Another thing that's changed significantly since Doom came out is that you could just bring the disc and run your games on your work PC.

Hmmmm, lunch-time Quake sessions...

We've lost the innovators, the people with imagination, the inventors. They've been replaced with identikit programming graduates taught to code by numbers. And a whole heap of hyoe around AI.

That, or computer science peaked in 1993.

I'd argue we've replaced the inventors with the money men. These days, it's 80s style greed - pump in the VC money, build up a user base, own the market and then sit back and rake in the mega money.

I would also argue that the inventors/engineers have been stifled by the continuing drumbeat of "Policy and compliance" rules companies put on said inventors/engineers. This is cancerous toward innovation.

I don't think we've lost them. It's just that we want to believe innovation is always an infinite curve, going up forever, when in fact, there are both physical and biological constraints, and after a technological breakthrough, the curve always flattens.

Looks at past breakthroughs, such as cars, at the evolution in the 2 or 3 decades from the late 19th century when they appeared, and in the past 50. Planes. Books. Shoes, even: since that last major evolution about 150 years ago, making the left and right shoe different, there's not been much going on there, Back To the Future II notwithstanding.

Many of the same themes are seen in cars as in computers these days - make them difficult or impossible to repair (especially without specific tools / equipment / access to supply chain), this limiting their lifespan, and try to convert as many aspects as possible to subscription services rather than one-off payments.

Unfortunately much innovation is going into busy work. We get new look buttons, web-sites which will only work on a narrow range of browsers. I can think of quite a bit of innovation that could usefully be done although some would involve unpicking a few years' worth of innovated crud.

Computer science peaked in 1993.

An environment very much described earlier by Alan Cooper, the "Father of Visual Basic" - “It has been said that the great scientific disciplines are examples of giants standing on the shoulders of other giants. It has also been said that the software industry is an example of midgets standing on the toes of other midgets.”

Computers did actually get faster and cheaper but the whole ecosystem grinded to a bloated halt. Software is poorly written, incredibly bloated, full of useless functions, made to help software and hardware sellers make more money and NOT made to help users do their jobs. Everything is a poorly written spyware full of DRM. Malfunctioning, slow, defective, made to be obsolete tomorrow morning. We are not going to experience another real revolution until the AI actually takes over and wipes us.

I for one will welcome our new AI overlords!

At least when they are wiping me out I will know for sure that it is intentional. The wiping out that our present overlords perform seems to be much more to do with incompetence.

"I for one will welcome our new AI overlords!"

Ahem ... How do you plan to do that? Looks to me like one very likely result of the overenthusiastic embrace of AI will be that effective communication. with or via computers will become next to impossible.

For example your "Hail Overlords" message will likely be massaged and come out on the overlord end as "What is the hail threat today in Overland Park, Kansas?" Or maybe as a challenge to take them on in a cage fight.

Strange to see a reference to Overland Park on El Reg. Are there people who don't live within a few hundred miles of it who have even heard of it? I'm guessing not many...

Obviously this is based on my fading memory, but I think that Word 6 will have most/all features that I use in Word to this day. And how many different versions have there been since then? So, yes, bloated software full of "features" that may benefit a very, very small percentage of people only, yet is programmed into all copies of Word/Office out there.

And don't get me started on the requirement for an Internet connection to play MS Solitaire now, for both the scores and those annoying ads! (Yes, I could buy an ad-free version, but why should I? Solitaire has been free in every version of Windows up to 10, so why change it?)

And that, right there, is why innovation has stalled on the desktop. Nobody want to pay for software.

GJC

Nobody wants to pay for software that they already had again I think you'll find.

We resent being asked to buy a new version of something every couple of years (minimum!) because that's what companies want us to do, when the one we have already works just fine, thank you. That's doubly true when the "new" software is actually measurably worse than the thing it replaces - being either stuffed full of adverts, stuffed full of spyware, running slower on the same hardware, demanding an internet connection for something it has no need to have an internet connection for, and in increasingly regular cases all of the above!

Microsoft is rumored to be turning Windows into a cloud-only offering. I believe it will fail miserably, but the corporate egg-heads just won't let go of the idea and moving forward nonetheless.

You do remember the days when every update to Windows and before that DOS was paid-for, right?

Nobody want to pay for software.

Actually, I already "bought" MS Solitaire when I bought my copy of Windows 10 as it comes with it, just like it did with every other version of Windows that I bought. Would you like to see the receipts?

And that copy that you bought will carry on working, forever. What's the problem?

GJC

The "problem" is as mentioned in my original post:

"...the requirement for an Internet connection to play MS Solitaire now, for both the scores and those annoying ads!"

Previous versions of MS Solitaire did not contain ads and did not require an Internet connection, so we're back to bloat and unwanted/unnecessary features, as per the OP.

When you say "And that copy that you bought will carry on working, forever" then, yes, technically you are correct. But it will still contain ads, still require an Internet connection unlike previous versions and at some point in the future (14 October 2025 in the case of Windows 10 Home) Microsoft will stop supporting it. So technically, yes; realistically, no.

So you want support, and presumably updates, forever, for free? That takes programming time and effort. Do you give your work away for free?

GJC

Yep. And you would have to be pretty unaware of the entire history of Microsoft, dating back to the "Open Letter to Hobbyists", not to expect the company to want to charge for anything and everything it makes.

Come to that, why Word at all? In the late 1980s, we were running offices with no huge problems using text based Word Perfect and Lotus123. For most people most of the time, they worked perfectly well. They may well have been not only as good at actually getting work done -- which is, I think, most likely the point of PCs -- as their modern GUI equivalents. Maybe better.

I remember the MASS11 update that came with proportional fonts seeming like a huge leap forward. As for Lotus 123 - I've still got loads of commands like /wcw in muscle memory.

I did my entire final year design project on Word 2. And the output still has the crisp perfection of New Orders Substance album cover.

I just watched a vid on Elite - an open universe game that wasn't just a programming marvel but also a brilliant game and all in ~22kB.

Or Frontier, the only game to simulate our entire galaxy from spiral arms to 1m topographical features on a 720KB disk

Yes indeed. We keep a Win XP machine, mainly to drive high end scanning and colour printing kit for which no later drivers are available. It runs on a single core 1 GHz Athlon. The (not very funny) joke is that equivalent tasks can actually run faster on it than on my 2.8Ghz i5 laptop running Win 10.

We now got billion-instructions-per-second processors which are being reduced to a crawl by shitware like Electron and JavaScript.

.. had to ramp up production to handle all the Doom wads eating up the digital real estate as fast as they could build it

"Later, Mosaic Corp evolved into Netscape, and that begat today's Mozilla."

And Netscape Communicator is still alive and hiding under the name "Seamonkey".

meanwhile NT has evolved into a monster that looks as if it wants to spend 30 years displaying the message "Preparing to Configure Windows. Don't turn off your computer".

I wonder if Microsoft have an entire department devoted to designing Wating graphics. It has a lot of them but then it needs a lot of them.

"Meanwhile NT has evolved into a monster that looks as if it wants to spend 30 years displaying the message "Preparing to Configure Windows. Don't turn off your computer"."

Somewhat reminds me of this:

Vasa or Wasa[a] (Swedish pronunciation: [²vɑːsa] ⓘ) is a Swedish warship built between 1626 and 1628. The ship sank after sailing roughly 1,300 m (1,400 yd) into her maiden voyage on 10 August 1628. ... Richly decorated as a symbol of the king's ambitions for Sweden and himself, upon completion she was one of the most powerfully armed vessels in the world. However, Vasa was dangerously unstable, with too much weight in the upper structure of the hull. Despite this lack of stability, she was ordered to sea and foundered only a few minutes after encountering a wind stronger than a breeze.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vasa_(ship)

Seems to me that many of the problems with modern computing are due not to lack of innovation, but to marketing folk insisting on the appearance of innovation. Potemkin innovation as it were.

When I still lived with my parents and brother, I played Doom (and later Quake) over a DOS-based IPX driver that used ordinary serial and parallel cables/ports in a daisy-chain.

You just ran a DOS TSR, connected either a 9, 25 or parallel cable to another computer which was also running the TSR.

That appeared like an ordinary packet driver to the OS, so you could run IPX over it.

Wasn't fast, but you could use it, and everything could see it as just a network card.

We used that for gaming until we eventually invested in a bunch of ISA NE2000 10Base2 cards and ran the coax between bedrooms (we already had the BNC and T-pieces from an old bag that came with a video recorder years before that used them for video cables! They worked fine).

I still have, somewhere, about 25m of various serial, parallel, 9 pin , 25 pin, and a bunch of adaptors and gender-changers for every combination that we used to join three PCs (a 386 a 486 and a Pentium if memory serves).

"three decades of increase in computer capacity and parallelism has mainly enabled unprecedented levels of OS and app bloat."

The main advance from a technical use-case point of view has been the intake, processing, transfer and storage of ever-increasing volumes of data. This is mainly determined by the gradual increase over 3 decades of processor, network and storage capacity, but there are very little new ideas. In fact a gigantic amount of this volume of data is either collected unnecessarily (without user knowledge / consent and/or simply 'we might use it later'), and brings little or no value to the users. Or even worse, it is generated automatically by bots in order for other bots to search it, catalogue it and reward it with good SEO rankings.

From a computer science point of view, the most interesting things are the work on unstructured data. The "AI" fad is mostly applying neural network ideas (themselves 3-4 decades old) using newer faster hardware and never-seen-before volumes of data (which is far too huge to properly sanitise hence some of the the garbage-in-garbage-out and hallucination effects).

From a hardware point of view the real paradigm shift is quantum computing, and that is at about the state that non Neumann architecture computers were in the 50s or 60s - it will be a couple of decades at least before we reach the '1993' equivalent

Interesting perspective - but yeah, sounds about right. Given that we had NT in 1993, I think Linux has improved rather more dramatically than Windows since then. Although even then, desktop Linux peaked some time around 2010, and hasn't really improved much since. It's just constant, constant re-invention of the same things, again and again. The 3D compiz/beryl desktop I had in, what, 2006, could do stuff than a modern Ubuntu desktop still can't! Because it hasn't been reinvented yet, but I'm sure it won't be long...

Exacto mundo! Nothing happened in the last 30 years, except ... Linux (eg. Slackware)! The vast freeing and democratization of computing, outside of entreprises and academia's labs. The software that now runs HPC, and Raspberry Pis, and smart toasters (aka phones), and goes forth and multiplies. (no mention of Linux in Liam's piece, and only yours so far in these comments!)

Although the PC industry is in deep denial about it, as it was in 2021, just as it was a decade before that, computers aren't getting that much faster any more.

I think we need to separate out this sentence slightly.

The hardware continues to get ever faster. You can happily buy 16 core processors for desktops running 32 threads. You can buy a 96 core processor running 192 threads with all of them running at circa 5GHz.

However, there is fuck all point because all of the software is so badly written that it will use precisely one thread running on one processor.

The net result is that despite the hardware performance being literally thousands of times better than it was in the 1980's, the software runs slower.

It takes longer to cold boot a modern PC than a 1980's original. It takes longer when the OS is loaded to open a word processor. It takes longer for that word processor to open and display a file.

True - I think LibreOffice 7x, opening a ~300kb password-protected spreadsheet, takes longer than opening a similar document did on Office 2003, obviously 20 years ago. Despite it now running on a 12-core 64-bit Ryzen with dual light-speed NVMe drives.

I'm going to look a *little* dubiously at you because I know memory plays tricks.

In my head, my System 6 Mac Plus was incredibly fast to boot. And then I watch a video of one actually booting on YouTube and it turns out it took several minutes.

> However, there is fuck all point because all of the software is so badly written that it will use precisely one thread running on one processor.

It's even worse than that. More often than not, that single thread will be hanging on I/O (on a disk that's being hogged by something else that's badly written), or on a network request (gods only know what for). Most likely, to power some feature that has a 1% use-case. So everything is just as slow or slower, even though single-thread CPU performance has also grown significantly.

Sorry, but that is simply not true, get yourself some faster storage. I have a dual boot PC running a 5800X. Cold boot to login, Windows 11 or Ubuntu is five or six seconds with SSD boot disk depending on the password. In 1984, it took longer then that just for the CRT to warm up.

My systems with nvme drives definitely boot faster than any machine I had 20, or even 10 years ago, but cold boot to login on a modern OS in five or six seconds? I'm skeptical of your claim to say the least.

'the software is so badly written that it will use precisely one thread running on one processor'

Look up Amdahl's Law. If the thing you are trying to do is fundamentally sequential, as is often the case - if you need to compute a before you can compute b before you can compute c - then it doesn't matter how many cores you have available, you are going to be stuck using one core for that thing. Not that there aren't cases where they could help and aren't utilised as much as they could be but more cores/threads are not a panacea. A 96 core processor does not and never will do things 96 times as fast as a single core.

It all died in 1997.

1) Because in 1997 the SEC changed the very obscure Initial Investor Rule which mean that all VC financed startups quickly became just Pump and Dump scams. Hence the Dot Com 1 bubble. Which blew up in 2000.

As a by-product the start up software business was almost totally financialized become little more than the public face of a financial scam as the VC's moved to making all their money from management fees rather than actually cashing out successful companies. Who made useful software. That made money. So since 2000 the fully financializd software startup business a.k.a Dot 2.0 has just been various schemes for the VC's to fleece various Bigger Fools. Usual desperately searching for yield in a very low yield post 2008 world. Actual useful (non buggy) software that did something new and innovation and made money, not going to happen. VC's are about risk adverse to new ideas as Hollywood / US TV script buyers. Sheep with money .

2) In 1997 Amelio made the huge mistake of letting Steve Job back inside Apple. And Job's quickly killed the whole ecosystem of small / medium sized Mac software companies who had been the driving force behind almost every new software category since 1984. All gone by 2000. Because all your (revenue) base are belong to us (Steve).

Pretty much every big hit Win 16/32 product of the 1990's first shipped on the Mac. Since 2000 the MacOS software market has not only been a very small niche (<2% revenue) but has not broken one single innovative product since. One that created a new market segment. With serious revenue. Which had been pretty much a yearly occurrence between mid 1980's and mid 1990's in the MacOS ecosystem

3) In 1997 it became very obvious that Andreessen utterly boneheaded "the Browser is the Platform" public statements had not only killed Netscape by putting a huge bullseye on them that MS could and would hit not matter what the cost but it was now obvious that Netscape could not even competent technically with MS's panic buying of the Spyglass code-base license which was renamed Internet Explorer. So losing the Web browser war to MS for a decade. Until the rewrite of Navigator took off due to the technical incompetence of the MS IE team. But in the end the old Netscape tradition of technical incompetence killed Firefox too. I know. Lets create a new language. That will fix the problems in Firefox. Giving the crown by default to Google Chrome. For the next decades until it has now suffered its own inevitable code collapse in the last year or two.

And that, boys and girls, is why the software business has been so boring, so uncreative , and so derivative for the last 30 years. Blame the VC's mostly. If you thought a typical High Street bank manager was unimaginative, conservative and risk averse to innovation then you have never met any hucksters in very expensive suits who have infested Sand Hill Road and its environs for the last 25 years.

There is no reason innovation should have stopped. The raw processing power now available is staggering. There has been some software innovation on mobile platforms but the form factor prevents anything truly breakthough happening. Desktop is the platform for radical breakthroughs. But will not happen with the current VC 2/20 model. And with the IRS allowing the various VC vehicle financial scams to continue.

The one hardware/software technology that I thought 30 years ago the might have sprouted wings was pen computing. Back then probably called light pens. I recall having high hopes for [1]GO Corporation PenOS (defunct 1994) and later the Apple Newton but even today pen based systems are the exception. Handwriting recognition on an Android tablet (GBoard) is pretty decent even with my scrawl.

I suspect that adding pen support to an existing interface/system doesn't fully utilize the distinctive features of the pen interaction. Designing a pen centric system from scratch might produce the critical mass required.

I always imagined writing writing mathematical equations or formulae from predicate calculus using a pen would be a great deal easier than typesetting them with eqn or latex. Typesetting something like the Schrödinger time independent equation in eqn is just plain laborious.

I can not wait another 30 years - I would be getting a telegram from the queen... likely delivered in person.

[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/GO_Corporation

Apple certainly seems to be selling quite a lot of its "Pencils" (I hate that they're calling it that).

Years ago I imagined an application to run on something like a tablet (long before such existed): one drew a circuit diagram of arbitrary complexity on the screen, and the device emulated/simulated that circuit in real time - take input and output from e.g. the headphone and mic/line sockets.

We're finally at the point where such might be practical... and there's no longer a need for it. Oh well...

Monopolies eventually stagnate, and in the case of Microsoft the company has only been adding stuff that benefits its bottom-line since Windows XP. Back then it was audio and video (Secure Channel) and later it became online advertising and cloud. And in the future we'll probably see AI in Windows 12 everywhere.

The core operating system hasn't changed, or barely.

Microsoft has been adding stuff which benefits its bottom line since 1976. It's a company, they tend to be interested in that sort of thing.