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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. Smarter than that by Wellington+Grey · · Score: 4, Funny

    From the article: The refrigerator-sized machine stored just 5Mb of data. Hoagland's PowerPoint presentation on the restoration project, at 9.16MB, would have crashed it.

    I'll bet that the old guys who wrote it were smart enough to actually check the size of a file before copying it -- you know, actually worrying about resource management. 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.

    -Grey

    --
    Silver Clipboard: Time Management Tips
    1. 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.
    2. 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.

    3. 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.
  3. Hey! by MECC · · Score: 5, Funny

    About 200 people, many of them of the gray-haired pony tail, bifocals and middle-age paunch variety

    ... hey!
    --
    "We are all geniuses when we dream"
    - E.M. Cioran
  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.