When Computers Were Cool
This article kind of reads like a car magazine version of cool. Man, we had big huge V8&#x27;s! We were slicing for any edge we could get! Change was in the air &amp; we were proud to be on top! Our MHz were mighty, our caches large!<p>It still strikes me as ultra-consumerist, the right to nerd out via niche knowledge, geeking out of displacement &amp; carbs &amp; tranmissions, pride in the machine.<p>What seems utterly absent is that operators used to be cool. There used to be wizards, masters of the machine, who could make it dance. We used to be tuning ourselves in, better harnessing the capabilities about us. But consumerism has won out. The pride in the numbers has taken over, &amp; pushes on &amp; on, to such great heights that the numbers are irrelevant, gratuitous.  The close connection with the machine, the making it an extension of ourselves, that has faded, that has not maintained, we no longer have those role models, those operators of supreme power no longer prefigure in our imaginations.<p>Now a days, almost all our experts are harnessed, lashed to large massive industrial machines. We no longer have the local, scattered computing experts. There are those operating at and inside FAANG scale, those operating their sizable or medium scale systems, and everyone else, and few of these are hyper-empowered individuals, few are wizards: all are either workers within their greater vaster machines, or users of the other expert technology they happen upon.<p>Computers are still cool. We are less so.<p>&gt; there was a world of curious and wonderful applications written with nothing but SGI hardware in mind: web authoring, video editing, image manipulation and graphics creation unavailable on any other platform<p>More pointless consumeristic exclusivity.<p>&gt; Yet there isn&#x27;t, today, an equivalent of the SGI Indy, or the Sun SPARCstation, or the DEC Alpha, or any of the other professional workstations. The only thing that&#x27;s on offer is more of the same user experience, only slightly faster.<p>Meh. You _can_ go spend a couple thousand on a 32 or 64 core ThreadRipper or Epyc? You can go stuff your system full of TB of ram, or dozens of GB&#x2F;s of NVMe. You can go add 100Gbit ethernet. You can go put in a colossal GPU. These will allow you new powers, but they are not reserved for some special class of machines. They are part of the same machines, with the same power as other machines, but greater specs, greater numbers. Your claim to exclusivity, your ability to feel special, is diminished, in this PC-compatible era. I&#x27;m not sorry to see these competencies subsumed, made generally available, no longer a part of elite, select niches, particular breeds of machines.<p>I do think there are still some magical bits of computing. To be honest, Intel&#x27;s latest Ice Lake mobile chip is unlike anything else the world has seen. It doesn&#x27;t have a lot of connectivity, only two ports of connectivity built into the chip, but each port can do 40Gbps of mixed USB or DisplayPort or PCIe, and that&#x27;s magical. USB4 is good for 80Gbps of DisplayPort. We need to get on this kind of magic, this level of cool. Finally, the consumers have non-junk connectivity. 1Gbit ethernet finally made apparent as the tiny little straw it is, a joke, and USB4 does support the system-to-system connectivity to drive home what a sham we&#x27;ve been living with, an unending non-upgrading set of standard peripherals that haven&#x27;t improved much at all.<p>But mostly, I think computers being cool come down to an issue of consumerism. Of everyone experiencing the same mundane application-centric small-operating-system world. A world where cloud has taken over, even for consumers, where we want our stuff accessible anywhere, anytime, from any device, and where what we do on any given box is hardly relevant, and, at this point, well patterened &amp; un-original, undifferentiated, all pretty much the same. The OS has no chance to differentiate, because all of the power, all of the use, all of the systems have kept effervescing higher &amp; higher, away from us, into that great mighty cloud above. How can we be cool, when everything that&#x27;s happening is so very far away?