Subj : Re: Hi all!
To   : hyjinx
From : Nightfox
Date : Fri Sep 19 2025 09:19:16

  Re: Re: Hi all!
  By: hyjinx to Nightfox on Fri Sep 19 2025 07:51 pm

 hy> Normal consumer computing (so, I wouldn't consider the RaspberryPI part of
 hy> that) was fun and interesting. Every other month, you were wondering what
 hy> new amazing tech was coming along - new graphics like the advances from 4
 hy> colours to 16, to 256, to millions, new CPUs which were significant marks
 hy> better than the ones before. Exciting new operating systems that did
 hy> things that no others did before it in some way or another. Untold amounts
 hy> of tinkering, just for tinkerings sake.

 hy> Now Windows has been amounted to a big pile of advertising, CPUs are all
 hy> pretty much meh, all the same, Graphics cards, whilst insane, are all just
 hy> doing the same thing, just faster, PCs encouraged tinkering and upgrading,
 hy> different computer types still existed on the market - Acorn Archimedes,
 hy> Macintosh PPC/64k, Atari ST, Amiga and the 8 bits before them. Linux has
 hy> been turned into a big lot of boring blah - enterprise kubernetes
 hy> containerised IoT function deployers.

I know what you mean, and I agree.  I've often thought about that too - In the early 90s, and through the 90s as well, computer hardware and software still had a new and exciting feel to it, and it was fun to see the new stuff coming out. Upgrades were more significant because they provided such an improvement over the previous stuff. But these days, it feels like upgrades aren't as significant.

Recently though, I've actually still felt a bit of that with newer graphics cards sometimes - I think the most significant is Nvidia's RTX cards with their ray tracing, which I think looks pretty cool.  There have been some PC games that have been re-released to support RTX ray tracing, including Quake 2. I thought it was particularly fun to try Quake 2 RTX.  I played Quake 2 when it was new back in the day, and I was impressed back then seeing its graphics on the Voodoo2 card I had; similarly, I thought it was cool seeing Quake 2 with RTX capabilities.

Otherwise though, yeah, it feels like a lot of computer upgrades are doing the same things but faster these days.

Nightfox
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