What is everyone’s favorite era in technology?
Mine is
The early-mid 2000s
Palm PDAs
Flip phones
Windows XP
Plasticky laptops and towers
Pentium 4 and AMD Athlon fight
A tamer, simpler internet. No social media like we have today.
dftf
<p>Yeah, I’d probably say the mid-to-late 90s up-to the late 2000s.</p><p><br></p><p><strong>Windows </strong>and <strong>macOS</strong> were both more exciting then: <em>Windows</em> had the merger of the 98SE/Me and 2000 codebases into XP, with its new-look. <em>Vista</em> then added loads of new "in-box apps", which <em>7 </em>then promptly removed in the vein of being lighter-than <em>Vista</em>. And macOS in the past I’d constantly see reviews and articles for each major new version highlighting all the new features, but in recent-years, it seems not-much significant is being added.</p><p><br></p><p><strong>Games-consoles</strong> were more-interesting back then, too. Between the PS1, N64, Saturn, PC and GameBoy you clearly had <em>obvious</em> hardware-differences, which sometimes meant entirely different games on every platform (for example, the first two <em>Harry Potter</em> games had five distinct releases: PS1; PS2/GameCube/Xbox; PC/Mac; GameBoy Color; Gameboy Advance). Thesedays, Xbox Series and PS5 games look virtually-identical; the same games on PC and Mac will generally look-better and allow for faster FPS; and the Switch ports will run at a lower-res and framerate. But they are all essentially <em>the same game</em>. As much as I like some of the stuff <em>Digital Foundry </em>does, for example, is it really that interesting to look at the same game on PS5 and Xbox Series X and note literal 1-2FPS differences between them in key-scenes?</p><p><br></p><p>(It was also nice that games didn’t need constant updates then, nor microtransactions, "loot-crates" and all the rest of the stuff we have now! You put the disc or cartridge in and that was that!)</p><p><br></p><p>Sites on <strong>the Internet</strong> were certainly simpler then, though don’t forget the security nightmares that were <em>ActiveX </em>and<em> Macromedia Flash Player</em> (and the scourge of slow-loading websites and noisy, flashy adverts that latter one enabled!). Not to mention all the security risks with both! (And it is great to be done with dial-up, too!)</p><p><br></p><p>I can’t remember too-much now about the CPUs of that era, but the most-exciting thing that happened around the mid-to-late 2000s was <strong>the introduction of dual-core CPUs</strong>, finally ending the "megahertz race". Though thesedays clearly what Apple is doing with their own Silicon is worth-watching, though not-exactly something others couldn’t copy. You just have to ask yourself "am I happy to gain speed by having the RAM part of the same chip, or do I want it to remain user-upgradable, and so on an external bus?". I’d argue that for most average users they likely <em>never </em>upgrade the RAM, so the speed-boost would be better.</p><p><br></p><p><strong style="color: rgb(0, 0, 0);">TV </strong><span style="color: rgb(0, 0, 0);">was certainly a lot-simpler in that time too — your only main choice was "shall I get a 4:3 CRT TV or a 16:9 one" and "how many SCART inputs does it have, and is one an RGB one". Until </span><em style="color: rgb(0, 0, 0);">Freeview</em><span style="color: rgb(0, 0, 0);"> came along, here in the UK there were </span><u style="color: rgb(0, 0, 0);">five</u><span style="color: rgb(0, 0, 0);"> free-to-air channels (BBC1, BBC2, ITV, Channel 4, 5ive) and </span><em style="color: rgb(0, 0, 0);">Sky</em> was about your only subscription option. Now, there are too-many different streaming-services and some will inevitably fail as people can’t afford them all!</p><p><br></p><p>That-said, some things thesedays are simpler. Take <strong>installing Windows</strong>. Back in the 90s, you’d have to create a bootable floppy-disk with a CD-ROM driver, run FDISK, create your Primary Partition, set it as Active, reboot, boot from the floppy again, format the partition you created, then run <em>Windows Setup</em>. It took until <em>Windows Me</em> to finally have all CDs be bootable without a floppy. <em>Vista</em> and onwards’ setups are far-easier. And updating Windows post-install is much-easier too. No more <em>Service Packs</em> then 100s of updates to do; just create the latest install-media, and once it’s installed, you’ll only have about five-to-six updates to install (not counting drivers) to bring it up-to-date.</p>
dftf
<p>It’s interesting though to reflect on how some things have become simpler or standardised over-time though.</p><p><br></p><p>Take <strong>video-formats</strong>: back-then you had LaserDisc, VCD, VHS, S-VHS and DVD (and some other, obscure ones). Only DVD still exists now, and being cheaper, still outweighs Blu-Ray for sales. And on the digital-side, gone are all the obscure formats like QuickTime video, RealVideo, WMV and so-on. Get a video-file thesedays and it’ll likely just be H.264 or H.265, and in future, AV1. And unlike in the past where many apps didn’t support most codecs, thesedays VLC or MPC-HC play virtually everything.</p><p><br></p><p>Or similarly, <strong>audio-formats</strong>: vinyl has made somewhat of a comeback, but cassette and Minidisc aren’t much-around: most people just play digital-files on their PCs, laptops, tablets or phones (or use streaming-services). And many obscure audio-formats of the past — such as Monkey’s Audio, Musepack, OGG Vorbis, Opus, RealAudio and WMA — have all-but disappeared, with MP3, AAC and FLAC all you see now (maybe Apple Lossless too, if you live in that world, or buy from iTunes; and MIDI still lives on). Far-simpler times now!</p>
dftf
<p>The examples you give are certainly valid, though thesedays not-only do we have the social-media platforms and the issues they bring, but also the various tech-companies have all grown to unmanageable sizes too. Not to mention the scourge that is ransomware, the "solution-in-search-for-a-problem" that is NFTs, and the planet-sapping cryptocurrency-mining. <span style="color: rgb(0, 0, 0);">I’m not a fan of some "software-as-a-service" offerings too — it was nice to be able to pay for something once in the past and then just own a perpetual licence. Yes, new-features get added, but if they’re just trivial things, what are you paying for?</span></p><p><br></p><p>Plus, while we have reduced end-user confusion in many areas via standardisation (e.g. modern devices will connect only via USB or Bluetooth, not also via Parallel, Serial, DIN or PS/2; and for video-output, gone are S-Video, VGA, DVI and (largely) DisplayPort, with HDMI the clear-winner), there are still issues within the standards themselves, such as the various USB 3.x and HDMI revisions and confusion over which devices and cables support which.</p><p><br></p><p>There are other areas too thesedays I prefer: the games-console emulation scene is leaps-and-bounds over where it was, with most consoles pre-2000s near-perfect for most games. Modern phone-games work better than the clunky "feature-phone" games coded in mobile-Java (J2ME?) which rarely worked the same on different handset models. Modern Internet and networking is far-simpler than the real legacy stuff like "token-ring" networks (well, until you start dealing with IPv6 addresses anyway!).</p>