Re: Minutes from Feb 21 LSE Call

Horst von Brand
2003-02-26T15:58:39Z

[Massive snippage of Cc:]
Hans Reiser <reiser@namesys.com> said:

[...]

> It is interesting that games are the only compelling motivation for
> faster desktop hardware these days. It may be part of why we are in a
> tech bust. When AIs become hardware purchase drivers, there will likely
> be a boom again.

Oh, it was always that way. When it was Apple ][+, nobody complained about
the spreadsheet being too small/slow, it was games which were CPU and
display hungry. The machines of that vintage that have still a following
around here are the Atari 800XL and such, which had special hardware for
managing grahics on display. With the first PCs it was color displays. Then
came CDs and multimedia. Today it is fast CPUs and accelerated video cards
my students want for running the latest crop in games. Many keep Win98 just
for running games, for work they use Linux ;-)

Some people say that most new computing stuff is first introduced for
gaming. That does make sense to me, as in a game you'll be more tolerant of
rough edges; plus games do have a much wider appeal than office suites or
databases, and are a much more competitive market to boot. ;-)
--
Dr. Horst H. von Brand User #22616 counter.li.org
Departamento de Informatica Fono: +56 32 654431
Universidad Tecnica Federico Santa Maria +56 32 654239
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