Comment by kamaal

4 days ago

Nah, your parent comment has a valid point.

Nearly entirety of the use cases of computers today don't involve running things on a 'personal computer' in any way.

In fact these days, every one kind of agrees as little as hosting a spreadsheet on your computer is a bad idea. Cloud, where everything is backed up is the way to go.

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kamaal

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jayd16  4 days ago

But again, that's conflating web connected or even web required with mainframe compute and it's just not the same.

PC was never 'no web'. No one actually 'counted every screw in their garage' as the PC killer app. It was always the web.

  • morsch  4 days ago

    One of the actual killer apps was gaming. Which still "happens" mostly on the client, today, even for networked games.

  • eru  4 days ago

    You know that the personal computer predates the web by quite a few years?

    • jayd16  3 days ago

      Sure, I was too hyperbolic. I simply meant connecting to the web didn't make it not a PC.

      The web really pushed adoption, much more than a person computation machine. It was the main use case for most folks.

    • rambambram  3 days ago

      This. Although briefly, there was at least a couple of years of using pc's without an internet connection. It's unthinkable now. And even back then, when you blinked with your eyes this time period was over.

      1 reply →

  • kamaal  4 days ago

    In time Mainframes of this age will make a come back.

    This whole idea that you can connect lots of cheap low capacity boxes and drive down compute costs is already going away.

    In time people will go back to thinking compute as a variable of time taken to finish processing. That's the paradigm in the cloud compute world- you are billed for the TIME you use the box. Eventually people will just want to use something bigger that gets things done faster, hence you don't have to rent them for long.

    • galaxyLogic  4 days ago

      It's also interesting that computing capacity is no longer discussed as instructions per second, but as Giga Watts.

  • bandrami  4 days ago

    Umm... I had a PC a decade before the web was invented, and I didn't even use the web for like another 5 years after it went public ("it's an interesting bit of tech but it will obviously never replace gopher...")

    The killer apps in the 80s were spreadsheets and desktop publishing.