Hardware Hardware we'd have killed for 10 years ago

Hmm... I may be the odd man out here, but none of the hardware listed would be something I'd have killed for. Not even died for.

I think the hardware we had at the time was just great ...for the time.

 

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

 

How about hardware from 2002 we would kill for today, 3dfx filed bankruptcy in 2002

 

Modfx - Steam WAS about in 2002, although it wasn't the awesome beast it was today...
2002 was the year I moved out of my parents and into my first student house. We paid around 40 quid a month for an upgraded T1 connection (bye bye 56k dialup!!) and used to play Counterstrike on steam on a weds/thurs/friday night. We were pretty good as well.... ;-)

 

I remember borrowing a book from the local library, full of program listings... my uncle read them out, and I typed them into a borrowed Commodore Pet... took hours, and only one in 5 ever worked.

Frankly, I prefer the kind of PEEKing and POKEing I do as an adult....

 

STEAM was introduced September 2004. My ADSL line was down for a couple of weeks just as STEAM was launched and I ended up with a higher STEAM id than I would have otherwise.

 

Great article, is it sad that I still have most of that old tat from 10 years ago, although the systems its installed in don't get used that much any more.
Barbs and Jubilee clips those things were responsible for so much heart ache and expense in my house hold. Im glad they are banished to the bin.

 

Love this article, more like this please!

While not technically PC hardware, a modern broadband connection is something that should have been included. Without it, no steam, origin, netflix, iPlayer etc.

 

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.

 

Athlon XP 2800+/6600gt/1,5GB/320GB running Xubuntu 12.04 still in use. It's fast but I do 3D modeling and I could make a good use of modern computing capabilities like OpenCL/CUDA. I'll upgrade to a decent machine when I can (and no, you don't have to explain me how much better a modern hw would be, I'm aware).
I also have a P3 laptop with Ubuntu 10.04 still in use. I use it in my electronics hobby and sometimes for light web browsing and coding.

 

In beta, official release was september 2003 and it was awful. I've got a 2004 account and Steam irritated me so much back then that it was only for want of Half-Life 2 cheesecake that I persevered. I know broadband was about, but it had nowhere near the coverage or speed available today, I had the best net available in my area and was lucky to hit 150kbps as opposed to the 1.5-9Mbps today. I probably should have phrased it as "in their current form".

 

Yep, internet speeds should get a mention. Like stormvixen I was in a student house around 2002, and we must have paid around £40 for an NTL 512Kbps line shared between the four of us. Now you can get 60-100Mbps for the same prices, with FTTP to come.

Also a mention must go to the humble wireless router which, I believe in 2002, must have been using the Wireless-B standard. We had so little faith in wireless routers of the time in our student house that we ran cat5 to all our rooms, tied to a central Windows server.

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.

 

<Stuff deleted. Probably better suited for another thread.>

 

+1

 

Remember that if you buy cheap compression fittings, you have sold the skin on your fingers to the devil.

 

That. I suspect unlike most people here, I missed out on dual-cores and went straight from a single core to a quad-core. The difference was immediate and astonishing! All the other stuff, yes, it's great: bigger faster storage, better cases, better graphics, better, quieter cooling, etc, etc. But for me, multi-core CPU's are just phenomenal. The fact that my PC no longer just shuts up shop for an hour or two while performing a virus scan - brilliant!

 

Nothing wrong with that, I still use my old AMD Athlon XP 2800+ everyday as well, (even though an Intel i7 950 is now my main personal PC). That 2800+ is as solid as a rock, and even though I've been thinking about replacing it for a couple of years with a cheap, low power net-top type device, the thing just keeps on working!

 

Some good items have been mentioned, and while great, most were evolutionary, not revolutionary, these were complete game changers and very revolutionary.

Large capacity USB thumbsticks/flash memory. These have single handedly destroyed almost every removable and external media out there. Even my most computer illiterate customers use them. I used to have to carry 100+ cd's from job to job, now I carry a single 32gig thumbstick with all my installers, portable apps, my documents, and room to spare.

Mobile data is another important one for me.
The ability to hook a computer up to internet from almost anywhere at any time (with broadband speeds no less!) has been a major help.

 

heatpipe coolers
( although not sure just how old they acually are... )
imagine the size of copper / aluminium block youd need to cool a socket 2011 overclocked cpu ??

 

Erm...Intel?