# Ten Years Of Technology



## AshleyAshes (Dec 16, 2009)

So the year 2010 is coming up and it just has me reflecting on how every day technology in my life has changed in the last ten years and when I actually stop to think about just how far we've come this decade, it's sorta mind blowing.  So I figured I'd post some of these things and others would post there and we'd all feel nostalgic for our Zip Drives and N64s.

Ten years ago my high school was slapping â€˜Y2K Readyâ€™ stickers on the PCs and we all worried a bit if the bank machines would work in Jan.  Now weâ€™re good until 2038 hopefully.

Ten years ago I got my eMachine eMonster 500A, a 500mhz Pentium 3 with 64MB of RAM and a 16mb Rage 128 based All-In-Wonder card.  I thought it was a gaming super computer.  Now thatâ€™s barely enough to run a minimalist server.

Ten years ago, putting 650mb or 700mb of information was a huge deal and only one person in my circle of friends even had a burner.  Now 8.5GB DVDs is a cake walk and 25GB Blu-Rays are just coming into general affordability.  Not only that but we can put four, eight, sixteen and even thirty two GB on flash cards and USB drives.

Ten years ago, we thought 100mbps Ethernet for LAN parties is huge.  Hell that was faster than our little ATA33 and ATA66 hard drives could push the data!  Now we can do 100mbps+ wirelessly through the air with wifi.

Ten years ago, the PlayStation had only recently solidified optical discs as the key medium for game distribution in consoles.  Since then, DVDs have been used and then Blu-Ray discs and now discs may become obsolete as direct downloads of games to PCs and consoles becomes increasingly popular.


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## Lil Mal (Dec 17, 2009)

Don't forget about monitors and televisions. They used to me huge, now they are getting as thin as a wallet.


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## Sinjo (Dec 17, 2009)

Don't forget we have crude teleporters now.


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## Azbulldog (Dec 17, 2009)

Aside from dialup, video game consoles, my best example would be the fact that my crappy iPod holds what...? Over 40,000 3 1/2 floppy disks?


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## Carenath (Dec 17, 2009)

Ten years ago, people were still using dial-up.. our school still had old and aging Apple Macs (System 7.5).
My computer needed a dedicated MPEG2 decoder board just to play DVDs.

"High Speed internet" consisted of a leased line and only businesses had them.
Mobile Internet, meant 9.6Kbps (or 14.4 if you were lucky) over a mobile phone.. and a laptop.

10GB hard drives were considered massive. Now, 1TB drives in RAID are becomming common on desktop systems.

We've gone from 4 analogue satellite channels and bulky 32" CRTs being the rage... to inch-thick 52" flat-panels and HD.


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## Lobar (Dec 17, 2009)

The hardware in my phone outperforms the hardware I had in my desktop ten years ago.


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## ToeClaws (Dec 17, 2009)

Lobar said:


> The hardware in my phone outperforms the hardware I had in my desktop ten years ago.



^--- This.  This sums up 10 years of technological advances perfectly.


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## AshleyAshes (Dec 17, 2009)

Carenath said:


> bulky 32" CRTs being the rage... to inch-thick 52" flat-panels and HD


 
This September I bought a Sony KV-27FS100 27" CRT SDTV that weighs 99.5lbs.


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## Rushnerd (Dec 20, 2009)

My GTX 280 GPU has more processing power then the entire computer lab at my middle school ten years ago.


Ten years ago the capacity of a hard drive is now the amount of RAM you can put in a basic home computer. (Or if you want to get into SSD's...lol)


Since ten years ago the video/tv/monitor/gaming/movie/standard resolution has increased by a factor of 5. From a VGA size for gaming resolution, today's largest monitors have scaled up by a factor of 13.3.


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## Runefox (Dec 20, 2009)

Actually, over 10 years, display resolution hasn't really changed much aside from going widescreen, unless you count the recent change in resolution in the TV/console/video market. My old 15" CRT (KTX branded) monitor from 1998 was capable of going to 1280x960 (square; 1280x1024 would have been squished as that's 5:4, not 4:3) at 60Hz, and was capable of hitting 1600x1200 at 30Hz/Interlace. A friend of mine had a much larger (19"?) monitor back in the day, and with his Voodoo 3 2000, he played Heretic 2 and Kingpin at 1280x960-1600x1200. PC gamers have had "HD" since not long after the dawn of 3D acceleration, where 3DFX was still king, nVidia was just beginning to emerge as a name in the market with the RIVA TNT, and ATI was beginning to come round with the RAGE Fury Pro series to contest the Voodoo 3.

There are major differences in the technology between now and then, and we have things like anti-aliasing (though it did exist, it wasn't practical), multitexturing, anisotropic filtering, bumpmapping, vertex shaders, pixel shaders, HDR lighting, and now even compute shaders, to name only a few of the advancements since then. They combine to give us what we now perceive as HD, but in reality, the display resolution (or at least the resolutions available) never really changed in practice over the last decade.


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## AshleyAshes (Dec 20, 2009)

Rushnerd said:


> Ten years ago the capacity of a hard drive is now the amount of RAM you can put in a basic home computer. (Or if you want to get into SSD's...lol)


 
No, not really. Ten years ago a new off the self computer typically came with 8GB-20GB of storage. We arn't nearly close to that in a current off the shelf PC. It's technicly possibly but well into the extreme end. For 'home computers', anything higher than 4GB is pretty rare right now.

The computer I got on Christmas 1999 itself had 13GB. 



Rushnerd said:


> Since ten years ago the video/tv/monitor/gaming/movie/standard resolution has increased by a factor of 5. From a VGA size for gaming resolution, today's largest monitors have scaled up by a factor of 13.3.


 
Also, not really.  I'm actually sitting behind a pair of Dell P1110 Trinitron monitors, both manufactured in 2000.  They are both running at 1600x1200 @ 85hz, the only reason they arn't set higher is cause I find it makes the icons too small.  These are high end CRT monitors but almost every off the shelf PC monitor at the end of 1999 was capable of at *least* 1024x768.

What would have been an accurate statement is to say the cost of large monitor has come down dramatically.  Ten years ago 21" monitors were considdered huge.  These 21" P1110's I'm behind had an MSRP of $599.  Now a days you can get a 22" LCD in the $250-$100 range depending only on the quality of the monitor.


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## Rushnerd (Dec 20, 2009)

Okay okay I get the point I wasn't completely on point but you don't have to tear me apart. For the ram I was thinking a 8GbHDD to 4X2gb sticks (or maybe even i7 amount of ram), I'm saying you can do it now. Sorry I gave horrible examples.
Runefox... guess I was unware we had 1600x1200 monitors back then, disregaurd my ignorant post. Still applies to video games (even though they only draw@720p now) and video standards though.

Thought i'd try to do something different then hard drive size or look at our cellphones.


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## AshleyAshes (Dec 20, 2009)

Rushnerd said:


> Okay okay I get the point I wasn't completely on point but you don't have to tear me apart. For the ram I was thinking a 8GbHDD to 4X2gb sticks (or maybe even i7 amount of ram), I'm saying you can do it now. Sorry I gave horrible examples.


 
8GB is still not really representative of a 'basic home computer'. You could do it easily but if you go to any store selling PCs, you are going to see very, very, very few units selling more than 4GB.



Rushnerd said:


> Runefox... guess I was unware we had 1600x1200 monitors back then, disregaurd my ignorant post. Still applies to video games (even though they only draw@720p now) and video standards though.


 
Consoles had a reason though. They only ran at 640x480 at the most because they only connected to standard def TVs. Though some Xbox1 titles could render at 720p, the list is short. This really isn't a story of video game resolution improvement but of the introduction and mass acceptance of high definition TVs. It's the first time we saw a real switch. It's important to know that the NTSC Color television signal that SDTVs were using was basically unchanged since the 1950's. Going to HDTV is a huge leap now.


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## Collie (Dec 20, 2009)

The amount of detail that you can put in things like games now is incredible, compared to ten years ago.  Ten years ago you needed extraordinarily high power computers to render high quality 3D models.  Think about Star Trek Voyager.  The detail of ship models in that is now close to the level of detail in games like EVE.  Multiple CPUs are a common thing, even quad cores.  You could only find quad cpu systems in very high end business machines, running at a third the speed of what you find now.  The amount of RAM in most systems is astounding.  My first computer was a Gateway ESS 400C bought in 1999, and it had 64 MB of RAM.  My current machine has /96 times/ that.  Ten years before that, systems had around 4 MB, only 16 times more.  The rate of advance has been astounding.  It's going to be interesting to see what happens.


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## Rushnerd (Dec 20, 2009)

Collie said:


> The amount of RAM in most systems is astounding.  My first computer was a Gateway ESS 400C bought in 1999, and it had 64 MB of RAM.  My current machine has /96 times/ that.


Yeah I tried to make that point...

_64k should be enough for anybody though._


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## Runefox (Dec 20, 2009)

I really don't mean to seem like I'm picking on you, but people say this all the time:



Rushnerd said:


> _64k should be enough for anybody though._


(640K, actually) I don't think anyone actually said that. It was originally a limitation of the IBM PC BIOS (later called conventional memory to differentiate it from other types) and the Intel 8086/8088 CPU, and came from the requirement to set aside 384KB of memory handles for the CPU to access the computer's hardware. It could be circumvented to allow nearly the full 1MB ("upper" memory) to be used by making use of a driver to scan and allocate empty parts of RAM that weren't being used by hardware access. On 286-class machines and later with their new "protected mode" (and on some 808x-class machines with special hardware), it became possible to access Extended Memory (Expanded memory for 808x) - All of the computer's installed memory became available, be it 2MB, 4MB, 8MB, 16MB, 32MB... It required a driver to activate, and in some cases could cause instability, but became necessary for later DOS games and applications to run properly (though every program still had a requirement of a certain amount of conventional memory).

... I got my own computer not long after the Pentiums arrived, so my only real need to learn about any of that was to get DOS games running, preferably with sound. That was back when the operating system didn't actually handle sound or video, and you had to tell the game itself where your sound card was (in memory address terms) and what type of sound/video card you had.

It was pretty fulfilling when you got everything working just so, but in the end, it's a *good thing you don't have to fuck with drivers any more*.

... Oh. Wait.


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## AshleyAshes (Dec 21, 2009)

Runefox said:


> It was pretty fulfilling when you got everything working just so, but in the end, it's a *good thing you don't have to fuck with drivers any more*.
> 
> ... Oh. Wait.


 
At least now you're not screwed if the game didn't COME with a driver for the sound card. Now the game just goes 'Yo!, DirectSound, wassup Brah? :3" All you have to do is make sure that DirectX/Windows has the right driver. Overall it is much easier these days.

God, remember the GamePort?  Hardware limit of two axis and four buttons, fancy drivers to get more than that, big ass port, games needing to be calibrated EVERY TIME you start them.

...USB makes life so much easier now.


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## Runefox (Dec 21, 2009)

Ah, that's true. Though I do wish I could use my Gravis Gamepad Pros on Vista. The closest thing I can manage is with that "Gameport to USB" box I have, but it emulates a controller instead of translating for, say, the Gravis driver. So... I've got two GP Pro's that I can't use. :/ Oh, well, I've got Logitech to make me happy now with my Dual Analog, ChillStream (fan died; Whoa, seen that one coming?! 8D) and RumblePad Pro. And my 360 Wireless Receiver. But their D-Pads are strangely even less effective than the Gravis ones were (and they were pretty bad).


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## AshleyAshes (Dec 21, 2009)

Well you shoulda gone with the GamePad Pro _USB_ then.   God knows you could probably find them in some backwards shop.  My local THRIFT STORE had one. @_@  Lacking analog, it's not my thing though.  And only the original brings back the nostalgic vibe.

But USB in the last ten years as really improved things.  We had accessories on PS/2, serial, parallel port, daisychained parallel port.  It was nuts.  Now we just jam every single thing we can into a USB port, any USB port and BAM.  No more specialty hard to find keyboards and mice for game consoles either, USB all the way!


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## Foxy_Boy (Dec 21, 2009)

Innovation!

That same annoying shit... But now it fits in your pocket so you can be bothered all hours of the day! Isn't technology great?


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## Runefox (Dec 21, 2009)

> Well you shoulda gone with the GamePad Pro USB then.


Yeah, well, my computer didn't _have_ USB ports back when I bought it! >=| I had to specifically look for the Gameport version. 

But yeah, USB is pretty awesome. It makes one wonder why more "standards" for components don't exist, like the new-ish HD Audio standard that's supposedly going to get rid of all our hardware driver issues (yeah, right, just like AC'97 did), or the old NE2000 "standard" (read: lots and lots of clones) for network cards. Why is it that there hasn't been standardization for such things? I can understand video cards given their wide range of ability, but network controllers and audio strike me as something that, nowadays, is fairly flat as far as the feature curve goes.


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## net-cat (Dec 21, 2009)

Ah, I remember my family's first computer. 386SX, 2MB RAM, Tiny hard drive with compression, Windows 3.1, DOS 5.

Good riddance, I say.



AshleyAshes said:


> God, remember the GamePort?  Hardware limit of two axis and four buttons, fancy drivers to get more than that, big ass port, games needing to be calibrated EVERY TIME you start them.


Actually, the game port had four analog channels and four digital channels.

The original idea was that that would be enough for two gamepads or joysticks with two axes and two buttons each. (Remember those old Y cables to do that? They would just remap pins.

Controller 1:
B1 -> B1
B2 -> B2
X -> X1
Y -> Y1

Controller 2:
B1 -> B3
B2 -> B4
X -> X2
Y -> Y2

Of course, that didn't stop people from coming up with far more sophisticated gameport devices that used more buttons. I had (probably still have) a gamepad that had as many buttons as the original PS1 controller.

D Pad -> X1, Y1
Main Buttons -> B1-B4
R1 -> X2 to max.
R2 -> X2 to min.
L1 -> Y2 to max.
L2 -> Y2 to min.

In theory, you could get even more buttons (up to 256 per axes) by abusing the X2/Y2 axes' ADCs but in practise, you'd probably start running up against the error limit of the gameports ADCs around 16 or 32 per axes. That, and all those buttons would only work one at a time and most games wouldn't be able to make heads nor tails of the input.



AshleyAshes said:


> ...USB makes life so much easier now.


True dat.



AshleyAshes said:


> But USB in the last ten years as really improved things.  We had accessories on PS/2, serial, parallel port, daisychained parallel port.  It was nuts.  Now we just jam every single thing we can into a USB port, any USB port and BAM.  No more specialty hard to find keyboards and mice for game consoles either, USB all the way!


Don't forget SCSI. :3


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## ArielMT (Dec 21, 2009)

net-cat said:


> Don't forget SCSI. :3



Which SCSI?


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## Runefox (Dec 21, 2009)

But SCSI has *TERMINATORS*! *Terminator theme plays*

...  Now we have SAS, Serial-Attached SCSI. It's... Basically SATA, and in some cases is compatible (with SATA devices, that is, not the other way around), but differs in many ways.


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## AshleyAshes (Dec 21, 2009)

Could you refrain from using stupid meme images in this thread, please?  Seriously, you are ruining my nostalgia buzz.


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## AshleyAshes (Dec 22, 2009)

Ten years ago, while some had high speed, dialup internet was still very popular.  I had a 54k modem that realisticly pulled about 5KB/s.  Now I have a cable modem that's pulling in just shy of 10mbps on a torrent right now.

I have as much internet bandwidth now as I had local network bandwidth ten years ago. D:


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## Runefox (Dec 22, 2009)

Ten years ago, I was still rocking my 33.6k modem on my Pentium 166. I remember back when I used to set up modem games of Command & Conquer with my cousin (who had a 24.4k modem and a Pentium 75), and I usually only got speeds of around 1-2kB/sec with my internet connection. My friend had a Pentium 2 around the same time, and he had a blazing-fast 56k modem - He could download at around 5kB/sec, over twice what I could pull off.

Eventually we got a cable modem, and that increased our speed to around 50kB/sec, but with my old Windows 95 install, whenever I had to reinstall the OS, I'd be without a driver for the NIC (a Kingston-branded Realtek 8029AS). I actually had to phone the cable company, who made me a driver diskette.


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## Collie (Dec 22, 2009)

Hahahah, oh old-school... thank god we don't have to deal with that crap any more.


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## Runefox (Dec 22, 2009)

Collie said:


> Hahahah, oh old-school... thank god we don't have to deal with that crap any more.



Hehehe, I remember setting my modem's IRQ and Baud Rate manually thinking there was going to be an improvement. X3


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## webkilla (Dec 22, 2009)

shit... i cant even remember what i did ten years ago

i was 13/14 back then - that would put me... in 6 or 7th grade. damn, thats harsh

C&C: red alert 2 came out back then. wait, what? holy shit i feel old now... (i remember playing the original command & conquer game when that came out... no wait, i've played Dune 2)

gameboys were all the rage back then. good grief.

oh gods.

the sims, the original, vanilla Sims - came out at the end of january 2000. good god!


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## Viva (Dec 22, 2009)

i just looooooove 500 terrabyte super computers^^. Oh and ipods came along, and now they have cameras and 100 gig memory in them.


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## Krallis (Dec 22, 2009)

My 250 GB archos 5 sums up tech pretty perfectly.

250Gb
Music, video, internet with flash support,  email
Gps
Tv tuner
Tv recording capability
4.8 inch touchscreen ( its a fantastic screen, better than an ipod touch)
And it looks damn sexy too.

AND i typed this whole post on it.


All that wouldnt be possible ten years ago in something that can fit in your hand.


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## icecold24 (Dec 22, 2009)

This is an interesting retrospective. If you really stop and consider, the way we live changed considerably in this decade, as it does almost every decade. Here's what I did, what I do, and also what I will do in the next ten years.

In 1999, I played Nintendo 64 through a shitty RF line on a 27" CRT TV, often Goldeneye with three other friends who were actually in my room at the time. In 2009, I play PC games on an LCD HDTV with many people all over the world. In 2019, I pair my phone with the TV and play Wii-like games over the cloud.

In 1999, I wrote my homework assignments in a 32 kilobyte black and white screen handheld computer with limited expansion capabilities and sound capabilities extending to three beep patterns. In 2009, I take notes at lectures with an 8 gigabyte iPod Touch, which can play music, movies, and browse the Web faster than my desktop did ten years back. In 2019, I work on an smartphone running the successor to Android, with 300GB of storage that can download and watch high definition movies if I wanted to.

In 1999, I connected to the internet on a 28.8kbps connection that often shat out to 14.4k due to our shitty phone lines (a year later we got a 56K modem which often shat out to 28.8kbps on the same lines). In 2009, I connect to the internet instantaneously nearly everywhere at speeds that would blow my mind back then. In 2019, this is all even faster and entirely wireless.

In 1999, I used a Windows 95 Pentium 166 with 96MB of RAM and a 2GB hard drive, upgraded to 8GB (remember having to partition individual 2GB drives?) A year after 1999, I used a computer with a 1Ghz Pentium III, GeForce 2 GTS video board, 256MB of ram, and Windows ME. In 2009, I use a Core 2 Duo 2.1Ghz, with 4GB of RAM, Windows 7, and a GeForce 9800GT with more video RAM alone than my first two computers combined. In 2019, my PC runs a client-side Windows Azure derivative, has nearly one hundred cores, 32GB of RAM, and 10TB of storage. But this is a high end prosumer PC for video and gaming enthusiasts. My friend's consumer PC and my laptop are smartphone docking station thin clients which operate over the cloud.

In 1999, I burned CDs with music I got from Napster and put those CDs on audio cassettes for on-the-go. In 2009, I just buy a song from iTunes and it goes right onto my iPod Touch after a sync. In 2019, the songs I bought rights to play are streamed on demand to my cell phone.

In 1999, my cell phone made phone calls and sent "SMS" messages. In 2009, my cell phone makes phone calls, sends text, picture, and video messages, has a full QWERTY keyboard, browses the Web, plays music, and does whatever else you can program it to do. In 2019, my smartphone with a docking station is also my computer.

In 1999, I listened to talk shows on FM radio. In 2009, I listen to completely uncensored talk shows on sirius. In 2019, I listen to completely uncensored talk shows on my phone from the show's website. There's another website which puts your favorite shows together and helps you find new ones to listen to. For music, think Pandora and lots of Pandora clones.

In 1999, teachers at school often reprimanded those who brought electronics to school (such as nerdy kids like I was). In 2009, these same gadgets were required for some classes. In 2019, we wonder how we conducted class without them.


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## ArielMT (Dec 22, 2009)

Ten years ago, I was in Diego Garcia, discovering the 'Net through Cable and Heartless Wireless and using a PCMCIA 14.4 modem.  High speed access was a completely alien concept to them.  The fee was $100 to set up, $20 a month to have an account, and 5 cents per minute to connect.

The PC I used was a Toshiba T4600c: a 486SX/33 with 12 MB RAM, an 800 MB HDD, a 640x480x8bpp TFT color LCD, a video adapter that could do 800x600x8bpp through the VGA port, a floppy drive, and Windows 95 installed from a box of floppy disks.  Netscape 4.6 took about 4.6 minutes to load.


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## AshleyAshes (Dec 22, 2009)

icecold24 said:


> In 1999, I played Nintendo 64 through a shitty RF line on a 27" CRT TV


 
This one was really your own fault.  Shoulda gone with the S-Video adaptor.


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## Collie (Dec 23, 2009)

Most people didn't, and still don't, know what S-Video is Ashes


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## Runefox (Dec 23, 2009)

S-Video didn't really provide a night/day improvement over composite (except for things like dot crawl and slightly less blur overall due to separated pins for chroma/luma), though compared to RF, certainly.

That said, I don't even know of many TV's that had S-Video back then, much less had one to use. I did my gaming primarily through composite connections, though I did end up buying RF switches for most of my consoles due to the fact that not everywhere I took my consoles had a TV with those ports (because unlike today, people, at least around here, didn't go around upgrading their TV's every few years). They didn't make them like they used to, though, and every RF switch I bought for a console starting from the N64 onwards basically fell apart after a very short period of time.


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## Ikrit (Dec 23, 2009)

AOL


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## AshleyAshes (Dec 23, 2009)

Runefox said:


> S-Video didn't really provide a night/day improvement over composite (except for things like dot crawl and slightly less blur overall due to separated pins for chroma/luma), though compared to RF, certainly.
> 
> That said, I don't even know of many TV's that had S-Video back then, much less had one to use.


 
We got our 27" RCA in 1997 and it has S-Video. Around that time S-Video was fairly common larger TVs so long as you didn't go with the cheaper models. But RCA, Sony, stuff like that would have S-Video.

I also have to say, compared to composite, S-video makes a marked improvement, especially on larger screens. Of course component, at 480i, that's the money right there.


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## Collie (Dec 23, 2009)

Runefox said:


> (because unlike today, people, at least around here, didn't go around upgrading their TV's every few years)



We had the same TV for around 15 years before getting a new one.  In fact we still have it in our basement.  Big heavy CRT, something like 30".  It also had fake wood paneling, but now we're going back to the early 90s/late 80s 



lazyredhead said:


> AOL



There should be a government cover-up for AOL, and they should insist it never existed.  That's how much AOL sucked.  Also free CD with a month of service when you sign away your MORTAL SOUL.


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## icecold24 (Dec 23, 2009)

Collie said:


> Also free CD with a month of service when you sign away your MORTAL SOUL.



Your trial password is SHIT-BALLS.


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## Telnac (Dec 23, 2009)

10 years ago, the speed of light was absolute.

Today, we know how to make the speed of sound >>> the speed of light (discovered by a high school physics class, no less!)  We've discovered how to send information a minimum of 16,000 times of the speed of light, and an experiment is in the works to see if we can make that work between the ground & the ISS.

Star Trek is closer than we think, people.


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## Ikrit (Dec 23, 2009)

Telnac said:


> 10 years ago, the speed of light was absolute.
> 
> Today, we know how to make the *speed of sound >>> the speed of light *(discovered by a high school physics class, no less!)  *We've discovered how to send information a minimum of 16,000 times of the speed of light*, and an experiment is in the works to see if we can make that work between the ground & the ISS.
> 
> Star Trek is closer than we think, people.


wait what....
i was always told nothing is faster then light...


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## LFKhael (Dec 23, 2009)

Ten years ago, a Palm IIIc PDA (which I currently use for school purposes) had a 15 Mhz processor. The battery life ranged from a few days to a little over a month.

Today, I have a Sidekick LX with a 200 Mhz processor that I can kill in less than five hours.

I hate that battery life has taken such a backseat these days.
EDIT: Two months ago, my parents finally switched from 56K to some AT&T DSL package.


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## AshleyAshes (Dec 23, 2009)

Telnac said:


> 10 years ago, the speed of light was absolute.
> 
> Today, we know how to make the speed of sound >>> the speed of light (discovered by a high school physics class, no less!) We've discovered how to send information a minimum of 16,000 times of the speed of light, and an experiment is in the works to see if we can make that work between the ground & the ISS.


 
Citation needed.

Edit: I've googled and I can't find anything relevant to his claims of communication with the ISS. There are articles on on a high school sending sound pulses faster than the speed of light, but their experiments do not violate the accepted laws of relativity. As such, their experiment has no ability to transmit information or matter faster than the speed of light.

http://www.livescience.com/technology/070112_ftl_sound.html

However Telnac view of ten years ago is what's really wrong.  Relativity acknowledges that in some circumstances, things can move faster than light.  What can't move faster than light is information or matter.


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## Runefox (Dec 23, 2009)

How does one define "information", exactly? I could very well see the idea of sending faster-than-light "pulses" of sound waves to convey information, even if the waves themselves are not technically faster than light. The pulses themselves, since they are detectable, should really be themselves capable of (likely very low-bandwidth as described in the article) communication simply by firing series' of pulses in such a way as they can be read as data, resulting in (again, a very low-bandwidth, but) very low-latency data transmission.


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## AshleyAshes (Dec 24, 2009)

Runefox said:


> How does one define "information", exactly? I could very well see the idea of sending faster-than-light "pulses" of sound waves to convey information, even if the waves themselves are not technically faster than light. The pulses themselves, since they are detectable, should really be themselves capable of (likely very low-bandwidth as described in the article) communication simply by firing series' of pulses in such a way as they can be read as data, resulting in (again, a very low-bandwidth, but) very low-latency data transmission.


 
I have absolutely no idea as this is in a field well beyond my education.  However I know that relativity says you can't move information or matter faster than light and the article specificly says that they didn't violate relativity and can't with it, I'll take their word for it.


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## AshleyAshes (Dec 24, 2009)

Ten years ago every console controller was wired.  There were some third party wireless controllers and a select few first party wired controllers.  Today, every console ships with wireless controllers and you have to buy the wires seperately to ensure you don't get killed in game because the batteries always die at the worst times.


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## Collie (Dec 24, 2009)

Ten years ago a significant amount of people still used antenna based television.  Now the old frequencies aren't even in use in the US any more, and only people in towns with no cable and poor satellite coverage, or people without the money, don't have cable/satellite television.


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## Sulggo (Dec 24, 2009)

soon you'll be able to get your cable straight though the air with out the need for a cable, and now there's wi-tricity were you don't have to plug certain things in.


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## Runefox (Dec 24, 2009)

Sulggo said:


> soon you'll be able to get your cable straight though the air with out the need for a cable, and now there's wi-tricity were you don't have to plug certain things in.



Bleeeeeh. Wireless is now and always has been rife with difficulties as compared to cables, and likely will continue to be so for the foreseeable future. Higher latency, lower throughput, and greater susceptibility to interference. Wireless, as far as we use it in consumer products today, has always been for the convenience factor, and again, likely will continue to be.

I don't care how good wireless gets >=| Wires will always be better.

Humbug. >=|


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## AshleyAshes (Dec 24, 2009)

Sulggo said:


> soon you'll be able to get your cable straight though the air with out the need for a cable, and now there's wi-tricity were you don't have to plug certain things in.


 
I think this is unlikely. I don't think that wireless broadcasting of electricity is technologically infesable but I think that if done it will be MASSIVELY inefficent. You'd be wasting electricity right into the air all the time and that would make adoption of it a huge issue when you have to pay the electric bill.

Induction chargers we have now where the charger and the item need to be directly next to each other is already pretty inefficent. It gets exponentially more inefficent the farther you get away from something.

The WiTricity demo itself was only 45% efficent at a distance of two meters.  So 55% of the electrical power going into the air?  I ain't payin' for that.


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## icecold24 (Dec 24, 2009)

AshleyAshes said:


> I think this is unlikely. I don't think that wireless broadcasting of electricity is technologically infesable but I think that if done it will be MASSIVELY inefficent. You'd be wasting electricity right into the air all the time and that would make adoption of it a huge issue when you have to pay the electric bill.
> 
> Induction chargers we have now where the charger and the item need to be directly next to each other is already pretty inefficent. It gets exponentially more inefficent the farther you get away from something.
> 
> The WiTricity demo itself was only 45% efficent at a distance of two meters.  So 55% of the electrical power going into the air?  I ain't payin' for that.



Not to mention, it's also canceriffic.


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## net-cat (Dec 24, 2009)

Runefox said:


> I don't care how good wireless gets >=| Wires will always be better.


James Clerk Maxwell would agree with you.

(Though I can see a point where wireless power will be good enough for small scale things, like charging portable devices or somesuch. Hell. I have a few things in my house that use induction to charge...)


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## Runefox (Dec 24, 2009)

net-cat said:


> (Though I can see a point where wireless power will be good enough for small scale things, like charging portable devices or somesuch. Hell. I have a few things in my house that use induction to charge...)



Mm, I can see that being quite useful. Come home and your cell phone starts charging as soon as it connects to your house-wide PAN, bi-directionally syncs your contacts and schedule with your computer...

Actually, as great as that is, with the rate at which carriers lock down the capabilities of their phones (my Telus-branded LG 8100 disallows any kind of file transfer to/from the computer), there'd probably just be the charging aspect, and likely you'll need multiple charge transmitters for each device. x_X


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## icecold24 (Dec 24, 2009)

I dunno what's so wrong with wires. I think the real problem lies in the absence of an efficient way to organize them.


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## Runefox (Dec 24, 2009)

Yeah, not everyone has racetracks and dropped ceilings, or can drill holes in the wall or have the patience to even run them and organize them properly. I know I don't! ... Cables everywhere.


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## net-cat (Dec 24, 2009)

Runefox said:


> Mm, I can see that being quite useful. Come home and your cell phone starts charging as soon as it connects to your house-wide PAN, bi-directionally syncs your contacts and schedule with your computer...


I'm thinking more along the lines of "charging surfaces." Come home, drop your cell phone, your car keys, your portable gaming system and your laptop on the counter and they all start charging. Wireless power of any significant range will be exceedingly lossy.



Runefox said:


> and likely you'll need multiple charge transmitters for each device. x_X


Probably. Though someone could snap up a few key patents early on and rush this to market.


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## AshleyAshes (Dec 24, 2009)

net-cat said:


> I'm thinking more along the lines of "charging surfaces." Come home, drop your cell phone, your car keys, your portable gaming system and your laptop on the counter and they all start charging. Wireless power of any significant range will be exceedingly lossy.


 
Induction charging can be pretty efficent however since it's at extreme close range. My understanding was the induction chargers for GMC's electric vehicles do 86%. It's true wireless power, like half way across the room, that's the system that I think will not become very practical as it's a total energy waster.

Our future is energy efficent, losing 25-90% of the energy efficency into the air because you couldn't get a plug is not intune with that future.


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## Telnac (Dec 25, 2009)

AshleyAshes said:


> Citation needed.
> 
> Edit: I've googled and I can't find anything relevant to his claims of communication with the ISS. There are articles on on a high school sending sound pulses faster than the speed of light, but their experiments do not violate the accepted laws of relativity. As such, their experiment has no ability to transmit information or matter faster than the speed of light.
> 
> ...


No, what I said is accurate because these experiments have proven one thing wrong: that information _*can*_ move faster than light... just not matter.  We can't send a particle faster than light, but both playing with waves & quantum entanglement have allowed us to send information faster than light.

Tho my memory served me badly: it wasn't 16,000 times the speed of light for information sent via entanglement, it's a mere 10,000 times the speed of light:

http://www.scientificamerican.com/b...uantum-weirdnes-wins-again-entangl-2008-08-13

Oh, and the experiment with the ISS:

http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=space-station-could-beam

No, that experiment doesn't explictly test FTL communication, but it does test the underlying mechanic of it: sending information encrypted via entanglement across vast distances of space.

And the research group that discovered how to send a bit of information via entanglement & allowing for a mechanism to send information w/o breaking the entangled state:

http://www.livescience.com/strangenews/090603-maco-entanglement.html

http://physicsworld.com/cws/article/news/37691


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## AshleyAshes (Dec 25, 2009)

Telnac said:


> No, what I said is accurate because these experiments have proven one thing wrong: that information _*can*_ move faster than light... just not matter.


 
Those experimenters themselves explicity stated that they could not send information faster than the speed of light.  Now, if I have to choose on who I go with, the phycist and associates that carried out the experiments themselves or you; I'm gonna have to go with them.



Telnac said:


> We can't send a particle faster than light, but both playing with waves & quantum entanglement have allowed us to send information faster than light.


 
None of these articles talk about sending information or matter faster than the speed of light.



Telnac said:


> Tho my memory served me badly: it wasn't 16,000 times the speed of light for information sent via entanglement, it's a mere 10,000 times the speed of light:


 
And you believe that this somehow disproves theories of what can move at the speed of light only ten years ago?  Since *1905* Einstein's theory of special relativity has acknowledged the theoretical possibility for particles that have always existed faster than the speed of light.  Nothing can be accelerated beyond the speed of light, but rather things that were always faster than the speed of light can remain so.  Tachyons are an example of this.

I'm sorry but you are gravely misinterpreting articles and even the basics of the theories behind them.  The statement that 'nothing can move faster than the speed of light' isn't an absolute in reguards to everythign in existence.  It's a practical statement about how we can't accelerate information or matter to the speed of light.  More over, none of the articles you linked even discuss the possibility of doing that.


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## WarMocK (Dec 25, 2009)

AshleyAshes said:


> Induction charging can be pretty efficent however since it's at extreme close range. My understanding was the induction chargers for GMC's electric vehicles do 86%. It's true wireless power, like half way across the room, that's the system that I think will not become very practical as it's a total energy waster.
> 
> Our future is energy efficent, losing 25-90% of the energy efficency into the air because you couldn't get a plug is not intune with that future.


Hehe, air core transormer technology ftw.

As for the speed of light dilemma: there are two things people either don't know or don't think about:
1. the problem is not that matter could go faster than the speed of light, but exactly hit the speed of light. According to the current principles of the relativity theory, we would face the same problem as with the resonance issue: mathematically, we would hit the x/0 barrier, and the result would go to infinity and beyond. The funny thing is, matter being faster than light would have a negative mass. Anyone here who wants to lose some weight? :A
2. With time and space directly linked to each other, time would run backwards for an object moving faster than light, time dilatation ftw. Even if it moved faster than light - we couldn't recognize it that easily because the object would go back in time at the same amount it moved away from our timeline, iow: for us, it would never have left the light speed barrier at all. The fact that there were some indications for matter or information moving faster than light proves that even the advanced relativity theory still is incomplete, and that's gonna be quite a nut to crack (not saying that's impossible, though. After all, humans are smart, at least most of the time ;-)).


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## Runefox (Dec 25, 2009)

> With time and space directly linked to each other, time would run backwards for an object moving faster than light, time dilatation ftw.


That concept's never sat well with me, especially considering motion is completely relative and objects travelling faster than light necessarily *appear* to have travelled backwards in time. But I'm not a scientist, so meh.


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## Telnac (Dec 25, 2009)

AshleyAshes said:


> Those experimenters themselves explicity stated that they could not send information faster than the speed of light.  Now, if I have to choose on who I go with, the phycist and associates that carried out the experiments themselves or you; I'm gonna have to go with them.


OK, I just re-read those articles explicitly looking for any place where they said information can't be transmitted faster than light.  I didn't find any.  Quite the contrary, what I found was researchers talking about how the entangled state somehow lets particles transmit information about their quantum state to each other faster than light.  Much faster.  If you want to prove me wrong, please quote to me the passage in these articles that says that information can't move faster than light.



AshleyAshes said:


> None of these articles talk about sending information or matter faster than the speed of light.


Uh... 

Article 1:


> In the latest attempt, researchers at the University of Geneva in Switzerland tried to determine whether entanglementâ€”the fact that measuring a property of one particle instantly determines the property of anotherâ€”is actually transmitted by some wave-like signal that's fast but not infinitely fast.


signal = information, and... speed (as well as a challenge to Einstein):


> There's one other subtlety to the experiment. If entanglement is traveling through space like some kind of faster-than-light wave, that would violate Einstein's theory of special relativity, which says the laws of nature are the same no matter which way you're moving with respect to anything else.


Article 2 doesn't mention FTL, because the ISS experiment is to test the distance limits of the entangled state, but if it works that means the FTL properties of entanglement can be exploited over vast distances.  But Article 3 is what's really interesting:





> Using electric fields and lasers, the researchers herded the ions into separate pairs and then entangled their motion. Then they separated the pairs by 240 micrometers (millionths of a meter), which is actually quite a span for an atom. Even at this distance, when the researchers changed the motion of one pair â€” stopped or started the vibrations â€” the other responded immediately, stopping or starting in kind.


There you have it: transfer of _*useful*_ information across an entangled state, which article 1 says is at least 10,000 times the speed of light.



AshleyAshes said:


> And you believe that this somehow disproves theories of what can move at the speed of light only ten years ago?  Since *1905* Einstein's theory of special relativity has acknowledged the theoretical possibility for particles that have always existed faster than the speed of light.  Nothing can be accelerated beyond the speed of light, but rather things that were always faster than the speed of light can remain so.  Tachyons are an example of this.


The quote from article 1 explicitly says that entanglement seems to violate special relativity.  The team in article 3 found a way to transmit useful information via entanglement.  Article 4 gives us more information on how they were able to establish & maintain the entangled state, which means that we could potentially entangle a pair of ions and keep them entangled indefinitely.  (Granted, the engineering required to do so is quite challenging.)

As for Tachyons or particles, Tachyons are theoretical only at the moment: we've never detected one despite experiments to do so.  That's not to say they don't exist, but until we do have a way to detect one, there's no way we could use one to transmit information faster than light (and also back in time.)

As for regular particles, I've never claimed they could go faster than light.  Telnac's bio uses quantum tunneling for FTL matter transmission, but that's 100% fiction.  Quantum tunneling is tricky stuff, and we've yet to find a way to control if (if it even _*can*_ be controlled) so measuring its speed is an impossibility (for now.)  So we don't know if quantum tunneling is faster than light or not.  In Telnac's bio, I assume it is.  But teleporters using quantum tunnels use alien technology.  Even in the mid 22nd century, humans have yet to master it.

Einstein's laws of special relativity and the realm of quantum mechanics have been at odds with each other almost from the start.  In the macroscopic world, special relativity has proven to be reliable again and again and again.  But in the world of the very small, quantum mechanics rules the day and things like particles which are in two places at the same time (which seems to also violate special relativity) are possible.  What's interesting about these experiments is that they're starting to bridge the gap between quantum mechanics and the macroscopic world.  Doing so seems to allow for things like FTL information transfer, as well as things like quantum cryptography and someday... maybe even macroscopic teleportation.


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## Telnac (Dec 25, 2009)

Sorry for the double post, but I wanted to discuss why relativity predicts that information & ordinary matter can't go faster than light.  Relativity shows that the amount of energy required to accelerate an object with a rest mass of M to the speed of light is, in fact, infinite.  That's because the mass of the object approaches infinity as its speed approaches the speed of light, and the increase of mass requires a corresponding increase of energy needed to accelerate that mass.

So it doesn't matter if you're talking about a proton or a planet.  You can get it 99.999% of the speed of light, but to get it all the way there, you'd need more energy than all the suns in the Universe have provided since the dawn of time.

At the time of Einstein (and until very recently, in fact) it was thought that information can only be transmitted via matter.  The fastest particle of matter is the photon.  With a rest mass of 0, it's the only thing that can actually go the speed of light.  Therefore, information, it was thought, is limited to light speed.

In support of that is the notion of causality.  I won't go too far in depth about it here; you can look it up if you want, just Google "causality light cones" and you'll find more information than you can shake a stick at.   But it can be shown that useful information sent faster than light to a receiver moving close to the speed of light relative to you can actually arrive BEFORE you send it, in their time frame.  A return message would therefore arrive in your time frame before you sent your first message.  But if you receive this second message before you send the first, and decide to never send the first, how did you get the second message?  This is the well-known Grandfather Paradox: if you go back in time & kill your grandfather before your father was born, how did you exist to go back in time in the first place?

If nothing, not even information, can exceed light speed, then the grandfather paradox can't happen.  Therefore, everything that happens in the Universe must have a cause in the past.  You can't just have transmissions from the future arriving at random.

Information sent faster than light violates causality, and that's exactly what I've heard physicists say when asked why warp drives or subspace radio or some other faster than light technology can't exist.  But causality _*has never been proven.*_  Quite the contrary, the only way to test causality is to _*disprove*_ it by setting up an experiment involving something going faster than light & back in time.

But if information transmission doesn't need a medium, then there's no reason that it can't exceed the speed of light... other than the notion of causality.  But there are competing theories to causality, the most famous one being the concept of alternate realities.  In the FTL information exchange example, you never sent that first message.  A "you" in an alternate reality did.  When those messages went back in time, they went across realities too.  The receiver was a receiver in an alternate reality, one where the message from the future was never sent.  The sender was in a reality where no message from the future was ever received.  If you're in the reality that received the message from the future, you can choose to send the message you intended to send or not.  If you do, someone in another reality will receive that message too.

Another thing Einstein predicted is that space and time can be bent and warped.  That notion is the inspiration for the warp drive (hence the name.)  One theory about entanglement is that the entangled particles "see" each other as if the space between them is very small, even though it may appear to us to be quite large.  How that works is anyone's guess, but each particle relative to each other may only be sending information at light speed, from their perspective, even though from our point of view that information exchange happens at speeds much greater than that of light.

Until I read Article #3 above, I used to believe that practical information transmission was limited to the speed of light.  Yeah, we can get waves to exceed light speed in carefully constructed experiments, but that has no practical application that would allow for FTL communcation.  Likewise, we can send a single bit of information faster than light in an entangled system, by breaking the entanglement.  But that bit only tells the other particle that its entangled partner is leaving the dance.  We can't use it to send an FTL SOS or anything like that.

In fact, I wrote Telnac's original bio on the assumption that practical faster than light technology was _*impossible.*_  Not even alien civilizations that have been around for millions of years can do it.

But when a team of researchers used a pair of entangled oscillating molecules to send information from one to another via a pulsed laser, that changed everything.  Now I'm a believer that FTL technology is not only possible, but that it'll change everything in the next few decades as engineers find a way to being it from the laboratory into everyday life.

And causality?  I believe someone will eventually set up an experiment disproving it, and it'll follow the aether into the trash bin of discarded theories.


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## AshleyAshes (Dec 25, 2009)

From the first sentance, you demonstrated that you don't know what 'Physical Information' is, as a physics term, so I'm not going to bother reading the rest.

On with the topic without you derailing it anymore.


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## Digitalpotato (Dec 25, 2009)

Remember in like 2000, when Phantasmagoria was such a big and expensive project for Sierra online?


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## william727 (Feb 24, 2010)

Collie said:


> The amount of detail that you can put in things like games now is incredible, compared to ten years ago.  Ten years ago you needed extraordinarily high power computers to render high quality 3D models.




acctually no what about total annihilation a game from 1997 that everyone in a small comumity still mods plays and has fun with

my monitor might be from april 2002 but its the best monitor and longest lasting one to with a max res of 2048x1536x60Hz through one VGA port is beleived to be impossable by todays standards and by driver standards (i cannt find a driver for this monitor because of that resolution its just a Hyundia ImageQuest P910 +


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## Runefox (Feb 24, 2010)

Not that the thread necro isn't pretty heinous here, but Total Annihilation had pretty rudimentary 3D graphics, and completely locked to a 2D backplane. Also, I'm fairly sure your monitor will max out at around 1600x1200 - Which is the listed maximum resolution. You might be able to push it higher with interlaced modes, but I doubt you'd get to 2048x1536. It is neither the best nor longest-lasting monitor.


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## The Blue Fox (Feb 28, 2010)

There are lots of things you can mention.

Going from CRT's to LCD's.

CPU speed going from 266Megahertz one core. To 2.66 Gigahertz with 8 cores.

From 156 MB or KB. To having 4,6,8,12 or 24 GB of ram.

From a few MB of disk space to now having 1 or more terabytes of space.

Ball mouse to optical or laser mouse.

From Voodoo Video excelerators. To freekin Quad SLI setups.

I can go on but i wont.


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