Everything you've said so far seems to make sense, at least to me, hah. Most of the people I know who run home servers like that are just data hoarders. I know one guy who actually hosts a server to stream movies from himself, but otherwise it's just space for people to download a bunch of stuff. Usually it's movies and shows, but it can also be YouTube videos, video games, books, drawings and photographs, along with other random software and such. At least from my experience. I joined on the hoarding train myself in an attempt to help preserve a certain website that ceased hosting recently, but I'm using a measly 12 TB drive for that. Most people I know start at 32 for their collections, usually in 4-8 TB segments and with at least one complete set of 4-8 TB backup drives. It's all about data preservation. I also know a lot of people who like to collect computers, open them up and upgrade them and mess with their OS, et cetera. It's quite depressing, though, because they seem to not know a lot about how computers work - they couldn't build their own operating software or anything like that, certainly, and even I surpass their knowledge in diagnostics sometimes, which gives me secondhand embarrassment, haha. That's just my experience though.
My experience with old computers is a lot of what informs my opinions on computing evolution, I guess. I don't really know what a GPU is, but I know enough about it for personal maintenance, like what connections might need to be resoldered if it stops working, et cetera. A sound card from 1994 or such seems to hold no similarities with the modern incarnation; none of my knowledge of the modern thing is able to be backported, I don't know what I'm looking at. Though, I'm kind of just ill and obsessed, and that wouldn't hold a candle to professionally working with the hardware; I don't mean to talk over you in that regard.
I think software has always been rapidly changing, hasn't it? I don't think there was even ten years of difference between Microsoft BASIC and Apple's GUI operating software. There's hundreds of examples of that kind of thing. I think a timely microcosm would be Adobe Flash. Flash Internet and Post-Flash Internet are nigh incomparable in a lot of senses, not just on how they operate but how the culture interacted with the software. I also think you understate the demographics change a bit; it's not just that the product became mainstream, it's that it became ubiquitous. Ten years ag
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