…

But most tinkering journeys do not start with dedicated hardware. They start with hardware intended for something else, generally on a quest to solve some problem or do something cool..

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

#118

Post by kuschku »

StavrosK wrote: post #111
kuschku wrote: post #77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In 2010, the local store had more components than I can order at reichelt, and was cheaper than aliexpress (if you include shipping). I really miss having a place (back then we even had ad dozen of them in a few km distance) with a huge selection carrying every component you might ever need, and with enough technical expertise that you could show your circuit diagram and get feedback how to improve it. This is someth…

How much is AliExpress shipping for you? It's free (or a few cents) for most of the world, AFAIK.

Depends on the seller, but quite a bit if you desire 24h or even 14 day shipping instead of the usual 90 day shipping

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

#119

Post by 8draco8 »

sriku wrote: post #60
user-the-name wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Learn what? Installing Linux on a computer doesn't really teach you anything much at all about computers. It teaches you about Linux .

That's today, but it wasn't so initially. You'd learn about your monitor's scan modes, how the disk is structured, dumping bytes between devices, optimizing for load by placing bytes on the outer sectors of floppy disks, using RAM as a disk to speed things up, and whole lot of "useless" things that build machine sympathy.

Well you still have easier and more difficult distros. You can go easy route and play with Ubuntu or Fedora but you can approach linux from the hard side and try Arch or Gentoo

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

#120

Post by petermcneeley »

niftich wrote: post #16

Note that the article is about innovation and performance gains in general-purpose processors slowing, and about the increasing shift onto specialized computing engines by those who seek further performance gains for specific workloads. This was foreshadowed with the Netburst not being able break 4 GHz in 2004-2005, and CPUs having to shift to multi-core. This bought "classic" CPUs more time, but CUDA showed up in 20…

The article discusses the current trend but you hint at the possibility of a trend reversal. The CPUs are more and more multicore with wider SIMD. Many now have dynamic clock rates or low clock rates. The GPUs which use to actually have fixed functions now more and more are just GPGPUs. This to me is a convergence.
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