Comparing the upgrade cycle of the 'vintage' days of consumer computing to modern day, have the capabilities neared their maxed out point?

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grimacefry@reddit

I remember encoding a 3min video from Adobe Premiere in 1994 on a 486 with Win 3.1. Left the computer running, took 5 DAYS to process. Doing the same a decade later on a Pentium III 500MHz with Win 2000, took a few hours. And another decade later with an Intel Core i7 and Win 7, about 15 minutes.

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RuncibleBatleth@reddit

There's only so much power you need for a spreadsheet or a web browser. Gaming and AI are the only things really requiring a high end PC anymore until you get into things like software development or science and engineering.

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cristobaldelicia@reddit

you're forgetting Virtual Reality and AI. While VR has sort of fizzled, and the present features marketed as "AI" now, might also disappoint in the near future, they are areas where "high end" PCs are necessary, with much greater storage as well as speed. I'm not interested myself, but there are always technologies coming up which will demand more computing power.

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WingedGeek@reddit

It was illuminating to look at old product cycles ... The IIe was released in '83 and only mildly refreshed over the years until it was finally discontinued in 1993(!). The IIgs was an '86 release that hung on (with mild massaging) until December 1992. Accelerator cards (TransWarp GS, ZipChip GSX), expensive add-ons (Vulcan internal hard drives, SCSI boards), RAM cards, etc flooded the market to keep the machines relevant for as long as possible. Remember CPU upgrade kits like the Pentium Overdrives and (e.g.) the Sonnet or DayStar cards that would bump a PowerPC 603e machine to a G3? Or the 68030 / 040 add-on cards for older Macs? Back when a computer was an *investment* that cost as much as a car (the Mac IIci debuted at $6,300 in 1989, not including monitor (and hung on well into the 68040 period, finally discontinued in '93); a complete IIci system was about the same price as a brand new Ford Escort and within spitting distance of a Mustang! Now they're disposable appliances...

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cristobaldelicia@reddit

The Apple/Mac perception is different from mainstream PCs, and I might even say distorted With original PCs, XTs and ATs, the industry wasn't sure how long consumers would hold on, therefore Companies like Intel put out Aboveboard Cars with 286, ram slots, and various upgrades just short of a buying a new computer, there was even 386 Aboveboard Cards. But the introduction to consumers of 386s with Windows 3.1, it became clear users would be willing to buy a whole new computer. And they would do it again with Windows 95. It was actually Compaq that produced a 386 PC before IBM, the engineers at IBM, trained on mainframes and minicomputers, were suspicious of the 386, some still wary of a "workstation" cannibalizing their System 360s with terminals. Apple by contrast had some weird ideas about product cycles. Remember the Mac was made by a group put into direct competition against the Apple II group! Pitting groups of engineers within a company against each other was not business as usual! Apple's mastery of "product cycles" became much better with iPods and iPhones

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lee4hmz@reddit

Oh, I remember reading MacUser in 1990-1992ish and absolutely boggling at how much a complete Mac system cost then, at a time when you could get hand-me-down home computers from the 1980s for basically free, and when decent full-size PCs were a fraction of the price *with* a hard drive, keyboard and monitor (all things Apple charged extra for then).

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texan01@reddit

It does seem like we’ve stalled out in terms of leaps and bounds. Like the performance difference between my 1984 PCjr (8088@4.77mhz) and my 1993 486dx2-66 is huge compared to my 2017 AMD A10 and my year old i5 laptop.

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QuidProStereo@reddit

True. I'd still be dailying my 2500k system (built in 2012) if a friend hadn't given me most of a ryzen 7 system. It still did everything I needed it to, including playing older games at 4k. The idea that a 12 year old system is still competent is wild when I consider that's the same age gap between my 2002 Dell P4 college PC to a 386. How useful would that 386 have been at 2002 tasks?

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stejoo@reddit

A 1983/84 XT was also quite usable at over a decade old. No, I couldn't play most of the newer games some of my friends. But I received plenty of old 5.25" floppies from people to explore. Those were being given away in the mid-90s. I used WordPerfect to write stuff for school on it, played some games, learned a bit of BASIC and Pascal, and much more. In February 1997 we upgraded to a Pentium with Windows 95 and Office 95. Quite a jump. My i7 860 system was like your 2500K. That was ten years old when it decided to start no more.

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lee4hmz@reddit

I went to high school in the early 1990s, and they still had a number of true-blue XTs (with the original 10 MB hard drives, no less) still chugging along doing things like word processing. My brother and I also put together a few XT-class machines for people who didn't need much more than a word processor.

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GaiusJocundus@reddit

The latest efforts at optimization is mostly about Application Specific Integrated Circuits, or ASICs. These have been around a long time and many ISA implementations are, in fact, ASICs. One good example, which I only know a very introductory level of details about, are some of the unique, graphics processing pipelines developed for the latest PlayStation designs, specifically. By creating components of your computer that are designed for specific tasks, you can optimize the performance of both code execution, by offloading to these "accelerators" and actual physical efficiency of the relevant electrical connections between busses and peripherals. GPU's are an example of such an acceleration peripheral that has become a standard in the desktop world. RISC-V, the latest standard coming into the mainstream, is modularly designed, largely with this ASIC concept in mind. Because the bulk of effective circuit optimization will be in the form of customized and specialized circuit designs, RISC-V minimizes its required module set while allowing implementers to extend the core ISA with custom modules and relevant instructions.

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misterhinkydink@reddit

We use RV implemented in a FPGA.

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misterhinkydink@reddit

I buy 2-3 year old Thinkpads, sometimes still on Lenovo warranty, for my work and keep using them for a couple of years.

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bwyer@reddit

Naa. Going from an 8088 to a ‘286 then a ‘386 was HUGE in so many ways. Once we hit the ‘486 with the integrated math coprocessor things started to taper off feature-wise. After that it was mostly just speed.

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t4thfavor@reddit

There was a time when there were even larger advancements. In the AMD K6 days, a single socket you could have 166mhz all the way to 550Mhz. I remember an AMD socket where my CPU was 600mhz and I upgraded to a 1.2Ghz on the same board. Then there was the jump from single core to dual core. Those were absolute massive improvements which could be had without upgrading your motherboard in most cases. I would argue significantly larger than 286->386->486.

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bwyer@reddit

Honestly, it really depends on what you're doing. Going from an 80286 to and 80386 introduced virtual-86 mode. That, combined with Windows/386 and later Windows 3.1 translated to massive improvements in stability, multitasking, and per-process available RAM. Not having to add an 8087/80287/80387 coprocessor for math was a huge boon to spreadsheet users in the 80486 days. You're absolutely correct that speed improvements were important, but that was just a small facet of computing back in those days. Directly addressable memory in the jumps from the 8088 to the '286 and '386 alone were enormous. In the Windows 3.1, Windows 95, Windows 98, and Windows Me days, multiple cores did you no good whatsoever. You had to make your way all the way to Windows XP to see an improvement there (unless you really wanted to use Windows NT). I'll footnote that by saying that I'm an OS internals geek, so those things are hugely important to me. They really wouldn't have had a big visible impact to the average user.

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t4thfavor@reddit

I get what you’re saying, I still haven’t seen an improvement better than going from ide -> sata and then from hdd -> ssd and then nvme. Processor and memory are nothing if you can’t feed them.

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bwyer@reddit

You're not kidding there! NVMe has been a godsend. I haven't found myself complaining about storage throughput in years.

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Far_Resolution_1215@reddit

Yeah when you can load a 6 to 8gb llm or sd model into vram in one second, tis amazing.

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AtomicPlayboyX@reddit

There were massive advancements in video cards, sound cards, recordable media, display technology, controllers, etc. My 90s-00s upgrades were about way more than speed.

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tehifimk2@reddit

>display technology I remember lugging my PC and 17" CRT around on the bus back in the late 90's and early 00's when I needed to move my rig around. It was a real pain. The monitor was pretty old when I sold it, but monitors were still expensive back then. This morning I just got an almost new 27" 1080p philips monitor from the bin at work. It's maybe a year or two old at most, perfectly fine. Just not needed anymore and not worth the time to sell it. Crazy how things have become so disposable now.

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bwyer@reddit

I don't disagree in that respect. Because the way OP phrased their comment "...keeping my current equipment and wait for next year", I assumed they were talking about their computer, not the peripherals. That was further underscored by the fact, to your point, that peripheral technology improvements have continued to accellerate every year. OP's "wait next year" sentiment would rarely apply in today's market in that context. So, yeah. Even just bus improvements (ISA, EISA, PCI, AGP, PCIe and its various versions) are incentive enough to do upgrades. CPU improvements, IMO, are very much secondary if not tertiary to peripherals.

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Nostalgic-Soul-76@reddit (OP)

Yes, I was mainly referring to the computer itself and not peripherals. Thanks for pointing that out. I should have distinguished between them.

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AtomicPlayboyX@reddit

Alas, on both fronts, things have stagnated. Outside of (poorly adopted) VR, peripherals haven't been all that interesting for a decade now. On the graphics side, ray tracing is swell, but still requires tricks to make it reasonably performance. So now it really is all about (meagher) speed improvements.

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jumbocards@reddit

I’m still using my 6700k and gtx 1070… cpu is almost 1 yrs old and I still play current games without issue.

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jumbocards@reddit

This is like buying a pentium 75 in 1994 and playing games until 2004 (world of Warcraft!)

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quotemycode@reddit

Just the nature of computing these days. Everything I do today, I could do 10 years ago with computers of the time. The only difference is they made the software slower - added "security" sure - encryption, .net, electron, all these things which are supposedly better, but don't really add much to the experience. Now "ai" is added to processors, but I run models on my gpu, no need for cpu, and for what I do with it, that's good enough for me.

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Vinylmaster3000@reddit

Pretty much, when I entered college I was using the same desktop I built in 2014, had the same RAM and Graphics Card. Only 'upgrade' I ever did to it was add a wireless card and during my first year of college upgraded the RAM from 8GB to 16GB, that was in 2018. In 2019 I bought a new graphics card, and in 2020/21 I built a brand new PC. If you were to attempt that during the 90s starting with a 486 DX2 and attempt to use it through 2001 you're going to seriously run into problems. > When I look at modern computing and see what is being offered, I don't get nearly as excited and pretty much concede to keeping my current equipment and "wait for next year." Pretty much. If you check best buy right now it's just a similar laptop or a gaming PC with RGB lights and there isn't anything really special. I know people talk about AI but besides it being a highly resource intensive SaaS there are only a few AI-accelerator cards aimed towards developers, you can do AI development with an already existing GPU, and that isn't really as exciting. Personally I do game development, recently I was working with idstudio's doom eternal which requires an extremely good PC, so that's what I'm looking forwards to.

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whowanderarenotlost@reddit

99% of office work. Excel, Word, PowerPoint could be done with Office 97 on Windows 98 SE Computers Or Windows 2000 / Office 2000 If you need a 'server ' Windows Network Domain.

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BrobdingnagLilliput@reddit

I'm on a 10-year-old laptop right now. It takes forever to boot up, and it's not as zippy as I'd like, but there are ZERO compelling reasons for me to spend a grand or more to upgrade from that hardware.

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Chemical-Cap-3982@reddit

some how we're on a 3 year upgrade cycle, but a quad core i7/16Gb mem/sata ssd, computer from 2014 is still very usable. a 10 year old computer in 1992 would not be able to keep. i think we've reached the point of diminishing returns on newer hardware.

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Nostalgic-Soul-76@reddit (OP)

"Diminishing returns." I like that wording.

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mega_ste@reddit

Progress is slowing, but there is still progress.  I'm using a ten year old laptop right now, running up to date Windows 10, does everything I need.  if it was 2004 and I was trying to use a ten year old computer, I wouldn't be having much fun.

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LiiilKat@reddit

Homelabbers are squarely in this boat. My entire rack is either Haswell or Broadwell, and it does everything I need for it to do, even heavy extended-run AV1 video transcoding.

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pixelbart@reddit

My parents’ 1st gen Core i3 based notebook died last month, after fourteen years of service and only an SSD upgrade a couple of years ago. Their new notebook is a bit lighter and faster, but it doesn’t really give them a lot more productivity.

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big_ass_grey_car@reddit

I think GPUs have had some awesome developments over the last 5-10 years. On-device VR and AI are becoming simpler with every generation, and in the next 10 years the power and thermal requirements will be minimal for what we can achieve today. The current state of generative AI is pretty lame (free-text prompts are bad UX for most people, and good artists’ and writers’ work is stolen out of “necessity”) but I can already see that the next few years will be marked by the introduction of powerful AI models into traditional computing workflows. Augmenting and organizing human work without stealing it is the goal of a lot of folks at the moment, even if those projects aren’t making headlines at the moment. Getting models on-device and free of any centralized entity depends on us advancing low-power GPUs. When we have that figured out, our personal devices will get a lot more interesting again.

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nixiebunny@reddit

I am using a new computer that's three times as fast as the 8 year old one it replaced. In the old days, it would have been ten times as fast. So it's slowing down. All the low hanging fruit of transistor size was picked 20 years ago.

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chiclet_fanboi@reddit

Jep, the progress slowed down, but it has become much more accessible too. Prices back then were very expensive.

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redditshreadit@reddit

I found it to be more expensive/frustrating than exciting. Using ten year old hardware, that's exciting.

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Nostalgic-Soul-76@reddit (OP)

Very true. 👍

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Optimal_Law_4254@reddit

It really depends on what you’re doing. For business many companies are on 2-3 year leases so that’s when the machines are swapped out. New capabilities aren’t much of a driver for average office users (including executives). The engineers on the other hand benefit from the increased speed and capacity.

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rcade2@reddit

We are just writing the same programs over and over for new generations of computers. We've always just done the same things with them.

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