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Deconstructing the PC Revolution

Posted by ScuttleMonkey on from the looking-back dept.

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."

7 of 103 comments (clear)

  1. From the article by Wellington+Grey · · Score: 5, Insightful

    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

    --
    Silver Clipboard: Time Management Tips
  2. Re:Smarter than that by wizardforce · · Score: 4, Insightful

    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.
    --
    Sigs are too short to say anything truly profound so read the above post instead.
  3. Re:Smarter than that by mcleland · · Score: 4, Insightful

    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.

  4. Usability by msimm · · Score: 4, Insightful

    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.

    --
    Quack, quack.
    1. Re:Usability by Ephemeriis · · Score: 3, Insightful

      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.
      --
      "Work is the curse of the drinking classes." -Oscar Wilde
  5. Re:Smarter than that by wizardforce · · Score: 3, Insightful

    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.
    --
    Sigs are too short to say anything truly profound so read the above post instead.
  6. Re:Smarter than that by mini+me · · Score: 4, Insightful

    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.