Well if all goes to hell in a hand basket like it has been wanting these past few years around the world there is no telling. I wouldn't want the world going backwards although it has forgotten too much and has to relearn what it means to make a quality brand and product that even when obsolete people would be happy to keep.

Those high end Dell laptops from 2005-2007 are fun to play with though as they were the best quality that Dell has ever made in a mobile platform. The only other that made laptops that good was Lenovo/IBM with the Thinkpad line.

I think having had something and then losing it, in terms of tech, would be more challenging for people to deal with than if we just "capped out" at a given technological level (e.g. for whatever reason let's say the 486 was the best CPU that could ever be designed, and we'd just been using them for the last 20 years). In the first scenario I think it'd be chaotic. In the later scenario my guess is that it would be pretty surprising what would be accomplished with the "capped out" hardware, no matter what level you picked - I'm basing this on looking at game consoles and what kinds of games end up being made after 4-5-6-10 years of extensive optimization and experience with the same platform on the part of software developers. Essentially resources would be shifted from "newer and faster" in terms of hardware, to heavily optimizing the software to run on what exists. To an extent I think we're already starting to see that with the rise of mobile devices and Intel/nVidia/AMD/etc hitting manufacturing walls in terms of density, speed, etc for a lot of processors (for example, I remember reading an AMD presentation that said something like "the free lunch is over" and talking about how in modern times, they can't just halve process size and double/triple clocks to improve performance).

That's pretty existential to think about. What exactly would be normal? There are people still alive today who grew up when no digital electronic computers existed as part of their modern living. Just watch movies from each decade film has existed to get an idea how people "coped." If we picked an arbitrary technology level to artificially stop, then maybe the mid 80's when we got a standard for floating point. Processors like the 80286 and 80287. What would artificially stop us though? Government mandate of pricing and use of these things? Make it illegal to use a better computer for personal use? Computing has created a lot of paradigms for communication, product development, and scientific research. There are all these things all around adding onto themselves.

edit:

obobskivich wrote:

I think having had something and then losing it, in terms of tech, would be more challenging for people to deal with than if we just "capped out" at a given technological level

That's a much more direct way to put it. It just becomes like an opinion, "how 'computer amish' are you willing to be?" The problem is we'd use those same old computers to discover again how to make better ones. The reality of physics up until now proves it could happen. We would have to artificially prevent it. Skynet. 😎

Auzner wrote:

That's pretty existential to think about. What exactly would be normal? There are people still alive today who grew up when no digital electronic computers existed as part of their modern living. Just watch movies from each decade film has existed to get an idea how people "coped." If we picked an arbitrary technology level to artificially stop, then maybe the mid 80's when we got a standard for floating point. Processors like the 80286 and 80287. What would artificially stop us though? Government mandate of pricing and use of these things? Make it illegal to use a better computer for personal use? Computing has created a lot of paradigms for communication, product development, and scientific research. There are all these things all around adding onto themselves.

The thought came because of how people take advantage of amazing things in tech, and are then so quick to throw it away once something new comes along. I mean, it's due to the wonders of mass manufacturing that we're even able to afford them in the first place, if this stuff had to be made by hand, most of the modern stuff wouldn't be made at all because it's so small, and the stuff that could be made would cost a whole lot more.

It's just kinda depressing seeing wonders of human ingenuity sitting by the curb to go into the garbage because the person, who knows nothing of how the device works in the first place has something new and this other device is "old".

I am going with 486. My main machine was down for several hours and I used my 486 as a main PC on modern sites.
It was about the minimum speed I could tolerate but it did what it had to do

fyy wrote:

people take advantage of amazing things in tech, and are then so quick to throw it away once something new comes along.
It's just kinda depressing seeing wonders of human ingenuity sitting by the curb to go into the garbage because the person, who knows nothing of how the device works in the first place has something new and this other device is "old".

It's a display of wealth. Are people really that poor if they can throw out electronics and not care? I recently just got $100k* worth of IBM Pentium laptops *(when they were new in the late 90s) . Today they are pretty much worthless, since anyone who has the spare electricity to power them would also have access to better computers.

Seeing as how much of mainstream gaming is FPS, a Pentium 166 is enough to get quake past 30fps according to the google spreadsheet benchmarks tracked here on vogons, so I'd say that. That also fits with RTSs, Dune II, Warcraft, Starcraft, & turn based, moo2, civ2.

Auzner wrote:

fyy wrote:

people take advantage of amazing things in tech, and are then so quick to throw it away once something new comes along.
It's just kinda depressing seeing wonders of human ingenuity sitting by the curb to go into the garbage because the person, who knows nothing of how the device works in the first place has something new and this other device is "old".

It's a display of wealth. Are people really that poor if they can throw out electronics and not care? I recently just got $100k* worth of IBM Pentium laptops *(when they were new in the late 90s) . Today they are pretty much worthless, since anyone who has the spare electricity to power them would also have access to better computers.

I'm not saying whether or not people are "poor", but more about the lack of appreciation in amazing things because something more amazing just came along. People will drive a car until it breaks down and dies. A car which has the equivalent miles of the circumference of the earth is "low mileage". That's not the case with computer hardware. Many computers that work just fine are tossed just because something new is there.

1998. Seriously. k6-3+'s, Turok, Final Fantasy VII, Half Life, Diablo, Warcraft 2, Might and Magic VII, Quake 1-2, mp3, DVD, Carmageddon, etc.

I wouldn't go further back then Core2Duo or Athlon 64 x2.

I would be ok with Pentium 233MMX as max. That's basically what I grew up using and sure while it had some annoying drawbacks as long as I could still use peripherals like USB I would be fine with using Windows 98SE on a Pentium 233MMX computer with 128MB ram, seriously that covers like all the games I play consistently. 🤣

As low as I'd like to go would probably be a Pentium 166 with 32MB RAM. I could still play Vangers then.

POD, Moto Racer, Vangers, Warcraft II, Starcraft, Civilization II, Starship Titanic, Red Alert, Command and Conquer, Incoming, Sim City 2000, Sim Ant - The list goes on. 😜

As low as I'd like to go would probably be a Pentium 166 with 32MB RAM. I could still play Vangers then.

I stopped chasing the state of the art once I got to 450MHz. For a long time I didn't feel like I needed any more.
Later on, one of my favorite computers I ever had was an obsolete, overclocked 440BX P3-800. I would have no problem going back to that, if not earlier. The only major thing that would have to change is the philosophy of web site design would have to come back to earth. The internet has become painful for P3s, but it doesn't have to be like that. If we all were forced back to 1999, web developers would put away the scripting crayons and let the user's browser handle the interface, like how HTML is supposed to work.
I do love Morrowind, and it needs more CPU and graphics power, but other than that sacrifice I'd be happy.

I think the 90s were an amazing decade of progress for the PC. You really needed to upgrade frequently to keep up in the 90s. A PC from 1990 was long since unusable in 2000.
The 2000s started to get dull, and it still is. PC upgrades from the tech of 2000 onward were increasingly just because you can, and less because they were needed. Then when you get to the age of multi-core CPUs, that's when we were really hitting a plateau. Multi-CPUs were never as amazing as people imagined them to be, and when they took that concept mainstream with multi-core chips, it was a sign of desperation IMO.

If I had to go back further, the first PC I think had decent performance was our 486DX2-66. I did browse the web on that towards the end of it's life, and with enough RAM it was okay. I always got frustrated with the slowness of our 386 on almost every game I played on it, so I wouldn't want to go back that far.
But to be 90%+ satisfied - the P3-800. Really just the web and youtube need to revert, and I'd be good.

I think the 90s were an amazing decade of progress for the PC. You really needed to upgrade frequently to keep up in the 90s. A PC from 1990 was long since unusable in 2000.
The 2000s started to get dull, and it still is. PC upgrades from the tech of 2000 onward were increasingly just because you can, and less because they were needed. Then when you get to the age of multi-core CPUs, that's when we were really hitting a plateau. Multi-CPUs were never as amazing as people imagined them to be, and when they took that concept mainstream with multi-core chips, it was a sign of desperation IMO.

Agree completely. Hardware these days is just BORING. Yet somehow the older hardware retains its appeal long after the race has been run. It's strange. hmmm

I could get by just fine with Core2-era hardware. I could probably get by fine with a Pentium 4-era machine as well, but I'd have to change a few of my habits. Now, if the modern web weren't such a resource hog, and things were how they were before 2008-ish, I'd probably even be fine with a Pentium or Pentium II, but again, I'd have to change a lot of my habits.

You know what, I might just try that for a week. Hook up a Pentium 4, install Linux, see how well it does for day to day tasks.

I would be happy with a Pentium 166MMX (lots of great memories from that time period). If not allowed to go that far back, then a Pentium 4 Northwood - I had one as my main rig until 9/13; by then, most websites became too slow an unbearable to tolerate.

mr_bigmouth_502 wrote:

I could get by just fine with Core2-era hardware. I could probably get by fine with a Pentium 4-era machine as well, but I'd have to change a few of my habits. Now, if the modern web weren't such a resource hog, and things were how they were before 2008-ish, I'd probably even be fine with a Pentium or Pentium II, but again, I'd have to change a lot of my habits.

You know what, I might just try that for a week. Hook up a Pentium 4, install Linux, see how well it does for day to day tasks.

Actually you can quite easily, I still use 2 Pentium 4 computers daily. One is an IBM with a 2ghz Pentium 4 (2gb RAM) and the other is a Compaq with a Hyper Threaded Pentium 4 @ 3ghz with 4gb RAM. Both run smoothly with Fedora 20 and the MATE desktop environment although you actually can run Cinnamon on both of these machines with minimal ill effects. Browsing the internet is quite fast on these machines.

Both computers are those tiny form factor business desktop computers (unfortunately I don't remember model numbers off the top of my head).

The general public would go bonkers,

Me personally, I don't know. for a period of time I only used what would be considered antiques in the computer biz.

I relied on a crappy laptop with only 4GB of HDD space, 256MB of RAM, and a 400MHz Celeron. This was back when I could squeak by on the web with Opera 10 or 11. I had the bare minimum on it. I had offbyone browser (for when opera was too slow), I had an MP3/OGG player called "billy", and a word processor called "Atlantis". Not much for games other than an NES emulator and Doom. OS was Win2k.

Sometime in 2011 or so I managed to get a hold of an old Dell and upgraded the thing to the max with 512MB of RAM, some kind of Radeon (PCI only) with about 1GB of vram, and shoved a 1.4GHz Pentium 3-S into it. It stuttered here and there, youtube and the like had to be put in low quality for best results, but for the most part it worked.

Then I later restored another old Dell, this one from 2004, I put in a P4 Extreme, a Radeon HD 4750 and 4GB of RAM (only 3.2 usable), I used that until XP lost support. (Had I known about the unofficial POS 2009 updates I'd probably still be using the beast.)

So I don't know how far back I would willingly go, I wasn't using those machines for nostalgia, but because it was either that or not computer at all. I do know that an average user would not be able to adapt because I had to specifically get hardware and software to fit my needs. If I just used the standard bloaty stuff the general public used at the original hardware specs, none of those machines would have been usable.

Just as an aside, but my local library is exclusively populated by Dell Pentium 4's on XP. They are all in constant use, people game and browse on them all day everyday with no complaints.
My most used PC at home is a Northwood P4, not even a particularly fast one, 2.4ghz.

Yeah come to think of it my Dell inspiron 6000 laptop I use is a Pentium 4 with 1.8ghz processing speed and 1.5 GB RAM. 🤣
Naturally I have Fedora 20 on it but still it's fast enough and about as portable as I ever want a computer to be. 😜 (No phones or tablets for me thanks. 🤣 )

So yeah I'd say the Pentium 4 is still a good little work horse and a totally viable budget PC.