Deconstructing the PC Revolution

coondoggie writes to mention that room-sized computers and other recollections were shared over the weekend at the Vintage Computer Festival in Silicon Valley. "About 200 people, many of them of the gray-haired pony tail, bifocals and middle-age paunch variety, attended the event at the Computer History Museum in Mountain View, Calif."

Comments

From the article

[Wellington Grey]

From the article: One of the first microprocessors on the market, the Intel 4004 introduced in 1971, featured 4-bit computing, a 750KHz clock, completed 75,000 instructions per second, held 4KB of ROM and 640 bytes of RAM.

"By today's standards, this is totally unremarkable," said Tim McNerney

Unremarkable is a 5-year old processor. But when things are the first of their kind, they will always be remarkable by any standard.

-Grey

Re:Smarter than that

[wizardforce]

Not like these young pups who think that CPU speeds and hard disk space are so large as to be infinite and not worth bothering with.

no, software bloat took care of that. You can't tell me there isn't something wrong with the fact that a computer with 20x less power can do the same basic things as a modern computer.

Re:Old technology and kids.

[rueger]

Groves recording sound?! It wasn't digital?!? No way!

No Gramps, it was grooves that recorded sound. Grove's was a paper based database that recorded biographical information about the musicians that composed and played the sound. My copy ran to two dozen volumes.

Re:Smarter than that

[mcleland]

Yes, things like: -Halo -Video editing -Statistical analysis for hundreds of thousands of data points -Half-Life -Videoconferencing -Google Earth Sure, software has bloated, but remember all these things you couldn't do in any reasonable amount of time on an older machine. Sorry for being obvious.

Re:Old hippies

[ackthpt]

It's hit some people in Silicon Valley hard, the ones who don't keep up. Anyone who's been to the Hacker's Conference in the last decade will recognize this.

Stay in tech for 20 years, or more, and see how you keep up. It's changing all the time. With one of those old mainframe computers you could be an expert on everything. With the great variety of things now, you have to specialise. You have to specialise very carefully. If you only do Microsoft .net security you could do very well for a salary for a spell -- that is, until something else comes along and replaces it and you have to study like a fiend to be up on it, too.

I've been in programming for about 27 years, it's not easy keeping up anymore. To damn much to keep track of, and like I said, changing all the time.

Usability

[msimm]

I feel like the bloat argument has been being over-used lately. Yes, computers are more powerful and doing similar tasks. But they also tend to be more user friendly and over all the user experience is much nicer. They also have to cater to a much broader audience then they used to.

Re:Usability

[Ephemeriis]

I feel like the bloat argument has been being over-used lately. Yes, computers are more powerful and doing similar tasks. But they also tend to be more user friendly and over all the user experience is much nicer. They also have to cater to a much broader audience then they used to.

I realize that our modern-day computers do all sorts of things that the old machines didn't... You didn't see a whole lot of streaming video playback, or MP3s on those old machines. But, really, those are specific applications - specific tasks. The OS itself really isn't being asked to do much more than it had to do 10 or 20 years ago.

And when it comes down to simple tasks that we've been doing for years - something like word processing - there really isn't a good reason why my computer has to be 20 times more powerful than it used to be just to accomplish the same goals.

Look at an old machine running an old version of Word, and then look at something shiny and new running Vista and Word 2007. The new machine requires gobs more RAM, faster CPU, tons more drive space, and a fairly beefy GPU...all to do exactly the same thing the old one did. Why?

Sure, I'd expect to need a nicer machine for 3D games, MP3s, streaming video... But why are the system requirements for a simple word processor so much higher than they used to be? Bloat. Yes, there are new features in there...some of them are genuinely useful... But a lot of it is simply overhead - new GUI, new graphics, different animated things, a pile of new templates, some clip art... Stuff that really has almost nothing to do with actually processing words.

There's a reason the bloat argument seems overused lately - it's because bloat is showing up everywhere and people are complaining about it.

Re:Smarter than that

[wizardforce]

Yes, things like: -Halo -Video editing -Statistical analysis for hundreds of thousands of data points -Half-Life -Videoconferencing -Google Earth Sure,

no no no... those are all examples of work which inherantly requires more computational work. What I meant was that it is that there exists no reason what so ever that modern operating systems require at least 300 megabytes of RAM to render a basic GUI when a computer with 32 megs can do it *better* than that. Go ahead, try it some time, try and use a modern OS on 32 megs- see how far you get. Now try loading an old OS, not too old as to not be able to load whatever software you require and you will find that it runs faster on older platforms than it does a modern one. Fascinating isn't it? And before anyone suggests that security is the reason- that's also a lie. Properly configured an old OS is still pretty safe and very usable. Many are supported by long term security patch efforts and work just fine.

Re:Smarter than that

[mini me]

What I meant was that it is that there exists no reason what so ever that modern operating systems require at least 300 megabytes of RAM to render a basic GUI when a computer with 32 megs can do it *better* than that.

Yes, there is a good reason. The market isn't willing to pay someone to spend the time to fit a modern GUI into 32MB of RAM. It's much more cost effective for everyone to just have 300MB of RAM instead.

Re:I agree with you, but...

[Ephemeriis]

again, it's features. Your copy of Office 2007 can do a lot more then your original word processor.

I will readily accept that a modern word processor will do more than, say, EDIT under DOS. But that's not what I'm talking about. Let's ignore the OS for a moment and just look at Microsoft Word.

According to Microsoft the requirements for Word 2000 are:

PC with a Pentium 75-megahertz (MHz) or higher processor
32 MB of RAM for the operating system, plus an additional 4 MB of RAM for Word
147 MB of available hard-disk space

And the requirements for Word 2007 are:

500 megahertz (MHz) processor or higher
256 megabyte (MB) RAM or higher (Grammar and contextual spelling in Word is not turned on unless the machine has 1 GB memory.)
1.5 gigabyte (GB) HDD

Now, I know 2007 has that fancy new ribbon thing... And it's got the nifty new XMLish file format... I would assume there's some bug fixes in there somewhere... I'm sure there are plenty of other new features in there that I don't know about... But, honestly, does it really do all that much that 2000 doesn't? They're both WYSYWIG, both have spelling and grammer checkers, both let you add graphics into your documents, both do all sorts of stuff with margins and tabs and columns and fonts and stuff.

So why does 2007 require 6 times as much processing power? Why does 2007 need 64 times more RAM? Why does 2007 take up 10 times as much drive space? Does it really have that many new features? Because, honestly, it seems to do almost exactly the same thing that 2000 did.

And that's just Word. Throw a shiny new copy of Vista on your computer and you're going to need even more CPU/RAM/HDD - all to accomplish the same task.

I'm not talking about doing something new... I'm not talking about running some piece of software that didn't exist back in 2000. I'm not suggesting that Half-Life 2 should be able to run on a 2000-era PC. I am asking what exactly it is that justifies making Word 2007 literally 10-times more resource intensive. Because it looks very similar to Word 2000 to me.

Re:Smarter than that

[gad_zuki!]

>Fascinating isn't it?

No it isnt. It takes only a coulpe hours for a non-technical person to learn how to operate a modern OS becuase of all the GUI-ness, wizards, etc. Modern applications dont even ship with manuals.

Now put them in front of a box running DOS 6.22 and well, you can figure it out.

OSs do a lot more. A lot. Maybe not for the "im too kewl for school" elitist like yourself, but for the common person they've brought computing to the home.