Comment by username223
Comment by username223 a day ago
That was a weird turn to AI at the end, but otherwise an interesting reflection. I'm a little too young to have grown up in the era of the Cray-1, but even in the early 90s, processors ran at 90 MHz and hard drives cost $1 per megabyte. Back when personal computers ran at single-digit megahertz and had kilobytes of RAM, a Cray was mind-blowing.
The exciting part back then was that, while computers were never "good enough," they were getting noticeably better every few months. If you were in the market for a computer, you knew you could get a noticeably better one for the same price if you just waited a little while. The next model was exciting, because it was tangibly better. At some point personal computers became "good enough" for most people. Other than compensating for creeping software bloat, there hasn't been much reason for most people to be excited about new computers in a decade or more.