Meatball wrote on 2022-07-12, 22:52:

I would say the PC died (as we knew it) shortly after DirectX 7.0 and the GeForce 256 releases. Of course, someone else might say the moment the Pentium was released it was all downhill. And this is all relative; there's gobs of superlative stuff after 1999/2000 - but "heart" was missing (for me). When you got into computers is likely the primary factor when reviewing the PC postmortem.

That's not wrong per se, I think. Sometimes I feel the same.
The classic DOS era of homebrewing, soldering irons and such was slowly coming to a halt at the time.

On the other hand, up until 2000, there was this kind of euphoria.
The Power Mac G3 B/W and the original iMac were released in '98.
People hoped for a better future, technical marvels, the end of wars.
It didn't come true, unfortunately.

But for a few years, the present was bright.
Windows XP debuted, it was colorful and stable.
PCs and their peripherals in translucent cases were still around, just to be replaced by strangely deformed ones.
The DVD was one the rise, video rental was going well.
Pokémon movies all over in the cinemas.. Mew! 😉

And there was some indie development scene based around Windows 9x.
2D games were being made again, people experimented with Direct3D/DDraw in late 90s/early 00s.
Emulators gained attention among the users..
SNES9x and ZSNES had their major releases.

Between 1997-2005, a lot of personal homepages formed.
Some had information/content about my other hobbies.
CB-Radio/Packet-Radio, Windows 3.1 gaming, QB45 programming, VB6, BBSes etc.
It was as if those individuals were performing a final salute for the 80s/90s.
As is the combined experience of all those retro people shined like a thousand stars.

Here's something very 90s, that I just discovered recently on Vogons.
It's a mixture of a screen saver, an RPG, a chatbot and an AI.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eHwS50Wmnx0

And then there are some really great games from the early 2000s, like Out of Order or The White Chamber.
Re: Could anyone recommend some pc games for girls?

On Caiman.us, Japanese indie games were also a recurring attraction in the 2000s.
Those people over there made great little titles like Cave Story or Undertale.
And then there were some less known gems like Tower of Heaven or Holdover.

In the early 2000s, there was a PDA hype, too.
PalmOS, Symbian/EPOC and Pocket PC rivaled each others.
Emulators popped up on those little devices.
Firstly, for Gameboy and NES, then Sega MasterSystem/GameGear and finally SNES/MD.
I fondly remember using my Handspring Visor to emulate Pokémon Yellow and Kirby on Phoinix (?) or how it was called.
(This was after I've found a video player for PalmOS, I vaguely remember.
The sample video contained a dithered footage of a hedgehog trying to hum_, uhm, climbing a toilet brush?)
On Pocket PC 2000/WinCE 3 handhelds, GAPI, the Game API, provided a simple DirectDraw/DSound counterpart. Yame used it.
Back then, SH3, MIPS and ARM (later: StrongARM, XScale) co-existed on Pocket PC.

Re: Handheld PC's: What happened to them?

Edit: I'm trying to name the positive things of the years around 2000 here.
Of course, I simultaneously missed the early-mid 90s with its last 80s waves.
Beige boxes, pagers, driving in cars without computer, listening to music and bed time stories or audio books on music cassettes.
Using those little Casio Pocket TVs to receive analogue TV with a little telescope antenna.
Using paper fax, a real torch light without LEDs, a wired phone or an early cordless phone, using walkie-talkies to talk to my friends. NiCD rechargeables, solar cell-based chargers. Light mills. Analogue SAT receivers with variable audio channels.
Playing with chess computers or R/C cars. Using null-modem cables to connect PCs, playing Click&Play adventures.
Using 5,25" diskettes in real life, still. Buying shareware CDs for use on a single/double-speed CD-ROM.

Edit: And players weren't so antisocial and dumped down yet, I think.
There was no Sony Playstation in the early 90s. 🙂👍

Edit: Or in other words, the early 90s were a time when both the analogue and digital world were in balance. Kind of. 🙂

Edit: Of course, the experience varied among countries.
Some were culturally living in the 80s, still, for example.
Or experienced completely different times, not sure.

Edit: Edited.
Edit: I'm sorry for the long post, I got carried away (again). 😥

Commercialisation can be one hallmark of so-called "loss of soul".

For example: There was a certain pioneering spirit which went hand-in-hand with the early days of PC modding, around 2000. Adding windows and tiny LCD screens to cases, making custom fanbusses, etc. It was post-retro (under the arbitrary "anything after 2000 = not massively retro" guideline), but it was still niche and organic. If you wanted to do it, you had to go to some underground forum and learn from the regulars.

Then suddenly there's a commercial seller. And another. And another. Soon there's a professional market catering to all corners. And the hobby shifts from "what cool thing did you make?", to "what commercial product did you buy?".

I'm not complaining. It's just the way it goes. In return, we get awesome products and tons of choice. A net win, by most accounts. But I do spare a thought for the lost pre-boom niches where DIY attitude and unique creations once ruled the day. We just have to take that energy and apply it in new places.

Meatball wrote on 2022-07-12, 22:52:

I would say the PC died (as we knew it) shortly after DirectX 7.0 and the GeForce 256 releases. Of course, someone else might say the moment the Pentium was released it was all downhill. And this is all relative; there's gobs of superlative stuff after 1999/2000 - but "heart" was missing (for me). When you got into computers is likely the primary factor when reviewing the PC postmortem.

It's an interesting period to take as example the Directx7.0 one cause the battle of the fastest components became interesting but probably too much intense maybe loosing that "heart" once the older companies that lived during the '90 became to close (beside when for some wrong choices like 3dfx but also some who tried much more than that, like original S3, Cirrus Logic, Trident etc..) or change their market or name. Still there was the Directx8.x and Directx9 period to arrive and imho that was still an interesting period maybe until the Radeon 9700/9800 and after that all became really not interesting to me.

I enjoyed the 80s and early 90s but for me the peak was around windows 98 and 2000, DX8.

Beyond that something happened but I'm not sure what. Feature bloat and hardware too often not operating as well as expected, or maybe I just got sick of the IT industry's failure to learn to make things "just work". I'm thinking of constant battles with wifi drivers, on board NIC drivers, sound card drivers, on board sound for multi-core motherboards, memory speed complexities... and all the automatic updating of everything... just made it all less fun and more of a chore.

And there's also the tendency for everything to turn into collecting and listing stuff, always online and so on. All of which means more of your own soul gets sucked into backing up, version checking etc etc and less of you is left to enjoy what you got into computers for in the first place.

So yeah I think the high point was the peak of pure usability and focus on what you wanted the PC for, and the decline was when system maintenance and administrration became a major routine task.

386SX wrote on 2022-07-13, 07:16:

Meatball wrote on 2022-07-12, 22:52:

I would say the PC died (as we knew it) shortly after DirectX 7.0 and the GeForce 256 releases. Of course, someone else might say the moment the Pentium was released it was all downhill. And this is all relative; there's gobs of superlative stuff after 1999/2000 - but "heart" was missing (for me). When you got into computers is likely the primary factor when reviewing the PC postmortem.

It's an interesting period to take as example the Directx7.0 one cause the battle of the fastest components became interesting but probably too much intense maybe loosing that "heart" once the older companies that lived during the '90 became to close (beside when for some wrong choices like 3dfx but also some who tried much more than that, like original S3, Cirrus Logic, Trident etc..) or change their market or name. Still there was the Directx8.x and Directx9 period to arrive and imho that was still an interesting period maybe until the Radeon 9700/9800 and after that all became really not interesting to me.

Yes, I agree. The Windows XP era was pretty good, and I refer to this era as the "dead cat bounce" which lasted up until PCIe really took hold, the arrival of the GeForce 6 & 7 series, the final gasps of Internet Explorer 6, and the introduction of Windows Vista - You could actually feel "the end is nigh" just looking at Windows Vista. Windows 7 tried to "shock a flatline," though.

After XP, it was all down-hill. The XP years were my favorite, because we had so many new and interesting avenues to explore with new hardware and software choices and you could go whichever way felt best to you, not to mention we also saw the rise of Linux and other alternative OS choices. The early years, where XP overlapped with 98/ME had some great strides in gaming and gaming hardware, especially in the 3D acceleration market and gaming audio. It's a shame we'll probably never see such days again, with no real advancements or things to get excited about.

PC never died or became soulless, the software just got really bad. We've papered over it now with extremely fast computers, SSDs, etc., but it's a real problem.

songo wrote on 2022-07-10, 18:10:

Back in the day, in 90's, Amiga 'elitists' considered IBM compatibiles inferior machines that lacked soul. Here, in Poland, they even called PC 'clones' and their users 'clonards'.

I didn't understand such concepts but it changed once I felt myself similar thing at some point. For me, it's started with Windows XP era. No DOS and its legacy, computers became ubiquitous, graphics whore arm race took ridiculous shape, RTS genre died, FPS was infected with WWII Call of Duty crap, fighting games and other arcade genres migrated fully to consoles... Magical machines became sad, gray boxes for casuals and vicious MMO addicts. It's comparable to what modern Android gaming is now and I hate it as well.

Guys, what's borderline for you? Or maybe you are still excited with new computers and the charm is still here?

For me the charm isn't really there anymore.
I find it hard to consider what I'd say is a soul of a PC but for me it's been a very slow process. The more PCs became less personal and more connected (as a slave computer and less an individual computer), the less I consider a PC to have a soul.

I'm really disliking the power the big corps are slowly strangling the computer world with and at least as scary is how uninterested the general public seems to be over this as they prefer to stay within their comfort zone. Surely it's easier to just use steam instead of having to swap out disks all the time and that having no internet means some of your games can't be played in offline mode or singleplayer mode (like why?) is just a matter of bad luck and supposedly not by design (which of course it is).

What worries me the most is big companies silently manipulating general public behavior and this same public mass being ambiguous about it (they just don't care, which is basically paved this way by the same companies that started this manipulation to begin with).

PCs are slowly devolving back into terminals again.

For me any piece of hardware that is stable and works flawlessly is soulless. And I'm glad that PCs of today are soulless.

I've held on to "outdated" "dont connect that to the internet" Windows 7 for as long as I could despite the constant shamers. I could still use Win95 themes with ease and have buttons and borders to grab and click instead of flat implied "UX" buttons and way less 'something went wrongs'. There's a lot of personalizing to be had in that one, before the whole metro mobile push anyway.

leileilol wrote on 2022-07-13, 18:44:

I've held on to "outdated" "dont connect that to the internet" Windows 7 for as long as I could despite the constant shamers. I could still use Win95 themes with ease and have buttons and borders to grab and click instead of flat implied "UX" buttons and way less 'something went wrongs'. There's a lot of personalizing to be had in that one, before the whole metro mobile push anyway.

I personally divide between my everyday life and hobby. For everyday life I use Windows 10 and contemporary hardware and for hobby ... for hobby I may use even abacus.

I never looked at PCs as having a soul but I think people give that attribute out to systems that are not mainstream or very customizable.

For me older machines were much more customizable when everything wasn't integrated into the motherboard, and you had many more venders out there to choose from. Same with software when there was massive competition before Adobe and MS office won.

Once Ryzen 4 comes out with built in video standard the vast majority of modern PCs will have no cards in them at all.

Tetrium wrote on 2022-07-13, 17:27:

For me the charm isn't really there anymore. I find it hard to consider what I'd say is a soul of a PC but for me it's been a ve […]
Show full quote

For me the charm isn't really there anymore.
I find it hard to consider what I'd say is a soul of a PC but for me it's been a very slow process. The more PCs became less personal and more connected (as a slave computer and less an individual computer), the less I consider a PC to have a soul.

I'm really disliking the power the big corps are slowly strangling the computer world with and at least as scary is how uninterested the general public seems to be over this as they prefer to stay within their comfort zone. Surely it's easier to just use steam instead of having to swap out disks all the time and that having no internet means some of your games can't be played in offline mode or singleplayer mode (like why?) is just a matter of bad luck and supposedly not by design (which of course it is).

What worries me the most is big companies silently manipulating general public behavior and this same public mass being ambiguous about it (they just don't care, which is basically paved this way by the same companies that started this manipulation to begin with).

PCs are slowly devolving back into terminals again.

+1000

I've been saying the same about computers regressing into terminals for a while now. People in general seem not to care, and most even happily buy excuses like "by streaming games you get the advantage of graphics being rendered on super-powerful server clusters!". Bullshit, it's not about convenience or performance, it's all about control and always has been, so they can randomly decide that you can no longer use the product you "purchased" a couple of years ago.

We're at a point in time where computers have the ability to process such an amount of data that would have been unthinkable a few decades ago, and yet we decide they are best used as dumb terminals? Even for basic applications such as word processors and spreadsheets the tendency is to move to a crappy and limited "web UI"... it's such a waste of processing power... wait, no, actually most of that power is dedicated to handle a gazillion lines of bloated JavaScript. Because we all love having browser tabs that need hundreds of MB of memory to run, right?

PnP was the beginning of the end. UEFI was the end.

Jo22 wrote on 2022-07-12, 23:55:

That's not wrong per se, I think. Sometimes I feel the same. The classic DOS era of homebrewing, soldering irons and such was s […]
Show full quote

Meatball wrote on 2022-07-12, 22:52:

I would say the PC died (as we knew it) shortly after DirectX 7.0 and the GeForce 256 releases. Of course, someone else might say the moment the Pentium was released it was all downhill. And this is all relative; there's gobs of superlative stuff after 1999/2000 - but "heart" was missing (for me). When you got into computers is likely the primary factor when reviewing the PC postmortem.

That's not wrong per se, I think. Sometimes I feel the same.
The classic DOS era of homebrewing, soldering irons and such was slowly coming to a halt at the time.

On the other hand, up until 2000, there was this kind of euphoria.
The Power Mac G3 B/W and the original iMac were released in '98.
People hoped for a better future, technical marvels, the end of wars.
It didn't come true, unfortunately.

But for a few years, the present was bright.
Windows XP debuted, it was colorful and stable.
PCs and their peripherals in translucent cases were still around, just to be replaced by strangely deformed ones.
The DVD was one the rise, video rental was going well.
Pokémon movies all over in the cinemas.. Mew! 😉

And there was some indie development scene based around Windows 9x.
2D games were being made again, people experimented with Direct3D/DDraw in late 90s/early 00s.
Emulators gained attention among the users..
SNES9x and ZSNES had their major releases.

Between 1997-2005, a lot of personal homepages formed.
Some had information/content about my other hobbies.
CB-Radio/Packet-Radio, Windows 3.1 gaming, QB45 programming, VB6, BBSes etc.
It was as if those individuals were performing a final salute for the 80s/90s.
As is the combined experience of all those retro people shined like a thousand stars.

Here's something very 90s, that I just discovered recently on Vogons.
It's a mixture of a screen saver, an RPG, a chatbot and an AI.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eHwS50Wmnx0

And then there are some really great games from the early 2000s, like Out of Order or The White Chamber.
Re: Could anyone recommend some pc games for girls?

On Caiman.us, Japanese indie games were also a recurring attraction in the 2000s.
Those people over there made great little titles like Cave Story or Undertale.
And then there were some less known gems like Tower of Heaven or Holdover.

In the early 2000s, there was a PDA hype, too.
PalmOS, Symbian/EPOC and Pocket PC rivaled each others.
Emulators popped up on those little devices.
Firstly, for Gameboy and NES, then Sega MasterSystem/GameGear and finally SNES/MD.
I fondly remember using my Handspring Visor to emulate Pokémon Yellow and Kirby on Phoinix (?) or how it was called.
(This was after I've found a video player for PalmOS, I vaguely remember.
The sample video contained a dithered footage of a hedgehog trying to hum_, uhm, climbing a toilet brush?)
On Pocket PC 2000/WinCE 3 handhelds, GAPI, the Game API, provided a simple DirectDraw/DSound counterpart. Yame used it.
Back then, SH3, MIPS and ARM (later: StrongARM, XScale) co-existed on Pocket PC.

Re: Handheld PC's: What happened to them?

Edit: I'm trying to name the positive things of the years around 2000 here.
Of course, I simultaneously missed the early-mid 90s with its last 80s waves.
Beige boxes, pagers, driving in cars without computer, listening to music and bed time stories or audio books on music cassettes.
Using those little Casio Pocket TVs to receive analogue TV with a little telescope antenna.
Using paper fax, a real torch light without LEDs, a wired phone or an early cordless phone, using walkie-talkies to talk to my friends. NiCD rechargeables, solar cell-based chargers. Light mills. Analogue SAT receivers with variable audio channels.
Playing with chess computers or R/C cars. Using null-modem cables to connect PCs, playing Click&Play adventures.
Using 5,25" diskettes in real life, still. Buying shareware CDs for use on a single/double-speed CD-ROM.

Edit: And players weren't so antisocial and dumped down yet, I think.
There was no Sony Playstation in the early 90s. 🙂👍

Edit: Or in other words, the early 90s were a time when both the analogue and digital world were in balance. Kind of. 🙂

Edit: Of course, the experience varied among countries.
Some were culturally living in the 80s, still, for example.
Or experienced completely different times, not sure.

Edit: Edited.
Edit: I'm sorry for the long post, I got carried away (again). 😥

I feel the beginning of the end was Windows 95/Pentium PC's, and the final nail in the coffin was 2013 when everyone started moving to tablets, smartphones, and smartTVs.

While the 95/Pentium era still had some coolness/soul carrying on for a little while, by about 1999 or so was really when things started to feel much like today and are boring. That's why I've been dabbling with these things for over 20 years, 🤣. To me, those old <Pentium machines had quite a "personality" of sorts, ranging from slow and cranky to the point of being like a character in a Monty Python sketch, to being almost entirely invulnerable to the changes of the time, like Obi Wan Kenobi or that guy down the street who still daily's a 60's pickup with a manual choke. Have had a few 486 systems, including my current one, that seem to just run anything within reason even if the minimum system requirements are 2 generations newer. Got Firefox LTSB on my 486 DX4-100 under Windows 2000 running off a SATA HDD on a SATA to PATA Converter, it works, it's slow....but just the fact it works is more than amazing enough.

ThinkpadIL wrote on 2022-07-13, 18:39:

For me any piece of hardware that is stable and works flawlessly is soulless. And I'm glad that PCs of today are soulless.

the hardware can be as flawless as it wants if the software on top of it breaks all the time 😁

Plasma wrote on 2022-07-13, 20:26:

PnP was the beginning of the end. UEFI was the end.

Quoted for 100% truth. UEFI is an evil thing which has signaled the end to "bare metal" as we knew and loved it. It's really really sad that things had to come to that. Now it's just one "souless" machine after the other in some company's walled garden. Along with the absurdity of how ridiculous and bloated the Internet has become. We've lost the real game. PCs are officially souless, "obeying" machines now.

Whenever I see a computer boot up without a Windows or Apple logo being displayed I know it is not soulless:)

imi wrote on 2022-07-14, 01:57:

ThinkpadIL wrote on 2022-07-13, 18:39:

For me any piece of hardware that is stable and works flawlessly is soulless. And I'm glad that PCs of today are soulless.

the hardware can be as flawless as it wants if the software on top of it breaks all the time 😁

... then it gets a soul and I try to fix it as soon as possible. 😁

...shitpost alert....

You know what PC's got SOOOOOOOUL...

Ol' Dell & The Pea Seas!!!

The hit x86 Soul Group coming to your town from Backfill Records

Featuring

Ol' Dell
Irving Belmont Macchio
Nathan Edgar Clementine-Versa
Twoeightysix Amdek
and Packard Bell

And their smash hit songs such as....
- You Really got a Latch on Me
- Dancing on the 640K Memory Ceiling
- A-Train
- Let's Stay Connected
- Knock on Faux Wood
- Hold On, I'm Cachin'

And of course the #1 hit of 1981 I-B-M-X-8-6-P-C

Maaaaaan, these PC's got souuuuul!

Come see them at the Dot Matrix Amptheater Festival with openers Billy Squier Industrial (BSi) and Comps Without Pi Hats!