Comments on: What Has Been The Greatest Advancement In PC Specs?

By: Jim Hillier

Jim Hillier — Sun, 14 Dec 2025 00:23:11 +0000

Hi Everyone,

All great choices! It goes to show just how many areas there are in which PC technology has advanced enormously.

Humble beginnings.

By: JD

JD — Sat, 13 Dec 2025 20:57:19 +0000

Hey Jim,

Cassette tapes, floppy drive storage…in school, I wrote simple programs and stored them on rolls of paper with little holes poked in them! Still, I will stray slightly from your PC specs and say the greatest advancement is the PC connection technology to the outside world. Otherwise, there is not much you can do with the PCs no matter how fast they are. My first modem was 300 bits/second! After a few upgrades, was up to 14,400 bits/second. And it tied up the phone line (no cellular back then). Now, connected 24/7 and at speeds that can approach Gigabits/second!

By: Mindblower

Mindblower — Sat, 13 Dec 2025 20:04:16 +0000

Well Jim, this is a loaded topic. I too started with the pocket size TRS-80. Yes to storage and CPU’s, but several points are over looked. We went from dial-up and BBS, to high speed and Internet. Not to overlook the cell phone s with their various o/s. Then there is Windows itself. Though it pushed (imposed) hardware, we are able to do multiple operations simultaneously. Finally, the size of a desktop is getting smaller, lighter, more powerful while consuming very little wattage. Hope others find more, Mindblower!

By: Reg Watson

Reg Watson — Sat, 13 Dec 2025 05:51:13 +0000

Thanks Jim
I think there are arguments for and against first and second place but I have to say I tend to fall on the CPU side (or microprocessor as we more commonly called it back in Jim’s and my day) for seeing the greatest advancement. All the work calculating and drawing was originally done by the poor old CPU. Finally someone realised you could offload drawing graphics to a dedicated card and let the CPU sub-contract out a lot of that workload.

Very close second I would put the evolution of the humble floppy up to the latest Gen 5 NVMe drives and finally third place going to the power hungry beasts of 5090 GPUs that we use today (if most of us could only afford them). SO much power drawn that you could almost heat a cup of tea and more than a few GPU power connectors have melted due to poor designs.

I can imagine how future DavesComputerTips readers in 2050 will have a polite chuckle reading about what we think are “top of the line PCs today. Of course that’s assuming aliens don’t land on Earth sometime soon and share us some of their faster-than-light style tech. Finally with current DDR5 memory prices going skyhigh and with no end in sight thanks to Ai slurping every DDR5 module up it can get it’s industry “hands” could we be witnessing the death throes of the Home PC market ? This no “supply and high demand” pricing has already filtered through to pre-built PCs and NVMe drives and probably will soon hit GPU prices as the VRAM will add to the cost of building cardss.

“You will rent your RAM from the Cloud by yearly subscription and you will be happy…” 🙂
Cheers
Reg

By: Steve Smith

Steve Smith — Sat, 13 Dec 2025 04:36:11 +0000

I would have to agree with CLISSA. My first Windows computer (Mar 1996 with Windows 95) had a 1 GB hard drive with a 3 1/2″ floppy drive. I now use a 2 TB hard drive for my main drive and I have several 6 TB external drives, a couple of Blu-ray burners, and many 32 GB flash drives for storage.

By: Clissa

Clissa — Sat, 13 Dec 2025 02:17:36 +0000

Simply, ….. Storage.
No matter what it’s purpose, without somewhere to put stuff whether for a fleeting moment or forever, nothing can be achieved without some type of storage.
Remember, some guys flew to the moon using a computer no bigger in storage volume than today’s smart watches.