Vintage Computer Festival Revisits The PC Past

OaklyBonn writes "The Vintage Computer Festival West is happening today at the Computer History Museum in Mountain View, CA. I've been to several of these, and they're always a blast. It is always amazing to see the things that our current sotware practices treat as not currently possible on todays machines (like, why is my 1ghz XP box sooo slooow?) Did the Beagle Brothers have a pact with Satan? Are we better off today than in the past?"

Comments

Why is my 1Ghz box so slow?

[16977]

Probably everybody and his brother will mention this, but software bloat is a big reason for slow "Fast" machines. Even something like a word processor can be bloated if you put in all kinds of dynamic spellchecking, OLE, libraries to support 100 different kinds of documents, and so on. When I get a new, fast, box, I use the opportunity to run all kinds of new, fast software, which makes the machine seem slower by comparison. Not that I'm going to abandon spiffy new software, but I realize that there is going to be a speed tradeoff.

Re:Why is my 1Ghz box so slow?

[John Jorsett]

I think it would depend on whether I continue to run the same apps as in the past. If I were still running Wordstar on today's hardware, it would be going lickety-split. Word does more than I want now, so I see no compelling reason to upgrade to the latest version of Microsoft bloatware in the future. Therefore, I have to think that there's at least the possibility that I'll eventually find the speed adequate. That excludes gaming, though. I can see that chewing up whatever whizzbang improvements come along, and wanting more.

Re:HELL YES

[Anonymous Coward]

lamer