Earlier quoted context omitted.
Hah, yes, I have stuck to relatively classic 2.5D and 3D games that work on current iGPUs. It's nearly a nostalgia thing since I met Doom in college. I struggle with the gaming hardware ROI, when I see how things become obsolete. E.g. my work bought me a Titan-X in 2015 for numerical/image processing work. Ten years later my Ryzen 7840u had nearly the same GFLOPs, though of course with less memory bandwidth. It also…
> I struggle with the gaming hardware ROI, when I see how things become obsolete. E.g. my work bought me a Titan-X in 2015 for numerical/image processing work. Ten years later my Ryzen 7840u had nearly the same GFLOPs, 10 years is an eternity in computer hardware. The idea that you should be able to get 7+ years from your hardware is a more recent thing. Imagine comparing the 2.8 Ghz Pentium 4 you could get in 2002 w…
I encountered subsequent Windows and Mac versions in work environments, but mostly kept them at arms length. I didn't embed myself the different Windows or Mac eras. Instead, I always had the same baseline, internet-connected machine experience with a similar environment of CLI, Emacs, X Windows, C programming, shell, Python, and other scripting languages like Scheme and Common LISP. The web arrived with Mosaic and evolved long with the content. Things like FTP sites, gopher, and USENET fell by the wayside.
But, the entire hardware history with Linux was a lot more incremental, overlapping, or blurry as far as different capabilities or needs. E.g. SMP, multi-core, large files, 3D acceleration, 64 bit, high speed networks, LCD monitors and associated video output formats. You could chase these different bits to your heart's content, but could also run for a long time with the same basic kit.
Due to CS in college and my career, I always had exposure to a range of IP networking technologies. My work computers were connected to the internet via ethernet and quite high speed WAN uplinks, while home went through the sequence of POTS, ISDN, ADSL, and cable modem. I was using Linux on Laptops, and we had WiFi at work since its very early days around 1997. We were also early adopters of 1000-BaseT in the LAN, so I remember the days when our data transfers were often limited by computer speed rather than trivially saturating the link.
To me, the increases in RAM and disk space over those decades were the most notable. I could do the same kinds of algorithmic work, but data sizes could be bigger. You can often let a program run longer, but a limited working-set size is a fundamental issue.
Of course, there were commensurate speed increases to make practical use of that extra space. I.e. how long does it take to transmit, store, and process these larger data that would exploit it? The realtime threshold brings associated eras. When was it practical to record/store/playback WAV audio, MP3, MPEG video, etc.