I have issues with smart phones. The change in using swiping and one finger and having no access to a actual keyboard or mouse or being able to plug in several devices as necessary. Not to mention you can't modify, replace components or anything else...

It's quite annoying. I hate the direction things are going.

I work well with mouse/keyboard/monitor. VR, finger breaking texts, smart phones, smart pads, smart tvs, biometrics, integrated networks, web 3.0, etc. It's all becoming Greek to me.

Smaller, faster, smarter. That's the way things are going. Kinda like people. Only without the last part.

Yes! As a kid, i used to play GTA 1 on pc, Cybermage, Thief Gold, Sonic 3d, Abe's Odyssey, Diablo 1, oh, the memories! Consoles i used to play only at the houses of friends! Heck, even they liked gaming on my pc at the time, we all enjoyed GTA 1 pretty much! Then, emulators started appearing, especially MAME and consoles became entirely irrelevant, at least for me!

That's kinda how it seems most of the time. The new system that is so... weak... it's dumbed down. There's no way to do programming or text editing or work on them. You just can't use them for anything serious. It's like... a portable TV/radio, and that's almost it.

Mind you, I think tablets would be great for reading eBooks, but the systems aren't open enough or useful enough.

I think I began to lose hope once I studied the MTBF (mean time before failure) metric. CONSTANT FAILURE rates are built into the cycle of nearly all human production, especially tech. Given the reality of self imposed and statistical failure, one doesn't have to be a psychic to know that evolution forces adaptation. Problem with tech is its consumer model is based on efficiency and profitability, not on usability, and certainly not 'open source' models. Human tools are only going to be as complicated as the problems we need them to solve. And since human entropy is moving towards degradation, those necessary problems become more and more pedantic as time goes on.

Then again, I'm not in the illuminati, so I don't have access to space guns and teleporter equipment, so I have to go by what shows up in the local magazine ads.

My problem with current tech is "it designed how the average person works" not "designed on the logic of computers and software designers".

I can't use Facebook, and hate the dumbing down of Windows.

Yeah... built in failure rates for hardware... I remember back in the 386 days you get a computer and it is good for 10 years, or even longer if you don't push it (overclock it), and I bet I can still find old 8bit computers that still work 20+ years old.

The age of hardware shouldn't be the reason to upgrade, it should be if the new hardware has some specific element of... improvement to make it worth it. Reminds me of watching the Tron Legacy where they asked what was different about the OS and they said 'this year we put a 7 on it'. or something like that, and that's really about it. The OSes don't seem to be really improving any, especially with iOS where they keep breaking games and software every time they do updates.

Honestly I'd be satisfied with older phones and the like, I mostly use phones for audio communication, not playing games and taking notes and watching videos. Hell I'm tempted to see if I could make a 8bit phone OS.

Just the whole thing... I don't know.

Think about it, computers used to be used almost solely by engineers, scientists, and programmers. Sure, there were the early creators of video games, 3D editing, and graphic design, but the heavy load of work done by computers were to assist very capable and smart humans in doing monumental tasks. Now the consumer market has driven computing to be about turning on light switches or liking posts on facebook... or even driving our cars for us. Technology is replacing not only human labor, but human invention and ultimately human agency.

The old dusty bastards of the 18th and 19th centuries saw this coming. You can find plenty of quotes and books warning us of this. It wasn't just first discovered by James Cameron with The Terminator.

“Men have become the tools of their tools.”
- Henry David Thoreau

Some minimum level of skill experience and work I would think ensures better products and productivity. Some minimum level of understanding of the hardware and software.

Having too easy of an entry results in crap. The shovelware with Unity games on Early Access/Greenlight is more than enough proof of that.

Well, I don't know about that. I had already become quite accustomed to the idea that games would have more and more stringent copy protection methods on e.g. Commodore 64, Amiga 500 etc., in case you actually bought a game instead of pirating. I've already ranted before about Microprose's Gunship (a helicopter simulator) which I actually got for Amiga 500, and its three-layer antipiracy methods:

- When starting the game, identify some tanks or something from the manual.
- When you are ready to end a successful mission, you were supposed to find some security code from the manual.
- It also had copy protection for the game disk itself so that it couldn't be copied.

The reason I ranted was because IIRC it also required you to keep your original game disk writable so that it could save your mission progress into it. If you happened to get an Amiga virus on your system (which usually overwrite the boot sector of diskettes), then it would destroy that game diskette as it had a non-standard boot sector (the copy protection).

Anyway my point was that when I switched to PC gaming, I recall games like Wing Commander 2 and Red Baron had no anti-piracy methods at all, no manual checkings nor copy protections (IIRC the first WC had a manual check, but not the second one?). It totally blew my mind, some PC game publishers really trusting the PC gamers that much that they don't put any inconvenient antipiracy methods on their games?!?

That was very unexpected to me and it would have been unheard of on e.g. commercial Amiga games I think, and I really appreciated that. Just like I appreciate GOG games not having (single-player) DRM.

Try 30+. My C64 still works.

Hmmm I wonder. Last year or something there was a big deal where nuclear warheads were just out in the open (Wyoming or Colorado) and they were discovered, and then they talked about the hardware that's still from the 70's running on floppies, a nuclear program that seriously needs an update/upgrade.

That's back when we made good products. Today everything's made overseas.

Although, there are suppose to be 8bit computer kits and you can build your own computer, just takes a few hours of putting it together and soldiering...

No idea!!!

There were no PC's when I was a kid, or maybe there were in PC's in companies, the old IBM stuff, but they were too expensive for a normal household.

We had what was called a homecomputer, running BASIC. Ours was an Acorn BBC with 64kB memory, and a tape-drive for loading programs. The first games I played were loaded from tape therefore, I can still remember the sound the bits and bytes loading made. Later on, my father bought a discdrive that could load programs form 5 and a 1/2 inch floppy discs.

I don't know if their were any game consoles back then, I''ve never heard about them back then. Just the tiny computergames where you had a device made for a single game, played on a LCD screen, things like Frogger (I never owned one myself though, just saw other kids playing them in the playground). But as the device couldn't play another game than that which it was made for, I wouldn't call them consoles. For that, it needs to be a device that you can load multiple games on. But I never heard of things like the first Nintendo's and whatnot until decades later (when I joined GOG, to be exact).

I got my first PC when I was way past childhood, when I was 30. I was a latecomer to computers.

As for consoles, out of curiosity I bought a second hand PS 2 two or three years ago (so I could learn what a console plays like for just 35 euro's). That was my first console, later followed by a PS3 bought for 129 euro. I did play some games on them, yet I like mouse and keyboard behind a desktop much more for gaming.

I grew up mostly on console and handheld gaming but PC gaming played a significant role. I was addicted to Doom as a kid and I tried out a bit of Warcraft 2 but I always had cheat codes on. I've seen others play the first Warcraft game but I never tried it out much.

I was also definitely into the FPS games that followed Doom like Heretic, Hexen, Quake, and (obviously) Doom II. I also loved playing Baldur's Gate which got me into the D&D-based video games and made me a fan of Bioware.

Still, it could never local four-person multiplayer on the Nintendo 64 and the Super Nintendo got me into gaming along with the original Nintendo at my house. I also played a bit of Atari 2600 but the controllers broke soon enough.