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SmallSpoonBrigade
ExplainingComputers
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Comments by "SmallSpoonBrigade" (@SmallSpoonBrigade) on "Tower PCs: An Endangered Species?" video.
I do think that pretty much any time you need a bunch of disks that you're going to be stuck with one of basically three basic options. One would be some form of tower, a second would be some form of rack mount and the last would be just a bunch of them connected via something like e.SATA, USB or Firewire style of external connector. The tower is particularly nice when you can't or don't want to string a bunch of external disks together and you don't have a good set up for a rack. And provided you don't need much portability, it's rarely a bad option.
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There's also flexibility. There hasn't been much change since PC97 came out, but it didn't really change much other than specifying colors for a lot of the common ports and that was about the time that you started to see buttons that were electronic rather than mechanical, so you could have a computer that could switch off without touching the button. Personally, I do think that I'll probably go back to the '70s era of computing in terms of using a thin client for much of my work as the room I work in is rather small and gets hot rather easily. A small computer like a Raspberry Pi with a monitor, keyboard and mouse with the rest of the computer in a larger room where it's not baking me would work perfectly well. There's even off the shelf KVMs out there that do just that. Or, you can use VNC or RDP to do the job in a more DIY style.
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@Dianaranda123 Yesterday, the local grocery store tried to charge me a sugar tax for a sugar free beverage, I told the cashier to take it back. I'd wager that if enough people complain and refuse to buy, that it will be fixed quickly. If people do pay anyways, then it won't be fixed until there's a class action suit and people get a couple pennies on the dollar of taxes improperly collected. The issue more than anything else is that if people don't refuse to go along with such things, then it will become inevitable. There are a decent number of DIY cloud apps that you can install on your own hardware, or even on leased servers. And honestly, apart from the challenges of accessing it away from home, it's often just as good. And accessing it while out and about is a known problem with known solutions.
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I have to disagree about the age, I"m sure they did exist 30 years ago, but it wasn't really until the first Pentiums started showing up that I remember seeing them available. Before that, they were mostly the pizza orientation boxes that were intended to sit directly under the monitor. I suspect that it wasn't as much of an issue because many computers of that age had somewhere between little and no need for ventilation. They also tended to not have much need for multiple storage units either with most of them having either one or two floppy disks and perhaps a HDD if you were well off. EDIT: I wouldn't consider it to be a tower if it's meant to sit on it's side. Apart from an old Magnavox I had, I never saw any computers that were designed for both orientations. They would have a very clear side that was made of unpainted metal that was intended to be placed downwars. Or at least all the computers I had, my friends had, the computer labs at school had and the ones at the hardware stores had were like that. I think it was just a relatively brief period where they made ones that could be kept in either orientation were a thing before they needed to optimize the heat dissipation and assume a standard orientation.
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