Nowadays, however, it would be desirable if the intellectual development of users had always kept pace with technological progress. ;)

I mean, you just have to look at the eloquence of then and now.

In the 18th and 19th centuries, people were very good at handling the subtleties of language.

In comparison, our way of expressing ourselves today seems downright neglected.

“It also depends on how you define cutting edge.”

Maybe, yes. But the C64 never was. It was cheaply made and full of bugs.
Like almost everything made by Commodore, maybe.
It focused on mass-production the foremost.
Parts were recycled everywhere (C64 is in parts broken because the ViC20 had been guttet for parts).
The business model was to sell as many computers possible, for maximum profits.
Everything else was secondary. Including the well being of the users.
It seemingly was a really bad company and it showed shirtly before bankrupcy.

It also depends on how you define cutting edge.

It’s not unheard of for an enthusiast to have a multi-PiB array at home.
100Gbit networking? 200Gbit? 400Gbit? All doable in a HomeLab.

You aren’t going to be installing 10 racks of H100s in your basement…
…but you can rent that rack by the hour today.
(It’s actually crazy to me that I can rent an hour of use on several dozen GPUs if I really need to run hashcat. And it isn’t even that expensive…)

With such easy access to tech that was literally state of the art 18-24 months ago, I’d say we are a LOT closer to cutting edge “at home” than a C64 user was in the 80s.

It’s a lot more like aristocratic citizen scientists l8ke centuries past.

Yay, you go the bot player in Quake 2 !!

Years of hobby research on my own hardware. Lowly dual EPYC with several GPUs.
Then a year+ of graduate level research using “someone else’s servers”.
Then I got so sick of the tech bros and executives I abandoned it.

As I said. We made huge leaps between 2008 and 2021ish.
I haven’t seen much real progress in the last 2-3 years.

It’s all sunk costs.
No one wants to admit that it never really worked well for “real” work.
It’s all just toys.
Some of the toys are really neat(when they aren’t theft…) like the super resolution tools.mbutbthey are still just toys.
NVidia and the rest are desperately pumping out hardware with bigger and bigger power budgets, praying that ANYONE makes something real before the money runs out, or society decided it might not be okay to use terawatts of power to make new cat pictures, or awul customer service chat bots.

It’s like watching people smile as they try to sell you an apartment on an island that will start sinking any day now. If they just keep acting like everything is fine, maybe the clients won’t notice their feet getting wet.

I was there in 1985 and I wouldn’t have agreed then and I certainly don’t agree now.

“Kybernetik” covers a much wider field than “Informatik”, it’s more of a holistic approach. I’m lazy today, so i’ll just cite Wikipedia: “Cybernetics is the transdisciplinary study of circular processes such as feedback systems where outputs are also inputs. It is concerned with general principles that are relevant across multiple contexts, including in ecological, technological, biological, cognitive and social systems and also in practical activities such as designing, learning, and managing.”