next »

[sorceress]

- multi GHz CPU
- high-res display
- surround sound audio
- and the fact I can switch from playing emulated 20 year old games, to the latest AAA title, to typing up reports for work all in the space of a couple of seconds.

I agree these are good things we have now, and a new design should be capable of these things. I've never cared for 3D audio however, but that's just my personal feeling.

Back in the day I suffered with no end of problems with the power supplies on Commodore 64s, and don't get me started on the wobbly nature of the various add on devices for the Spectrum!

Power supplies were not up to standard in those days: a combination of having passive cooling (airflow was easily obstructed), and that they were manufactured using cheap components that were not thermally stable (the electrical properties of them changed over time).

We're better at making PSUs now as it's something we've had to get better at as hardware has demanded more power. Whether we've learned our lesson about not using the cheaper thermally unstable components is another matter.

You obviously feel that there's something missing from todays computers that has been lost over the years, and that the need for a consistant hardware platform is not being met by todays consoles.

At risk of repeating myself, my interest isn't in consoles; it's in general purpose computers. A consistent hardware configuration is only one piece of the puzzle. But I believe that that alone would help to pull people together, and stimulate formation of a happy user community, which in turn improves the user experience.

I think the reason people care so much about frames-per-second and whatnot is because there is this never-ending need and opportunity to upgrade one component or another. I talked about distribution briefly in a previous post. 

When there is a never-ending upgrade path, people feel a need to measure how far behind the curve they are, or how far in front they are, and benchmarks like FPS is one of these measurements. This involves judging ones own benchmarks by comparing them with other people's benchmarks. The feelings associated with that process are innately competitive rather than being cooperative, so are not helpful for building a happy user community.

[moi]

I think there might be a market for very low specs ,barebone computers that would be like the modern equivalent of zx spectrums because todays computers are generally too powerful and almost imopsible to program a,d exploit to their fullest capacity.
Something that you could buy a dozen for 500 dollars and then use them everywhere in your house and program with machine code or shtg like that. I long for the simplicity of 8 bit computers, nowaday all is bloated interface.

That said, everybody who knew old computers first hand , can't really honestly regret anything about them.

[sorceress]

I think there might be a market for very low specs ,barebone computers that would be like the modern equivalent of zx spectrums because todays computers are generally too powerful and almost imopsible to program a,d exploit to their fullest capacity.
Something that you could buy a dozen for 500 dollars and then use them everywhere in your house and program with machine code or shtg like that. I long for the simplicity of 8 bit computers, nowaday all is bloated interface.

For that there is the Arduino, and the Raspberry Pi.

http://www.arduino.cc/
http://www.raspberrypi.org/

[braindigitalis]

The problem with smartphones is that they're closed platforms (at least ios and android are). You can open them up a bit with jailbreaks but still... neither ios nor android even have a central file browser. Smartphones are definitely multi-purpose devices but not all purpose in the same way as a "proper" computer. They're decent for standard "consumer-level" stuff like checking email, browsing the internet, casual gaming etc, but for more specialized activities they're extremely limited.

Ok, i will bite, this is an interesting topic.

Firstly just to correct a minor error on C.A. Sinclair's part the android platform is a lot more open than the ios platform, and even has a file manager and for the most part full filesystem access, apps are not restricted to just their directory and jailed, and you can install what you like without any kind of permission from google and without a jailbreak. At least, this has been my experience of android 2.3 on the samsung galaxy S2.

Secondly, yes, i do agree that a lot of aspects of older computers were better. When i say 'older computers', I used to own a BBC Master 128k. It was a beast in its time, but still within the realms of plausibility for one man to know it inside out within 2 years, right down the the timings of i/o ports and the hardware level.

I loved that system, i loved the simplicity of the system and that i wasnt even afraid to take a soldering iron to its motherboard. I remember soldering in a switch to switch a memory range between an EEPROM chip and RAM, depending on what i intended to do that day.

I also remember sending off 16k of machine code i had assembled myself to be burnt to EEPROM so i could plug it into that machine, giving it functionality similar to a PC's BIOS password.

Who these days would know how, or even dare to take a soldering iron to their motherboard and/or extend their BIOS with homebrew chips?

I learned more in those few initial years on an underpowered old BBC Micro than i did in following years on my first PC.

Just to make you wonder, i owned my BBC Micro when I was 15 and at that time, the Pentium 2 was just coming into production, and the average RAM in a PC was 32mb. My BBC Master 128k had 128k of RAM (obviously) and a 640k 5.25 inch disk drive, with feeble graphics, but i loved it non-the-less.

In fact, the only thing that made me move to a PC was the ever-onwards march of the internet and its intrusion into our daily lives, and the fact that college insisted on teaching us how to program a PC.

Simplicity is king and i lament its loss under many hundreds of layers of abstraction, even if this is required for the average person to use a computer.

In effect, we have traded simplicity for the programmer for simplicity for the end user.