logoalt Hacker News

spottedmarley • yesterday at 11:25 PM • 1 reply • view on HN

1.0 and 2.0 are, sociologically and culturally, two completely different paradigms when considering how people use their devices. In the early days, even for the first decade or so of the internet, the computing world was largely homogeneous, most people had almost identical hardware, software and use cases for their home PCs. There was not a lot of variation. In 2026 the entire world is fractured in terms of the hardware, software and applied use of their myriad of devices. Impossible to label any of it as PC2.0 when virtually no two PCs are the same or used for the same purposes. So it would be more like several billion unique PC revolutions.


Replies

glimshe • today at 3:00 AM

In the earliest days of the PC revolution, people had different, incompatible hardware and software (with the exception of the widespread MS BASIC) even if they sometimes used the same CPUs and audio/video chips. TRS-80, CoCo, MSX, C64, Amiga, Atari ST, ZX Spectrum, Oric, Amstrad CPC, X68000, PC-98, IBM-PC, Apple II, Mac Classic, Macintosh II, Apple II GS, SGI, Sun etc. In fact, hardware and software are a lot more homogenous now than in the beginning: 2 dominant CPU architectures (x86/64 and ARM) and 3 dominant OSs (Windows, MacOS, Linux).