"Thanks kind of feel left out when folk here start remembering their c64 and Ataris and whatnot! My first computer was a celeron 500MHz..."
In a lot of ways, between the c64 and the celeron 500MHz is an enormous, almost unrecognizable leap, whereas between the celeron 500MHz and the machine in my hand is just a lot of incremental change. I had a machine ~2000 that was de facto a 500MHz Duron (running at its full 1GHz overheated very quickly), and I used the same basic paradigm on that as I'm using now. Emacs, browser, terminal windows, MP3 player. Wifi needed a dongle. The integrated webcam is new since then.
My first computer connected to internet was the family Pentium 100Mhz with 64MB of ram that ended up retired by my father for a much powerful athlon whatever. It used to run Windows 98. I inherited that one and immediately ditched the Windows 98 as it couldn't allow me to listen to music while browsing and use an office apps, audio was stuttering all the time.
This is actually the reason I started using linux. I remember internet was usable at 100Mhz back in the days, I could play some videos (obviously at a much lower res, I was using a CRT). The funny things is some of the apps mentionned here already existed at the time so it resonnate with my experience, although back in the days I tended to prefer apps running on terminals unless it was absolutely necessary. Emails, music player, I was a terminal for all of that. My computing life was not that different than today bar the videos resolution increase. And the web wasn't less interesting or usable.
It is incredible how crap internet has become that we can't reasonnably think we can browse it comfortably on what would have looked like a supercomputer at the time of my 100Mhz Pentium.
>I used the same basic paradigm on that as I'm using now. Emacs, browser, terminal windows, MP3 player.
I don't disagree with your overall point, but two parts of that paradigm, Emacs and the terminal emulator, do date back to the C64 era. Here's Richard Stallman on developing GNU Emacs: "There were people in those days, in 1985, who had one-megabyte machines without virtual memory. They wanted to be able to use GNU Emacs. This meant I had to keep the program as small as possible." [0] Emacs may never have run on Commodore computers, but my impression is that it ran on very similar computers.
In a lot of ways, between the c64 and the celeron 500MHz is an enormous, almost unrecognizable leap, whereas between the celeron 500MHz and the machine in my hand is just a lot of incremental change. I had a machine ~2000 that was de facto a 500MHz Duron (running at its full 1GHz overheated very quickly), and I used the same basic paradigm on that as I'm using now. Emacs, browser, terminal windows, MP3 player. Wifi needed a dongle. The integrated webcam is new since then.