Computer Expectations of Today, and a Decade Hence?

Luciq asks: "The other day I was cleaning out my closet and started reminiscing about all the good times I had with my 33Mhz 486DX. I got the machine 10 years ago just as the first Pentiums were coming out. With a 33Mhz processor, 212MB hard drive and a whopping 8MB of RAM, I could surf the net at 2400 baud, manipulate photos and even play games with full-screen video like The Seventh Guest. Today I use an Athlon XP 2400, 80GB HD, 512MB [not 512K!] RAM. While I can do some neat things with it, I must say that it's fallen short of the wonderous expectations I had for such a system in 1993 (no immersive VR?, no seamless voice recognition?). What expectations did you have for today's PC, 10 years ago and how does the reality match up? What do you expect from computing, 10 years from now?"

Comments

See!

[themassiah]

Today I use an Athlon XP 2400, 80GB HD, 512K RAM.

Even after 10 years, 640K is *STILL* enough for anybody!

End of the BSOD

[StarOwl]

10 years ago, I wished for an end to the Blue Screens of Death.

I got my wish. I installed linux. :)

Games gotten better?

[calebtucker]

10 years ago I expected some truly breath-taking an immersive 3D games with excellent gameplay for the present. However, I often times find that today's games are simply breath-taking in a graphical sense but really lack in the gameplay. Am I just spoiled or does anyone else feel this way? Maybe it's just that I'm remembering my childhood playing those side scroller games for hours.

Re:Games gotten better?

[garett_spencley]

I disagree with the common case that "all games today are eye candy and the real innovation was in the 80's etc."

Of course, there are games that are manufacturered purely to capitalize on a market. Such as games based on movies and tv shows (who wants to be a millionaire rings a bell). However, there are games out there that are breath-taking in an eye candy sense and also in a game sense.

For example, Quake III Arena might be remembered for it's graphics but it also brought multi player internet gaming to a whole new level.

Half life may be a similar concept but it has really brought game hacking and modifications forward. Maybe not truely novel concepts (quakeI had internet play and ID was allowing users to hack their games for a while) but they really created their own cult followings and people play those games for hours just as people played the paralax scrolling games of the late 80's early 90's for hours too.

What about GTA and the ever so popular vice city? I think vice city is probably THE perfect game (for me anyway). It combines so many different types of games into one: role playing, fighting, racing, mission based, shoot-em-up, business etc. Plus it brings you into this whole virtual culture and world where every detail from the people on the side walks to the radio stations are considered. Making it more of an interactive movie that sucks you in and keeps you there.

How about The Sims? Another novel concept. My wife still plays that game for hours at a time. She's got her own little neighbourhood kicking where she can control everything and build up her characters etc. What do you call that kind of game? Role playing? Simulation? I'm not so sure. I definitely don't remember any games in the 80's and early 90's having a game concept like that.

The fact is that gaming is just like any other business. The people who are there to capitalize on it want to market proven products that aren't so risk based. So you do get a lot of games comming out that just seem to be the same as last month's big eye candy. You see this in movies and music and television too. But don't neglect the games that do bring new concepts forward. They're there, you just have to notice them.

- Garett

I YAM THE VOICE OF THAA COMP-YEEWWW-TURR!

[Ab0rtRetryFail]

I expect (hope?) that text-to-speech will start sounding natural in 10 years. I'm sick and tired of the bland TTS that still sounds like it did in the '70s. Here's hoping. :)

short list

[john_smith_45678]

- OLED displays that are like paper (thin and flexible)
- fuel cell batteries that provide power for quite a bit longer
- 64 bit computing (arriving now - wonder what the next step would be - 128 bit?)
- Windows to require 30 terabytes of disk space

I hope somebody invents a better mouse (or whatever it might be called) ;).

I also wonder if we'll still be using hard disks ten years from now.

A Funny Fortune...

[oGMo]

A decade ago or so, I saw this fortune:

Imagine that Cray computer decides to make a personal computer. It has a 150 MHz processor, 200 megabytes of RAM, 1500 megabytes of disk storage, a screen resolution of 4096 x 4096 pixels, relies entirely on voice recognition for input, fits in your shirt pocket and costs $200-$300. What's the first question that the computer community asks? "Is it PC compatible?"

It was funny at the time. Those specs were ridiculous!

Today I've got a 200MHz+ Zaurus with 64MB of RAM builtin, plus about 512MB worth of CF cards. And you can get 1-2GB CF microdrives. And it costs about $300.

It's like "Unix! I know this!" line from Jurassic Park... reality caught up, and it's not funny anymore. :-( ;-)

In my experience and my (not so humble) opinion...

[JessLeah]

...90% of hardware improvements are essentially wasted by programmer inefficiency.

Look at those amazing 4K demos that people did (and stll do) for DOS. People are doing wild stuff here-- things like real-time pseudo-3D rendering, fractals, you name it-- all inside of 4 kilobytes of code. And most of these demos will run just as well on a '286 or (at most) '386 than today's space-heater chips.

Contiki is a lovely example of what can be done with efficient coding. In my experience, this sort of efficiency is NEVER achieved today in "commercial" projects or even in OSS/FS code-- people never even come close. The only areas of computing which have seen significant improvements (I don't just mean "more widgets" or "better interfaces" (the latter has nothing to do with hardware improvements, so don't even mention it)) in recent years have been:

* Gaming (perhaps the only area where efficiency is even SOMEWHAT appreciated, as it leads to higher FPS)
* Rendering (ditto)
* Real-time scientific simulations

In 1980, I could flip on an Apple II and have a usable prompt inside of a second or two. Nowadays, even with a screamin' P4 or Duron will get you a 30-second startup time-- if you're lucky. That's just to boot up the OS. Wanna start a word processor? That'll take even longer.

If you want to get a sense of what MY expectations were that were shattered, go grab a good Apple II emulator and some appropriate software and fire the emulator up. Make sure that it's running at the full possible speed-- not "compatible" speed (which is 1.02MHz, if I remember correctly). Look at how fast stuff runs... and that's in emulation. Sure, there's no fancy GUI, there's no clippy, whatever you think "modern" OSes have to have... but the point is that even in emulation, old stuff runs REALLY, REALLY FAST. If the same mentality of "efficiency is everything" that was necessary during the days of limited hardware power was voluntarily adopted today... well... imagine Windows XP starting up in one second (and not crashing). Imagine being able to swap cool new games on floppy disks. Imagine most games being distributed on Mini CDs, even those with lots of videos and speech, since a full (650-700MB) CD would be overkill for them.

Then wake up and realize it's time to go buy some more RAM again... ho hum...BillG just raised the bar on hardware requirements. Back to the treadmill we go...

Turbo Button

[cioxx]

It needs to make a comeback. I have a 2.4ghz box sitting under my desk, but would be delighted if Intel made a commitment to bring back the turbo button.

Push it, and you have successfully doubled the speed to 4.8ghz. That's the kind of innovation computer industry needs. Forget complicated overclocking.

PC technology is game-driven?

[maliabu]

from my experience, computer technology is mostly driven by computer games.

anyone can still type up a letter using an old computer. science/research are adapting to what's currently available, rather than creating the needs, but i might be wrong.

on the other hand, not many game developers are still writing games for the current computers, instead, manufacturers are trying to come out with something so that their consumers can finally play GTA3 smoothly.

so a question to answer your question - what do you expect to see in computer games in the future.

Re:My expectation?

[killthiskid]

Real expectations:

• I guess hardware is better. Wait is gone for the most part. That is good.
• Software that works. Office is a good example of bad things. Why the hell do features that worked in an earlier version of office get broken in later editions. I would think software would evolve in such a way that stuff gets better, not stuff added on and and the old stuff worse.
• Better GUI... obviously. I've used KDE, Knome, Win2000 (like Win98), and WinXP... XP still messes me up everytime. Why did they change the start menu. I know, go and change the scheme.
• Connectivity. 'tis getting better. Google is good. P2P is good. Email is ok. IM is good. Video phone anyone?
• Related to tech: telecommunications. fucking joke. With lots dark fiber out there, phone services should be a dirt cheap commindity. land lines are a joke. Everyone, please get broadband, if you can, and dump your landline. The baby bells need to suffer.
• Music and Video on demand. There is no good technical reason that I shouldn't be able to purchase and instantly listen to any audio or video thing ever created. Big media blows, I hope they bankrupt with the telecoms.
• Input devices. The mouse is good. The scroll wheel is better. Gestures are good. What's next... we need help!
• Monitors/other output devices. 300dpi? We're waiting. Transparent paper like screens? We're waiting!
• Backups. Consumer level PC need a VERY GOOD inexpensive method of backing up stuff... I'm talking the whole hard drive in a manner of minutes. Cheap. Often.

There, you asked.

Re:My expectation?

[killthiskid]

Oh yeah, add a decent protable long lasting, easily rechargable power source to my list... something like a fuel-cell that can be recharged with butane or gas... whatever, as long as it is light, long lasting, and easily refilled... and prefereably doesn't explode or kill people at will.

In Ten Years...

[sfe_software]

Given that:

While I can do some neat things with it, I must say that it's fallen short of the wonderous expectations I had for such a system in 1993...

always seems to be the case, my expectations for 2013 are as follows:

- Computers will be much, much faster
- Operating systems will be much, much more bloated
- Our demands will have gone up
- Mozilla will have become sentient, and will be its own project maintainer

And the end result will be roughly the same. Except that last part, that will be new.

Alpha-blending at the OS-level will be not just standard equipment, but nearly required. Games will be more beautiful, but will come on 3 DVDs and take 3 or 4 minutes to load up, giving about 30-50 FPS on a "fast" machine. (Seriously, load up UT2K3 on a "fast" machine, it looks nice but is very slow...)

The video card will be about the size of the motherboard, and will require more cooling than the CPU. Audio cards will come with fans (if that sounds weird, what if I told you, in 1993, about fans on video cards, water-cooling, or heat-spreaders on RAM modules? Case-mods, LED-fans, ...)

We'll keep hearing about how magnetic media is coming to an end, reaching the end of Moore's law, even while Maxtor is releasing 4.5 TB disk drives, and Seagate (among others) announces a new standard to replace the SATA that we'll have all become quite familiar with.

... in other words, nothing will change, except that we'll then take certain CPU-intensive tasks for granted, much as today compared to 1993. But just like encoding/ripping/sharing MP3s was very labor-intensive in 1993, such is the case with video now, and we'll see that whole cycle again with video via DivX...

Video capture/tuner cards will be standard equipment (like audio today), and maybe -- just maybe -- by then we'll have some kind of industry standard on digital broadcast (cable/sattelite). Eh, probably not...

IMO anyway.

Re:In 10 Years there will be

[crazyphilman]

Oh, brother... I can see it now, my fellow programmers will come up with the following selection of delectables:

1. Russian Hacker model: She's six feet tall, very thin, black hair, ice-blue eyes, can kick your ass but chooses not to. Wears tight black jeans, a skintight black Linux T-shirt, and a leather jacket (with chains that jingle!). Dirty mind, friendly, but if you make a programming error, she ties you to a chair and mocks you, muttering, "Dahlink, RTFM". Hackable, with a XXX porno mode.

2. Japanese anime model 1 (techie chick): About five feet tall, thin, long black hair, green eyes, modernish hip clothes and weird cat ears. Randomly gets annoyed, produces a 1,000 pound hammer, and pulverizes you. Has no nipples or gonads. Warning to the orally fixated: she has little razor-sharp cat teeth which appear when she's feeling mischevious.

3. Japanese anime model 2 (Hentai model!): Like model 1, but instead of cat ears, teeth, etc, she has a schoolgirl uniform, nipples and gonads. Randomly "accidentally" opens a gate into hell, allowing huge perverted demons into this universe, which subsequently violate her "against her will". Beware: some owners have gotten a little too close to the action, resulting in, well, you know. The lawsuits have been settled.

Moore's PC

[nick_davison]

Roughly butchering Moore's law:

10 years / 18 months ~= 6.666
2^6.666~=60

So, as a rough rule of thumb, expect things to be about 50-60 times as powerful as they are today:

Given my 2GHz, 1Gb ram, 128mb video ram, 100Gb hard drive system today, a kind of typical PC, I should be running, by then:

120 GHz, 60 Gb ram, 7.5Gb video ram and a 6 terrabyte hard drive.

However, the following will also be true:

1) Windows 2013 will still be as slow as hell (probably clogging that fast 120 GHz processor with all of the things it securely prevents me from doing).

2) My wife will have finally killed me for all the money I've spent, especially as I swore that last year's 80Ghz processor would see me through for a couple of years.

3) According to Nick's newly coined law - every eighteen months my PC will give off roughly double the heat energy - I have just single handedly caused the ice caps to melt.

Things I could not have imagined that did happen

[DigitalDreg]

Ten years ago I had a 486DX/2 running at 66Mhz with 16MB of RAM, 400MB HD, and a 14.4 modem. My 17" IBM running 1280x1024 in 256 colors was the envy of my friends.

Rather than being dissapointed by what didn't happen, here is what I'm pleased about that did happen, that I didn't expect.

- T1 download speeds into my house. My cable modem does 1.5Mbits down and 256Kbits up. That never occurred to me.

- Back then my machine could play back video from CD. Now I can do it in real-time off the Internet.

- Back then my computer chirped. Bill Clinton's voice coming from the White House web page in 1996 was scratchy. Now my entire music collection is on it.

- I can make my own CDs. Data, music or both.

- My machine serves as a digital darkroom.

- My machine lets me communicate with other people through email. (More of a social change than a technological change - back then I had email, but nobody to write to!) IM, IRC, etc. are also common now.

- Home networking.

- A powerful version of Unix in my house, free, with a lot of great applications. (Including MYSQL, which I'm toying with now.)

- Wireless capability so I can work where I want to, not where the computer is.

We've come a long way in 10 years ...

Surely not!

[spamchang]

Did anyone see the DMCA or RIAA legal pack of business coming ten years from now? Just think of what life in the future will be like post-resolution-of-said-issues. Orrin Hatch wants to crack our cases with destructive virus files...what will electronic entertainment of the future be like?

Cold War II: The Race between Digital Rights and Hackers.

1983, 1993, 2003, 2013

[Arandir]

Just trying to remember stuff off the top of my head. Probably off a few years on some of these.

• 1983
• 
  IBM PC, 8088, 4.77Hz, 256K+ RAM, $10,000. Language of choice is BASIC. Video is CGA, but only if you can afford the card, MDA otherwise. Removable storage is the 5-1/2" floppy holding 320K. Some people get wise and punch their floppies to make them double sided.
  
  The OS was PC-DOS, and fit on part of a floppy. Small, fast and feature-less.
  
  Game I remember distinctly was "Gato" (came out about 1985 I think), a submarine hunt game. It fit on a floppy, and was awesome fun!
  
  All PC software had to fit on (and run from) a single floppy.
  
  Networking? Not on the PC! Of course, the PC makes an excellent (but expensive) terminal for a UNIX system, from which you can access the ARPAnet.
• 1993
• 
  Packard Smell, i486, 66MHz, 2Mb RAM, $3,000. Language of choice was Turbo C, although some Turbo Pascal diehards (myself) still lingered. Video is VGA and a smattering of SVGA, XVGA cards. Removable storage of choice was the 1.44Mb 3-1/2" floppy. Some people have CDROMS, but not many. Harddrives are the norm, and their typical sizes are about 100 to 500 Megs.
  
  The OS for most people was still DOS, now version 5.0. People are running this cheesy environment called Windows 3.1 on top of it. I rebel and use OS/2. I need 8M RAM to use it, but it had a UI that GNOME and KDE are barely approaching ten years later.
  
  My games of choice were Civilization and SimCity. They came on floppies, but a lot of other games are starting to come out on CDROMS, which pisses me off since I can't afford one. They also tend to use more RAM and Video than I can afford either.
  
  Software in general is bloating. Stuff that takes up 5 to 10 Megs of disk is common. But I'm not bitching much, since they're adding a lot of features, not counting the GUI.
  
  Networking has arrived! 14.4K modems are becoming standard. If you live in the right area, you can get an internet account. Otherwise AOL and Prodigy are somewhat suitable substitutes.
• 2003
• 
  Home Built, P4, 2.8GHz, 1Gig RAM, $1,000. Language of choice is C++, although several dozen other major languages are common. There are no video standards anymore, but the minimum resolution anyone can put up with is 32-bit 1024x768. GPUs are more expensive and have bigger fans than CPUs. Removable media of choice is the CD-R, with USB memory sticks becoming popular. But the 1.44M floppy is still king. It will probably remain standard equipment until the typical BIOS can boot from USB devices (guesstimate of one year).
  
  The common operating environment is still Windows, but fortunately, the current incarnation runs on top of NT instead of DOS. WinXP recommends 512M RAM. UNIX is making strong headway into the desktop market. Even the most basic Linux distro requires a minimum of 16M RAM, with most recommending 64M.
  
  I haven't bought any games in a couple of years. The last one was Civilization III. (My how things change!) The game market has become dull. My prediction from ten years earlier, that game developers would start scaling back and produce games that would run on systems that the public actually owned, proved false. Instead, the public eagerly upgrades their RAM and GPU's every six months. I see that the many new blockbuster games require video cards that haven't been on the market more than six months.
  
  Software in general has long since passed the bloat stage, and has become quivering mounds of fat reminiscent of dead whales washed up on the beach. This isn't limited to the Windows world. I don't see much increased functionality with OpenOffice versus the Lotus SmartSuite of ten years earlier.
  
  Highspeed internet connections are considered a human right in some regions. You hide your head in shame if you're still using a dialup modem or ISDN.

Okay, now time for 2013 predictions:

Sun Home Workstation, 128-bit i986 class, 1