It was so fun back then. Not the yelling and moaning we have going on today.

Here on Lemmy, even in non-political discussions some is always whining about the current president or whatever.

Or calling for alt voices to be banned.

Back in the 80’s computer stuff and conversation was more fun and not so freakin’ political.

It was about games, DYI, trying to learn to hack, learning the new tech. It was awesome!

I was part of it, but not as much as I could have been because I was in a small town and couldn’t afford a lot. But I def had a foot in the scene, and it was awesome!

  • tal@lemmy.todayEnglish
    1·
    4 days ago

    Now even the hardware is boring: oh gee, the new CPUs are 5% faster for $600! Oh yay! New video cards which are 10% faster for $1800! Like who gives a shit anymore. The days of there being generational or even every-other-generational improvements sufficient to justify prices of buying it are quite dead, and I don’t know if that’s just physics being a pain or if it’s straight up engineering design choices. Both, probably.

    Silver lining: it makes personal computers a lot less-expensive. Your system isn’t running at a quarter the speed of current systems and in need of replacement three years after it came out of the factory.

    On the video cards…parallel processing is actually still improving at a fair clip – like, the GPUs aren’t improving quite as fast as the CPUs were back then, but they are improving. I think that a major factor is that today, a big chunk of marketshare shifted from desktops to laptops and then laptops to smartphones. That means that while, yes, you can go out and get a tower that can crunch a lot of data in parallel, most software out there isn’t going to use it, because a lot of people are using systems that are under power-usage constraints.