In the 1980s, personal computers were toys for hobbyists. In the 1990s, they became tools for ordinary people. In the 21st century, they have become goggleboxes for idiots.

Discuss:

Goggleboxes or Googleboxes?

This idiot only owns 1 chromebook. I could not pass up the cheap price I paid for it. It works good also. For the kind of computer user I am. Can run Linux if I want to. But I have other laptops for that.

But I got broad shoulders. So I can take it. Being called a idiot. My self assured manliness usually considers the source of such statements. I then move on.

Yahoo search is better. :-)

May I ask what CPU you have in that? The bottom-of-the-line Chromebook that I have personal experience with is slow and laggy and can barely handle SD YouTube, so I'm curious as to how much power you need before a ChromeBook starts to work well.

Also: any issues with heat generation?

Can't speak for rokytnji, but when I had my Chromebook, it was a N2840 w/ 4 GB ram, and it was more than suffucient for me. Ran Fedora 23 w/ full KDE desktop and never felt too slow or laggy. I had to limit how many tabs I could open in Chromium, and I couldn't really use Firefox at all, but it worked fine other than that, even was able to use Gimp and such with IMO quite acceptable performance.

I guess it depends where you were looking back then. Where I traveled, I saw that personal computers were actually spreading like wildfire through small businesses back then. The killer app was VisiCalc. Pretty much every business got one because of VisiCalc and getting a PC with it, usually an Apple II, paid for itself in short order. Later you had the IBM PC, with Lotus 1-2-3 which was a VisiCalc clone, and dBase. Again, with that software the machines paid for themselves in short order. The software cut some tasks from weeks to hours, allowing the saved time to be invested in growth or development.

I guess the big difference between then and now was that back then a lot of savings were reinvested. Now they seem to be bled out of the company as fast as possible, often resulting in a death spiral.

There was also a fair amount of scientific computing going on, but nothing like now.

Speak for yourself. They were not toys for hobbyists in the 80's. I entered the workforce back in the 70s and in 1980, when the IBM PC and Mac's came into play people were writing documents, doing simulations, programming on them, and looking to attach them to networks. One of our largest bailiwicks was to solve the Novel File Server attachment issue with DOS and early Windows. Dial up modems were used a lot, similarly we did a ton of data communications utilizing nailed up telco circuits for things classified as Point of Sale, which were not just cash registers, but instead banking terminals, law enforcement terminals, and so forth.

This grew a ton in the 90's once Windows started catching up with MAC and Linux started to be seen around the block.

I suppose I can't necessarily disagree about the 21st century remark, however I also feel that it is what you make of it. Sure I do use my phone to look things up, but I'm not looking up videos of dumb people doing dumb things just for a laugh. Meanwhile one can probably criticize stuff I look up per personal preference merely because different people have different tastes. Same comment in reverse is that whatever you choose to look up, if anything, I may criticize that choice as well. But those are personal choices. Meanwhile I still feel that personal computers are used a great deal for real work.

You said you're in your 70s in a different thread. Do you work? What exactly do you do with a personal computer? For my part I'm saying that I do work on personal computers, four different ones which I have in my office as a matter of fact.

Mine is the intel celeron model of Acer This model

https://www.amazon.com/Acer-C710-283.../dp/B00EYTI0TG

It is not laggy at all. With Youtube. Movies, Music. Few Tabs open <I am not a mutiple tab user much>.
The 32 gig sd card holds my movies, music, pictures, you get the idea. No speed issues. But I use a class 10 SD card.
No issues with heat either. I live in the desert.

A million years of mankind living on this earth has brought us closer to death and filled our time with electronic solitaire.

I am hoping for something like IBM's box to some day assist medical problems so that the mom and pop doctors won't have to take 30 years to learn their jobs. (I have a poor opinion of the current methods in medical treatment)

What he said. I don't need a self driving car.
What I need?

A self driving prostate.

Understood and agreed but I do recognize that self-driving cars are a very important step toward realizing full AI, and even partial steps improve the prospect for Cyborgs. It may be some time yet before we have 3D Printed prostates or the like but Cyborgs have existed on some level ever since peg legs were invented. It's just getting more sophisticated due to the microprocessor Harrrr!

On the larger scale of the point of this thread I'd like to say idiots would be idiots without PCs or the Internet.. At least with those things they can come into contact with people who don't suffer fools or patronize them.

Furthermore, as demonstrated by the overthrow of Mubarik and others, tyranny is at risk like never before, Tyrants can now be toppled without firing a shot. For me that utterly compensates for those that choose to remain ignorant. They will adapt or die out.

Understood and agreed but I do recognize that self-driving cars are a very important step toward realizing full AI, and even partial steps improve the prospect for Cyborgs. It may be some time yet before we have 3D Printed prostates or the like but Cyborgs have existed on some level ever since peg legs were invented. It's just getting more sophisticated due to the microprocessor Harrrr!

On the larger scale of the point of this thread I'd like to say idiots would be idiots without PCs or the Internet.. At least with those things they can come into contact with people who don't suffer fools or patronize them.

Furthermore, as demonstrated by the overthrow of Mubarik and others, tyranny is at risk like never before, Tyrants can now be toppled without firing a shot. For me that utterly compensates for those that choose to remain ignorant. They will adapt or die out.

--- XKCD on Free Speech ---

Through the mid-1980's computers were expensive, and primarily used by government/business/education entities, and therefore the software was business oriented.

After PC's thrust computers into the public eye, there has been a never-ending procession of new "fun" uses of computers, which imho is a good thing. People use computers to accomplish things they can't accomplish otherwise, and whatever it is they want to do is just fine, even if I don't particularly like or use these new things (like social media, for example). But whatever new thing people want to do on their computer devices it fine with me.

Maybe I got the dates wrong, but I can remember reading with amazement about things called microcomputers that you could buy in America as kits from Radio Shack and then put together yourself. They were the equivalent of Raspberries today. Obviously only geeks used them.

I remember microcomputers coming in for office use. The first one I saw was a Commodore Pet and there didn't seem to be much you could do with it compared with a "proper computer" (i.e. a mainframe), but by the time I retired, our department was using a few PCs running DOS alongside dumb terminals. The only advantage we could see to them was that you could buy them on a departmental budget without having to go through the IT department.

I bought my first PC after my mother died, because I had inherited a stash of family letters from her and needed a computer to help me decipher and translate them. It wasn't a job you could do at all easily on paper. That was a second-hand box with about 4 MB of core, running Windows 95. It was a useful tool and you didn't have to be a geek to use it. It was easy to learn to use the software. If anyone is interested in the story of the letters, there's a ramble about them on my website called The Brown Box.

What I find so sad about most modern computer use is that most of these people are not interested in computers at all; they merely use them to access something they consider less boring, like updating their Facebook status or watching videos of cats.