[clug] From Cobb & Co to We’re Entering A Post-Device Era

George at Clug Clug at goproject.info
Tue May 28 14:02:57 UTC 2019


Bryan,


In responce to your comment, "Remember black and white TV?"


When I did my apprenticeship as a Radio & Television Mechanic, I was
trained to repair valve black and white TVs. 



Colour TV came out later. 



And when Colour TV did arrive, some of the large German valve Colour
sets required two strong people to lift them, they were huge and
heavy.


>From memory something callled "integrated circuits" came out shortly
afterward.


Some years after that I had people telling me about this thing called
"binary", I could not grasp what they were talking at that time. Of
course later on Assembler was the only way to program microprocessors
if you wanted your program to run at any decent speed.


[Apple IIe, I got to see one of those once]



Then some time later the IBM PC was released, and here we are today.


Ain't it great !


One thing I do think about from time to time, it has been interesting
living before the beggining, and then through, the era the PC
(Personal Computer). 



If I get to live a bit longer, I may also get to see the end of that
era as the "PC goes the way of the Dinosaurs", extinct, being replaced
by cloud "storage and compute". Not sure what term will be used to
describe a totally online system.


https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Post-PC_era   , hmmm, I think this
statement is incorrectly named, "The Post-PC era is a market trend
observed during the late 2000s and early 2010s involving a decline in
the sales of personal computers in favor of post-PC devices".  I
realise that is what people called it, but ... that was just the "Era
in which PC sales noticably declined".


https://www.theverge.com/2015/8/9/9115503/post-pc-is-just-pc
You use your smartphone as much as your laptop because it’s just
another PC...



I reject the above statement. Yes the smartphone is a computing
device, and it is a personal device, but yet it is not a Personal
Computer. It is way beyond being just a PC.



https://www.worldometers.info/computers/  
According to a report by Forrester Research, there were over one
billion PCs in use worldwide by the end of 2008, and over 2 billion
by the year 2015.  


I will only accept we are in the "Post PC Era" when any working or non
working PC can only be found in museums (and/or my garage), and the
only way to compute is via a device that connects to the cloud for
compute and storage. We are fast heading that way now. 



I wonder what "cloud gaming" will be like.
https://www.cnbc.com/2018/04/27/5g-could-change-the-video-game-industry-forever.html
https://mcvuk.com/playgiga-why-5g-plus-cloud-gaming-is-the-next-big-opportunity/
https://www.telecomasia.net/content/cloud-gaming-could-make-half-5g-data-traffic-2022


So I agree with the sentiments of "I argue that we’re entering a
“post-device” era."
https://www.fastcompany.com/3061084/were-way-past-steve-jobs-post-pc-era-and-headed-for-a-post-device-future
The same thing has happened to tablets. While some naively predicted
that tablets would one day replace PCs, the worldwide tablet market
never reached the same level as PCs, and with very few exceptions,
tablets never became the general purpose computing device that many
envisioned. Instead, worldwide tablet shipments peaked in the fourth
quarter of 2013—just two years after PCs did—and have slowly
declined ever since.

And what do people think will happen to Linux in a “post-device”
era" ?  


Will Linux only be used on servers?  



Will Linux morph into a Cloud GUI ?


I can only hope my store of ancient PC hardware survies the ravages of
time [1] so I can still run my favourite, last version of Linux
(Desktop) and continue playing Tux Racer! Whatever version of Linux
ends up being the last version.



The plastic of my System 80 (TRS-80 [2] clone) is starting to decay,
and I guess the electric capacitors will be drying out too. My last
attempt to boot NEWDOS 80 from a 85kb [2] single density, single sided
floppy disk failed, I suspect due to age. Maybe there was not enough
magentic strength in the media to retain the OS's data?



Long Live the PC...



George.


PS: I never used Punch Cards in the work place, only at Uni, I am not
that old. I wish I had kept my first BASIC program on Punch Cards.







Links:
------
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Ravages_of_Time
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TRS-80


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