But again, that's conflating web connected or even web required with mainframe compute and it's just not the same.

PC was never 'no web'. No one actually 'counted every screw in their garage' as the PC killer app. It was always the web.

You know that the personal computer predates the web by quite a few years?

Sure, I was too hyperbolic. I simply meant connecting to the web didn't make it not a PC.

The web really pushed adoption, much more than a person computation machine. It was the main use case for most folks.

This. Although briefly, there was at least a couple of years of using pc's without an internet connection. It's unthinkable now. And even back then, when you blinked with your eyes this time period was over.

That was a pretty long blink?

The personal computer arguably begins with VisiCalc in 1979.

> Through the 1970s, personal computers had proven popular with electronics enthusiasts and hobbyists, however it was unclear why the general public might want to own one. This perception changed in 1979 with the release of VisiCalc from VisiCorp (originally Personal Software), which was the first spreadsheet application.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_personal_computers#...

Mainstream use of the web really took off in the second half of the 1990s. Arbitrarily, let's say with the release of Windows 95. That's a quarter of a century you'd be blinking for.

One of the actual killer apps was gaming. Which still "happens" mostly on the client, today, even for networked games.

Yet the most popular games are online-only and even more have their installation base's copies of the game managed by an online-first DRM.

That's true, but beside the point: even online only games or those gated by online DRM are not streamed or resemble a thin client architecture.

That exists, too, with GeForce Now etc, which is why I said mostly.

This is just factually inaccurate.

Please provide a more comprehensive response. I suppose I should be more specific as well.

Some of the online only games I am thinking of are CoD, Fortnite, LoL and Minecraft. The online-first DRM I am thinking of is Steam.

Even half of your list is not "online only."

In time Mainframes of this age will make a come back.

This whole idea that you can connect lots of cheap low capacity boxes and drive down compute costs is already going away.

In time people will go back to thinking compute as a variable of time taken to finish processing. That's the paradigm in the cloud compute world- you are billed for the TIME you use the box. Eventually people will just want to use something bigger that gets things done faster, hence you don't have to rent them for long.

It's also interesting that computing capacity is no longer discussed as instructions per second, but as Giga Watts.

Umm... I had a PC a decade before the web was invented, and I didn't even use the web for like another 5 years after it went public ("it's an interesting bit of tech but it will obviously never replace gopher...")

The killer apps in the 80s were spreadsheets and desktop publishing.