Get ready to fire up those dial up modems. I just ran across this old PC Mag from 1992 on Google Books thanks to Wired. (can I through in anymore companies in there?) Get a load at those computers they were advertising just 20 years ago at the dawn of the World Wide Web.
<iframe frameborder="0" scrolling="no" style="border:0px" src="http://books.google.com/books?id=HERlo0BgpGYC&lpg=PP1&pg=PP1&output=embed" width=500 height=500>
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Blast from the Past
Last posted
Nov 10, 2013 at 05:31PM EST.
Added
Nov 10, 2013 at 03:23AM EST
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The 386SX was a speed boost indeed!
20Mhz
>tfw in 20 years, people will look back and see how shitty our 2GB of RAM, 250GB hard drives, and 900Kbps download speeds were and wonder how the hell we ever survived
Those are ALREADY low by today's standards, xTSGx.
That sleek chassis.
That blisteringly fast processor.
This is the pinnacle of yesterday tech.
Yeah, I mean I just bought a laptop for $1100 with 12 GB of RAM, 500 GB HD (kinda low since it's not SSD), i7 3.2 max turbo frequency w/ 4physical cores, but 8 since it hyperthreads and a nice 2GB Nvidia GPU. The screen is a cool 17" not full HD, but still HD resolution, and I have a built-in subwoofer in addition to the sound bar. Oh, and lastly I forgot to mention the Blu-ray drive, the HDMI output, dual band wifi, and the usb 3.0 ports. That and home internet is 3 Mbps on average.
This just kinda pwns the laptops listed at $2000 with 20MHz (probably single core) processors, 1 MB of RAM, 40 MB HD, 3.5" floppy drive, 9.75" LCD, a cool VGA controller, parallel and serial port (usb wasn't around until the mid 90s), and a 3 Hour battery (probably lead is my guess on the type although my battery last about the same time honestly).
We've come a long way in 20 years. Many of these specs are more powerful at an order of over 2^10 or 1024 times. They didn't even have an on-board network controller back then. It's just beautiful how advanced and cheaper things are. Sure you can still go out and buy a $3k computer, but it's going to look sexy for probably 4 years and out preform the average machine for at least 6 to 8 years. It'll probably be scary to see where we are in 10 years though.
Spoiler alert though: Windows 8.1 pro offers support for 2 CPUs. Guess where the next step in processing power is coming from guys.
Now I know why tablets didn't take off for so long. (Page 29)