Hardware Hardware we'd have killed for 10 years ago

[dark_avenger]

As others have already said USB sticks are up there, CD/DVD and even Blu-Ray have been over taken by it. I sure do not miss the days of putting a floppy in and getting the "This disk needs to be formatted" message because the disk had crapped it's self.

The change from dial up to broadband was also a huge thing, anybody here tried to use the internet on 56K these days? Near on impossible.

Case design certain deserves a mention, gone are the days of the "beige box", case internals now can almost now be art rather than a functional but giant mess.

Plug and play that wasn't "plug and pray" also was a huge step. Windows 7 install is almost magical compared to the early days of XP. Install windows and wow look at that have to install maybe 1 driver rather than 15!

That much in the last 10 years I really wonder what will come in the next 10....

[lacuna]

Originally Posted by Meanmotion

Great article! Definitely brings back some good memories. In particular the reserator. I actually ended up with bit-tech's two reserators through working alongside them for trustedreviews. Was such a shame they didnt have the performance to match their looks. Would still be using them today if they did.

Im still using my reserator with my 3.0ghz P4 and a 7950gt (both using Zalman water blocks. Both the P4 and 7950 have a TDP of 82w, so a combined 164w and it works fine. It hasn't been refilled or even opened in the past 4 years since installing it either. So based on that it should easily be able to cool even an i7 extreme

[pizan]

SLi/Crossfire especially when you can add a second one to an aging system to keep it playing new games for a bit longer.

[Meanmotion]

Im still using my reserator with my 3.0ghz P4 and a 7950gt (both using Zalman water blocks. Both the P4 and 7950 have a TDP of 82w, so a combined 164w and it works fine. It hasn't been refilled or even opened in the past 4 years since installing it either. So based on that it should easily be able to cool even an i7 extreme[/quote]

Fair cop to a degree. Most of the reason I sold them was the hassle of water cooling at all and particularly with those great hulking things, and i didnt have room for them. I do seem to recall them not being rated to cope with the heat output of top end GPUs of the time (that i had them) though. I was rocking 8800 ultras or some such - really reminds me how long it's been since I've tinkered with such things.

[lacuna]

Yeah, the 8800 Ultra had a tdp of 175w I think so that could be just too much

[BLC]

Not sure I agree about multi-core processors; I had a dual processor system a few years before 2002 (dual P3-800s on an Abit VP6 - that was an awesome board...), and it wasn't so hot. It only really shone in Linux, as very little in Windows was multithreaded; Windows 2000 & XP were indeed multithreaded, but hardly any applications/games took advantage of it. It certainly did boost performance, but not to the same degree that it does these days.

I think, to be honest, 10 years ago I'd have killed for any hardware as powerful as we have today; these days you'll find dual-core 800MHz chips in a low-end smartphone, whereas when I bought my dual-core rig it was pretty high spec. Anything over 1-2GB of RAM was far too expensive to consider, whereas 4GB is pretty much considered the minimum.

I agree regarding USB though: if there's been a "game changer" over the last 10-15 years, it's been USB. It certainly achieved the goals of standardising peripheral interconnects, and more besides. People scorned the iMac's lack of floppy drive when it was released, but how many times have you even seen a floppy disk in the last 5 years? I'd wager that it's a miniscule amount compared to the number of USB sticks you see.

Originally Posted by Nexxo

30 years ago: 8-bit. If you remember it, you weren't there.

Just about . I loved my Amstrad CPC464, even with it's monochrome green screen...

Originally Posted by dark_avenger

Plug and play that wasn't "plug and pray" also was a huge step. Windows 7 install is almost magical compared to the early days of XP. Install windows and wow look at that have to install maybe 1 driver rather than 15!

I remember the early days of USB and "Plug n Pray" on Windows 95/98. Rebooting after unplugging a device, re-installing the driver and rebooting whenever you plugged it in... That was not "Plug n Play".

I'd argue that even the Windows XP install process was far better than Windows 95/98/2000, and that's 10 years old. And although Win7 has drivers for pretty much everything, you still wouldn't leave the bog-standard graphics or chipset drivers installed - exactly the same as WinXP or Win2000 10 years ago.

[cjmUK]

Originally Posted by BLC

Not sure I agree about multi-core processors; It only really shone in Linux, as very little in Windows was multithreaded; Windows 2000 & XP were indeed multithreaded, but hardly any applications/games took advantage of it. It certainly did boost performance, but not to the same degree that it does these days.

This is true.

Even now, very few applications make the most of multicore processors, simply because we still aren't that good at programming efficient, multi-threaded applications.

10 years ago, a multi-core processor would have boosted the responsiveness of your OS, especially when running multiple applications at the same time, but it wouldn't have been as useful as it is proving to be now.

[BLC]

Originally Posted by cjmUK

This is true.

Even now, very few applications make the most of multicore processors, simply because we still aren't that good at programming efficient, multi-threaded applications.

10 years ago, a multi-core processor would have boosted the responsiveness of your OS, especially when running multiple applications at the same time, but it wouldn't have been as useful as it is proving to be now.

I remember trying to get the multi-threading hacks working in Quake3: there was a lot of command line hackery (IIRC) and it often crashed in spectacular fashion. Even when it worked it was only a small boost compared to having faster clock speeds and a better graphics card.

[bleeper]

There is nothing I can do on my modern PC that I couldn't do on my PC 10 years ago. I had a 2Ghz CPU, 1GB RAM, XP Pro, 200GB Hard Drive, 512K broadband, a decent graphics card, and I was playing games (look at 3dmark 2001, it wasnt that bad!), downloading movies & music, using whatever passed for VoIP at the time, all at a great speed.

Obviously it all ran a bit hotter, noisier but essentially I could probably do most tasks except gaming with the very same PC.

20 years ago really was a different world and my creaky early 90s 486 compared to my 2002 Pentium felt like a much bigger leap - approx 100x faster CPU, 500x memory, 200x Hard Drive, fast ethernet, high res monitor, CD Writer.

I think I'd have been much more impressed by all the portable, low power devices we now take for granted.

[BLC]

Originally Posted by bleeper

I think I'd have been much more impressed by all the portable, low power devices we now take for granted.

Hell yes. A phone (Samsung Galaxy Note) with a dual core 1.4GHz processor, 5" 1280x800 LCD and a 2500mAh battery? Even phones with more traditional 3-4" screens still have similar levels of power.

10 years ago I still had a Nokia 5110.

[Knowbody]

Originally Posted by pbryanw

Now we have 5Ghz Wireless-N and Homeplugs reaching over 10MB/s. I'm hoping that in the next ten years we'll have wireless that can match what our current Gigabit Ethernet connections can do.

802.11ac is coming out now, and has speeds of 1300mbps in the 5GHz band