Greatest Technological Advancement...

[Counter-Strike]

What do you believe is the greatest technological advancement as far as computers?

I believe the change from the 16 to the 32 bit interface was a huge change, or could even be that laptops were created.

 

[Flanker]

The practice of Overclocking *WOOT*

 

[Counter-Strike]

Yeah that would be a good one, actually I never thought of that XD

 

[Nubius]

overclocking isn't really a technological advance though.

I think when hard drives became closer to how they are now instead of those record sized disks in the room sized computers of yester-year

 

[CJJohnson]

I'm biased, I'd have to say electricity.

After that, I'd say GUIs. I lived through DOS....Dohh

 

[TheHeadFL]

The emergence of home networking and broadband internet access.

I've been building computers since 1996, and I can remember how much of a limitation it was that only one computer in our household could access the internet, as well as the fact that we had to have a second phoneline just for that purpose.

When I first was able to run a Sygate NAT'ing router on my main PC, and installed a 10Mbit hub and network cards in both our computers, that really changed the way we used computers in my house.

Compare that to today where networks are found everywhere, and hooking up to a wired or wireless network and getting broadband internet is just a no-brainer. We take the internet on our PC just for granted, since we are always connected 24x7. It didn't use to be like that for anybody but college students on campus networks or businesses.

Hell, even my phone (Pocket PC/Windows Mobile 2003 SE) is internet connected 24x7 with ISDN speeds. Its even a no brainer to drive out away from my apartment and hook my laptop up and wirelessly connect to the internet via my phone anywhere I go.

I think that is kind of the big change.

 

[Flanker]

overclocking isn't really a technological advance though.

Sure it is. Its given the somewhat nasty definition of "Making the CPU go faster than it was designed/intended to go," but its basically finding ways to increase the performance of your computer.

 

[TheHeadFL]

I used to have a Celeron 266MHz SL2QG retail boxed. Back in 1998 (I think?) that was *the* chip to get, since it was just a rebadged Deschutes (sp?) core P2 with the 100MHz bus pin locked (and no onboard L2 cache if I recall). I remember having to use a piece of tape on the pin to run it at 400MHz.

I think it cost me maybe $500 to build the bare bones part of that system... whereas if I remember correctly a P2 400 was going for at least $500 on its own.

But people were overclocking way way before that. They started multiplier locking Pentiums before that because people would rebadge and scrape off the markings on chips and sell them at erroneous clockspeeds.

 

[macdude425]

IMHO, there were two: the Disk ][ and the Macintosh. The first revolutionized disk technology and the other brought the GUI to the average user.

 

[CJJohnson]

The internet has to be way up there, but I still say GUIs. How many people here would have given up long ago if they had to configure the memory manually for each game? Base memory, extended memory...Aaaah.