Then what do you mean by pure software? I think there's essentially zero domain-free software.

I prefer co-domain free software. Has no side-effects.

It is kind of funny though how all this hand wringing on performance, graphics, quality quality quality, has just resulted in basically same stuff as what I was doing with my computer in 2000 but with enormous resource use in comparison. Still playing games, still same old discussion forums/social media/whatever on the internet, same email and office suite, same chat, same media players, same everything. I can't even see the difference between 1080p and 4k from a couch, and people are trying to sell me 8k to watch the same stuff.

It just does not matter. The ideas matter. Novel functionality matters. But that isn't what any of that is. Same old. And the effort spent, the resources, the energy. All for more polygons on Lara Croft.

I mostly agree with you, but you couldn't have have meaningful live videochat between continents in 2000.

CU-SeeMe worked pretty well in 1995 if you had access to a half decent Internet connection, which admittedly most people didn’t.

For well funded organisations, ISDN video conferencing facilities were reasonably common.

Verizon in NYC was trying to make ISDN happen in the home in the mid 90's. I had it. The hard part was getting an ISP that supported SLIP.

In Australia ISDN was available pretty much everywhere to any residential customer who wanted to pay for it, but it was not particularly popular. It was widely used by businesses, however.

The main reason was that the line rental was significantly higher, POTS lines had untimed flat rate local calls, whereas ISDN didn’t, and ISPs charged more for ISDN plans.

Towards the end of the 90s that changed for voice calls, and so a fair number of folks who couldn’t get ADSL for one reason or another got DoV (Data over Voice) Internet services. This is where you make a single channel ISDN “voice” call, and then use it for 64Kbps data. Most ISPs supported it on ordinary dialup plans.

This gave you significantly better speed, and much improved latency compared with what could realistically be achieved with V.90.

My favorite part was due to it being a digital line there was no modem negotiation.

CuSeeMe certainly was being used before 2000.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CU-SeeMe

That took until skype in 2003 I guess. The idea is pretty old though and people were trying for it for a while from different angles.

Maybe not between continents but we had meaningful live video chat in 1968

>all this hand wringing on performance, graphics, quality quality quality, has just resulted in basically same stuff as what I was doing with my computer in 2000 but with enormous resource use in compariso

Mordern GPUs are streaming multiprocessors. Complaining that GPUs use a ton of resources is like complaining that a firehose uses a ton of water. Maximum data throughput is the point!

>But that isn't what any of that is. Same old. And the effort spent, the resources, the energy. All for more polygons on Lara Croft

There are MANY novel games being released every year. It's up to you to find them.

I'm willing to bet all those novel games would have still been great games if they took their underlying mechanics and were making them in early 2000s with that era graphics. Ray tracing isn't a game mechanic. Neither is hair physics.

I'm not sure where people get the idea that graphics quality is the root issue with modern AAA games. When a great game is released and it looks amazing (Baldurs Gate 3), nobody is taking issue with the graphics.