Ask HN: When did computers become powerful enough for your purposes?

For various approximations of "powerful enough": once I upgraded my 486/66 to 32MB of RAM it was powerful enough (could write C++ in emacs and compile while X11 was running, without any swapping).

In grad school I started working on molecular dynamics simulations; computers will probably never be "powerful enough" to run long enough, high fidelity simulations for that to be a useful outcome, so the answer there is really "never".

Since then, I've worked on computers that are much more powerful than I need (TPUv4, 192 core 2TB RAM servers, etc) but are still not powerful enough (or efficient enough) to do all the tasks that people could use them for.

I don't frequently upgrade my home server or home desktop anymore- typically only when a new game comes out and I can't set everything to maximum, or I run out of disk space, or I need to do something that doesn't fit in RAM. I've held off on upgrading from 1gbit LAN to 10gbit LAN because it's not really pressing either.

No computer I have used since 1976 has failed to meet expectations or run code I wrote slower than seemed reasonable but I do admit I had to wait in a queue for my cards to be run.

No computer I owned has really ever had no idle time when not caught in a bug of my making, or running beta OS code.

Because of time sharing computers stopped being too slow to use when compiling their own kernel around the time a megabyte of memory was common. That's use, distinct from "play intense video rich games"

No computer i own has been fast enough for me to routinely make video immersion work.

There's a lot of "it depends" in that, but I will say this. I'm a heavy user of Eclipse, and by and large I like it just fine, and it has run mostly OK on every computer I've used it on since about 2001 (or whenever it launched). But the one big annoyance I've always had with it was the startup time. And maybe a side order of "uses RAM aggressively enough that I don't usually want to run more than maybe two instances."

Now I don't know if it's purely down to hardware, or if JVM improvements are also a big factor, but the last new computer I bought (a System76 laptop, that I got maybe not quite two years ago now) is powerful enough that Eclipse launches in a couple of seconds, and I can routinely have 7 or 8 instances running with no problem. The machine in question has all nvme and/or ssd drives, and has 64GB of RAM. yeah, I splurged a little bit when I bought it. And in hindsight, I couldn't be happier. You can never be too young, too good looking, or have too much RAM.

We're getting there. We Almost have a fully bottleneck free generation of computers. But we aren't actually there yet. My all nvme 5900X computer with a 2080Ti is great but there are still things that could be improved to make things flow through the system without restriction.

I don't push computers very hard. I write code, write prose, and surf the net. So, maybe 1995?

It kinda depends... my purposes have changed a lot over the years! So here are a couple of instances where computers were underpowered/powerful enough for my purposes.

My TRS-80 model 1 did not have enough memory (4K). Writing early BASIC programs like a program to maintain D&D character stats, I very quickly ran out of space. When I upgraded it to 16K it was adequate as far as RAM. Cassette storage reliability was another issue entirely - none of my old programs have survived.

My college roommate's 512K Mac was way too painful to copy files between floppies - you had to swap them at least a dozen times. It became difficult to manage files and back them up. My later Mac SE was a lot more usable once it had an internal drive.

My PowerBook Duo 230 was surprisingly adequate for writing and programming especially when I started using a magneto-optical drive to back things up.

My later PowerBook G4 was inadequate for audio stuff - I was trying to record podcasts and mix things. I had endless trouble getting a clean recording with an extern USB microphone or headset and mixing audio really strained my hard drive space.

Wi-fi bandwidth was not adequate for what I was trying to do, about 2006 through 2012 or so - I was not able to serve my iTunes library to a different machine across Wi-Fi, and have that different machine stream the audio to an AirPort Express to listen to, without breaking up or stuttering. It's still tricky to get this to work even with much faster Wi-Fi with a 7th generation iPod Touch, although it works great with a recent iPad.

A very old Intel Mac Mini was not really adequate for recording and mixing my podcast projects although it worked better than the the G4.

My 2008 Mac Pro was great for all my video and audio projects with added RAM and 4 internal drives. It's still my workhorse machine for my big e-mail archive and producing podcasts.

I am using several little Intel NUC machines, i3 and i5. They are surprisingly fast. I use one as a headless build server for personal projects using VSCode. My kids use a couple of them for gaming even though they have pretty minimal GPUs. But they work just fine for a lot of games, especially games that are a few years older.

My M2 MacBook Air is shockingly powerful enough for anything that doesn't require a huge amount of storage, so it's my new workhorse for writing, programming, Logic Pro mixes, etc. I can even generate Stable Diffusion images on it. The big archive of projects lives on a Synology now. The battery life is finally long enough!

I'm planning at some point to replace the 2008 Mac Pro with a machine set up specifically for video projects. It might be a new Mac Mini...

When video compression and home broadband converged to make porn consumption a quotidian pastime.