It feels like we have started over. The first few years where home PC’s got popular were weird. Things were clunky, and very fluid. Some games and programs required a bit more memory, of a bit of a better graphics card, and I would take out and update my graphics card, or get some extra memory, and open the PC and put the memory in the slots available on the motherboard. It was just how it was. CD’s got popular? Simply get a CD reader and plug it in. Zip-disks got popular? Get a SCSI extension for your PC, plug it in on your motherboard, connect your new zip-disk to the new SCSI port and hope for the best. A hard-disk? Get the really expensive 20MB HD and plug it in. Format and partition the HD and after a couple of hours everything was ready to go. USB connections? Get an extension, plug it in, and you are ready to use whatever you got.

After some years things got less fluid. PC’s came all equipped, and updating was not so usual anymore. Games could basically always run, although sometimes a bit slower, depending the hardware you had. All systems had a hard-disk, and USB connections. Things got easier with every new generation of hardware.

I know the AI (more accurate, the LLM) we now have is not hardware, but even being software it feels like old times. Trying models, and different setups. Making choices, because some models are just to big, and don’t fit on your drive. Waiting and trying to improve the setup, adding speech or image or music generation, try what works and what doesn’t. If kind of fun again. Reading and investigating, and slowly getting results.

When my laptop gave an answer to my first question, without having to connect to the Internet to do a search it felt exactly the same as when I added a strip of 4 MB of memory, and it worked, and I could run some new program. Exciting, another leap into the future!