Wednesday 10th September 2008

Ten Technologies that can Revolutionise PCs

Posted at: Wednesday 10th September 2008 by Orestis Bastounis

The PCs of ten years ago seem to come from a different age. What will PCs look like ten years in the future? Orestis Bastounis rounds up the technologies that could change computers forever

The PC has changed beyond all recognition in the last ten years. In 1998, the average PC was slow and beige. Windows 98 was considered cutting edge, nobody thought parallel computing on the desktop would take off, and the 90MHz Voodoo 2 (featuring the original incarnation of SLI) had just hit the market.

Today, those early 3D accelerators have evolved into the GPU, not only capable of pushing gaming graphics, but also general purpose computing tasks. Most CPUs on the market from Intel and AMD now squeeze two or four cores into a single chip. Storage is measured in 100s of gigabytes, if not terabytes.

What about the next ten years? There are seemingly many out-of-this-world technologies in development now. They could change the world forever, or they may end up as nothing more than a pipedream. We’ve picked ten ideas that seem most likely to change how we use PCs forever.

Read about them below.

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not sure on the author

but dubious sentences like the PCs of ten years ago seem to come from a different age......what......like the age ten years ago? lol

Comment by vulcanproject at 2:50pm 16th September 2008

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Nostalgia

I remember I got a flying machine that had a 25mhz processor which i upgraded to a 33mhz which also had a turbo mode .... so i could play doom & Wolfenstein 3D full screen on dos ... then came windows 3.1 (26 floppies or something stupid like that) !! oh well how times have changed 3.6ghz processor now

Comment by akoli at 1:27am 16th September 2008

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Did an American write this? Fibre is not fiber ;) Pet hate...

Comment by Xonerater at 4:33pm 14th September 2008

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Typo

Fixed! Thanks :)

Comment by Sifter3000 at 1:01pm 13th September 2008

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typo time!!

second paragraph, end of the fourth line, "fore" should be "four" :D :D

Comment by soddit113 at 9:06am 13th September 2008

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the past

Awww, i miss 10 years ago, got my first PC then from Tiny. It's still being used today by my dad, but cos the CD-Rom drive is broken and the Voodoo3 3000 died earlier this year, it uses the motherboards own graphics, so he only plays Championship Manager 2000-2001 on it. Most the games I would put into my top 10 faves would be from between 7 and 10 years ago. Bring back the past the future sounds expensive.

Comment by smiffy at 2:44am 13th September 2008

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Memories...

I got delivery of my first PC in Dec 1998. It was a Dell XPS R450. Pentium II 450Mhz, 256MB SDRAM, 16MB STB NVidia4 TNT graphics card (later upgraded to 32MB GeForce2), Turtle Beach Montego Voice PCI sound card and 14.4GB ATA Ultra HD and Win98. Also came with a 21" CRT (trinitron based) monitor (which I am using right now with my 10/2007 bought system), PS/2 Intelli mouse and Altec lansing ACS495 speakers (still using now). Grand total: £2384.08 incl. del and VAT. Where is it now? With me 82 yr old dad! Uses it for email and surfing the net. Still works fine except struggles with flash-laden websites (TG for flashblock!) and multiple tab browsing. Still plays a mean game of Quake III Arena, Unrl Tnmnt and AOE II Age of Kings. LOL