PC Ads of the past

- audio/video encoding, editing and playback and format conversion.

- a lot more pixels (1920x1080x24bit vs 640x512x8bit - a 19 times ratio, plus accelerated desktop).

- I could browse the web on the A3000 (12 MHz/2Mb) but it was slooooow, just keeping up with the 14k4 modems.

And, yes, I do mostly the same things, LibreOffice and LaTeX instead of !Impress and !Sigma. Vi or Gedit instead of !Zap.

I can see me using a low power Arm based desktop when the SoCs become powerful enough to run GIMP and Audacity.

Full Motion Video for full movies in TV equivalent resolution (FMV was a CD-i and CDTV - with add-on - function not out till 1991, and even then was incomparable to modern Blu-Ray)

Hold a computer in your hand and get live flight information sent to it.

Send messages to other people via a handheld computer anywhere in the world and respond accordingly. Note that it may have been possible using a portable computer and acoustic coupler, but you'd need the person at the other end to have a computer and acoustic coupler/modem to receive, and that hadn't achieved critical mass.

Access an enormous user-edited encyclopedia containing music, video, text, images and updated constantly with the latest information.

Proper 3D in games at 50FPS with fully texture mapped and filtered filled and rendered polygons with bump mapping and anisotropic filtering.

As above but in your hand.

Crack DES at home.

Use a touchscreen interface on a device not much bigger than a large sheet of paper or thicker than a small book to look up recipes from an almost infinite source of food or drink recipes.

Use a method of browsing through unstructured media in a way that is completely accessible to a large portion of the population of the planet, and then have that unstructured media indexed in a way that makes it easy to find the information you want regardless of where in the world it's stored.

Watch TV and Movies when you want, regardless of when (or if) they're shown in your area.

Build up a music collection where the only limit is your imagination without taking up massive amounts of physical space.

Reliably collaborate on projects in real-time and see what they're doing, join in and have the ability to video conference, whiteboard and screen share with lots of people all over the world.

Watch talks at a conference from the other side of the planet, while the talks are going on, from the comfort of your own home. Then interact with people at the conference again from the comfort of your own home on the other side of the planet.

Gain access to news regarding events from the ground without journalistic involvement. For example, imagine the Tianamen square protests with footage and commentary from people at the ground as it happens being made available to the majority of people in the west.

Study courses remotely as though you were actually there, interact with the lecturers and teachers and do this with ivy league schools or great universities for free, from your home on the other side of the planet.

Share video footage of your baby's first steps/words/whatever with their grandparents on the other side of the planet in real time or share it by uploading it to a place where they can access it minutes from then.

I really could keep going for a long time. There's a ton of stuff. It's not even the power, it's that we now know what to do with it.

Even in 1995, when it started to get a bit easier (Word/Excel on the Macintosh) - it still was a time consuming task.

I recall teaching classes, entire classes on the concept of "Cut", "Copy", "Paste", and "Clipboard" - intro to Macintosh concepts in 1995.

Even as recently as 2001/2002, spreadsheets had to be careful managed and broken up on laptops that were constantly running out of memory.

Photo Management, Instant Messaging within the enterprise, File Sharing - I could likely list 20 things that I can do today that I couldn't easily do in 2000.

There are things that I can do today, that I didn't even know _existed_ in 1990.

’progression’ involves a lot more than increased capability. i’d say a greater measure of technological progress is in looking at the diffusion and mass adoption of a transformative technology.. even if you could (maybe) do all of what you do on a computer today 25 years ago, my parent sure as hell couldn’t (i wasn’t born yet) and neither could 99%+ of the world’s population. the fact that we’re nearing a point where everyone has access to some sort of computing and connectivity is real progress. as too is the fact that you can get something today that’s thousands of times more powerful, and at a fraction of the cost.

also (and relating more-so to my original comment), there has clearly been a lot of progression towards making (the now far more powerful) components smaller and more mobile, which has clearly has a significant effect on how people interact with that same underlying technology. i mean forget smartphones, there are watches now that are more powerful (and capable) than early pc’s, and i wouldn’t write that off in saving we've ‘failed’ just because we aren’t driving-around in flying cars (operated, of course, by our humanoid robot chauffeur’s, and in-route to pluto for some good skiing)..