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It's insane, how far our industry has come in less than a single human lifetime. I wish I could see what will become of it in a few centuries.
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It's also kind of insane how rapid the capabilities and tech grew in just a short 10-year span in an earlier period. The B&W mid 80s Mac art style of this reminded me of approximately the same era...

For example right now if you had a $3000 desktop PC (sans cost of monitor) that was built in 2016 it would probably still be a fairly capable Linux workstation.

If you went from 1986 --> 1996 the tech jump in equivalent cost would be something like a 12 MHz 286 with EGA video card, a few MB of RAM, a MS-DOS CLI environment to in 1996 being a Pentium 66 MHz+ or AMD equivalent with significantly more RAM, a SVGA video card, tons more I/O, PCI slots, running Windows 95 or an early Linux distro, and just a whole world more capability. The 286 would be quite obsolete and barely useful for anything.


> ... or example right now if you had a $3000 desktop PC (sans cost of monitor) that was built in 2016 it would probably still be a fairly capable Linux workstation.

Oh totally. I've got an actual workstation, with ECC mem, from 2015 and a Xeon with 14 cores / 28 threads (tbh I think that CPU alone was worth more than $2 K back then) and it's still plenty quick. I use that old workstation a server though and my "workstation" is a much more modern AMD 7700X (not the latest or quickest CPU by any mean but it's already quite beasty).




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