Computer Nostalgia

In the world of computers everything is moving fast. Especially the pace of hardware development is often astounding.
Just these days i had this “Wow” experience and flash of nostalgia when i got an old computer mag from the year 1995 in my fingers. Top of the line computers were running Intel Pentiums with 100MHz. Wasn’t that longer ago than 8 years? No, it wasn’t obviously.
A few interesting and long forgotten facts about hardware in these days:

• CD-ROM’s available were running at a maximum of 4x speed
• HD’s commonly available had around one gigabyte of capacity. Only some SCSI drives with up to 4 gigabytes storage space, but hardly affordable.
• RAM in a machine off the shelves was 8 megabytes in size, and for what we pay for 512 MB today, you did not even get 4 MB back then.
• Not to forget, the graphics cards in consumer machines gave you a resolution of 800×600 pixels if you were up to date.

Thinking about what hardware we are running today, this has been painful back then. Possibilities in computer use had been severely limited just by the lacking capabilities of hardware and available processing power. These were the days when you did not find a computer in nearly every home, just because it still was too expensive.
The race for faster machines did not stop since then, if anything the speed picked up. New generations of CPU’s to be seen every second year at least. But compared to the mentioned 8 years ago, today must be like heaven for every computer geek. Hardware is nearly dirt-cheap today and is at the same time capable of running any kind of software fast enough.
I think a while ago we have reached the point where we are not waiting for our computer anymore when we work, but the other way around. Of course if you are working with huge images or render things with your 3D software, calculations still take some time. But not in a way that it would be inconvenient.
So realizing this, i am quite happy with how computer technology has come along and where we are now. Brave new world? No, just right the way it is.