Was the late 1990s the sweet spot for technology?

[GusB]

Yeah I look back to these days and glad we're long past them, Win98 was the first Windows OS to offer USB support but so flakey you could plug in a device and the entire system would blue screen. No proper task manager either and 'not responding' on a program was just a normal occurrence. I don't miss any of that at all.

Also I didn't really appreciate how reliable modern computers are now compared to older models either, I was recently working on a 2004-era Dell Optiplex which ridiculously is still in production use at work (don't ask!) that was misbehaving and I remember back when those machines were current I was Dell certified to save time organising repairs which were frequent, I knew the hardware extremely well. We recently retired a standard set of similar PCs which were newer and I just don't know them at all because hardly any of them had gone wrong through their 24/7 life.

I think the earliest USB support for Windows was 95 OSR2(?), which I'd never heard of until I inherited some old hardware and a box of disks that someone was chucking out. Said box also contained an upgrade CD for Windows ME, which I don't think anyone has mentioned yet.

To be fair to the original Windows 9x releases, I had a PC that ran 98SE for a good while and it rarely caused many problems. I wouldn't be rushing back to it, though!

As far as other gadgets go, I had an MP3 player that was essentially a USB stick with some extra buttons and it was fiddly to use. It was mainly used as a USB stick! Prior to that it was a Sony Walkman with cassettes. It was still in working order the last time I came across it, though; no obsolete software updates needed to get it running!

 

[52290]

Those who prefer 1990s technology... I take it you'd be happy with a world without (a) railforums, and (b) Pendolinos, but with pacers?

(On the other hand there were no Voyagers in the 1990s, so I guess that's a big plus for that era).

I wouldn't expect a pacer on my journey from Preston to Euston but I would prefer a class 90 with mark 2's or 3's to a Pendolino. Proper windows for a start.

 

[JamesT]

Again as already stated Windows 98 was fragile and the hardware still slow. XP was much more robust. 32-bit was a limitation but although I never used it to compare XP64 did exist. I still do not know why it was abandoned for the platform which started as Vista that was at least 10x bigger and has evolved in to Windows 11.

Vista, like XP is a continuation of the Windows NT line. They didn’t abandon XP but were a bit too ambitious when it came to hardware requirements. The changes made at the time were definitely needed, rearchitecting things like security and drivers which have pretty much lasted since.

 

[Ediswan]

I was recently working on a 2004-era Dell Optiplex which ridiculously is still in production use at work (don't ask!)

Been there (roughly).

The original IBM PC design had hardware addressable parallel ports. These could be used as what are now called GPIO ports, to control external hardware. The external hardware tends to be expensive to replace. Add-on parallel ports for modern PCs are not compatible (we tried). Hence, the old PCs are kept running, with spare PCs on a shelf.

 

[py_megapixel]

Windows becoming established was surely a curse not a blessing...

 

[JamesT]

Windows becoming established was surely a curse not a blessing...

Having a dominant ecosystem has its advantages for many people. As much as I enjoyed my Amiga days, it was a complete pain interoperating with the Macs at school. Also being dependent on a single manufacturer and a subset of the industry making compatible peripherals.
Perhaps another OS could have risen to that position on the relatively open PC hardware? But I don’t know what that might have been, OS/2 was tightly controlled by IBM and Linux definitely wasn’t ready.

 

[DynamicSpirit]

Having a dominant ecosystem has its advantages for many people. As much as I enjoyed my Amiga days, it was a complete pain interoperating with the Macs at school. Also being dependent on a single manufacturer and a subset of the industry making compatible peripherals.
Perhaps another OS could have risen to that position on the relatively open PC hardware? But I don’t know what that might have been, OS/2 was tightly controlled by IBM and Linux definitely wasn’t ready.

I rather agree. Windows has been knocked a lot in the past and there are things you can criticise about it, but it has opened up computing to the population in a way other operating systems largely failed to do. The Windows reliability issues of the past were largely caused by a mixture of (a) MS making sure Windows was an open ecosystem that worked with lots of manufacturers' hardware - and the hardware didn't always play nicely, and (b) that Windows often pushed the boundaries of what had been done before in terms of what an operating system could do. I think the tech/IT World is probably better and more user-friendly than it would have been if Microsoft hadn't existed. Having said that, I'm glad that Windows is now so much more reliable than it was in the 1990s,

 

[brad465]

I'd say the 90s was the sweet spot for music, but listening to that music is far better on music tech that came after the 90s.

 

[nw1]

I would say the sweet spot was about 1995 to about 2014, or thereabouts.

The mid-nineties onwards did indeed see big improvements to the power of PCs, and prices came down. The internet of course became widespread in the early part of this era, followed by broadband which increased speed and decreased costs compared to dial-up.

Then towards the end of this era we had smartphones, which brought all sorts of interesting opportunities, though many of the really interesting use-cases were realised before about 2015.

For those of us into free and open-source software, the 20 years above also featured massive growth in that area.

I'd say the last few years since the mid-10s, while there have been some interesting developments, haven't been quite as exciting (IMO) as the preceding 20 years and we've started to see more of the negatives start coming to the fore, particularly in the area of privacy, such as big tech companies unduly collecting personal data and using it to their commercial advantage.


== Doublepost prevention - post automatically merged: 2 Jul 2023 ==

Those who prefer 1990s technology... I take it you'd be happy with a world without (a) railforums, and (b) Pendolinos, but with pacers?

(On the other hand there were no Voyagers in the 1990s, so I guess that's a big plus for that era).

1990s had CIGs, VEPs, 87s/90s and DVTs on the WCML, and (as you imply) XC services worked by hauled stock and HSTs. We also had proper timetables, none of this cut-down post-Covid nonsense. What's not to like?

 

[bavvo]

I think the wonderful Douglas Adams summed it up best.

“I've come up with a set of rules that describe our reactions to technologies:
1. Anything that is in the world when you’re born is normal and ordinary and is just a natural part of the way the world works.
2. Anything that's invented between when you’re fifteen and thirty-five is new and exciting and revolutionary and you can probably get a career in it.
3. Anything invented after you're thirty-five is against the natural order of things.”
― Douglas Adams, The Salmon of Doubt

So for me, the peak period would be around 2006 when I had a single Nokia phone that acted as a decent camera, mp3 player and phone, computers were simple but functioned well, you could watch TV or films without signing up for huge monthly subscriptions and social media has not become the soul destroying monster it is today

 

[nw1]

I think the wonderful Douglas Adams summed it up best.

So for me, the peak period would be around 2006 when I had a single Nokia phone that acted as a decent camera, mp3 player and phone, computers were simple but functioned well, you could watch TV or films without signing up for huge monthly subscriptions and social media has not become the soul destroying monster it is today

Some good points from Mr Adams though I'd push the upper age limit a bit beyond 35

Sadly I was rather older than 35 in 2014 which was the end point of the golden period I quoted.

 

[yorksrob]

1990s had CIGs, VEPs, 87s/90s and DVTs on the WCML, and (as you imply) XC services worked by hauled stock and HSTs. We also had proper timetables, none of this cut-down post-Covid nonsense. What's not to like?

Spot on !

 

[johntea]

I'll always have a soft spot for the 90s and technology as I was a child geek back in those days and essentially technology has now paid the bills for the rest of my life (unless The Terminator and/or ChatGPT decides to take over) as I chose to make a career out of it and doing rather well out of that choice so far!

There was a sort of frantic build up to the year 2000 where everyone thought the world would end when the clock hit midnight due to the millennium bug only for it to turn out to be a bit of a damp squib in the end (although I remember having to update the library software at the school I went to as the library manager basically used me as their personal IT support and before the fix the software was using 01/01/99 short date formats, but the supplier sent out an update on a floppy disk in plenty of time!)

Still some incredible new technology coming out these days but I don't have as much interest in it now, 37 hours a week is more than enough for me these days!

By far one of the greatest innovations for the average computer user is probably the rise of SSD/NVMe drives rather than spinning rust, you can even chuck one in an older computer and extend the life for a couple of years with ease!