Comparing Today's Computers To 1995's

An anonymous reader writes "A look back at two articles from 1995, touting high end computers and 'must haves.' How times have changed... ...'Memory (RAM): We seem to have convinced most manufacturers to adopt eight megabytes as standard, compared with four megabytes in 1994. Don't buy less than eight. The difference in performance between an eight megabyte machine and a four-megabyte machine can be dramatic.'"

Comments

yup

[Anonymous Coward]

Those were the days....when it took 30 minutes to load a porn site

Re:yup

[Anonymous Coward]

Now the porn is available on demand but it takes 30 minutes to load up my schlong :(

Re:yup

[Vorghagen]

And there weren't even any videos.

Re:yup

[Anonymous Coward]

That'll only get better with time. Nanotech's going gangbusters these days.

Re:yup

[PatPending]

"In my day, we didn't have videos. We got ASCII pinups on 132 column green-bar! That's the way it was, and we liked it! We loved it!"

Re:yup

[wisty]

Slashdot's junk character filter prevents me from posting this: http://www.asciipr0n.com/pr0n/pinups/pinup09.txt

Re:yup

[GumphMaster]

Slashdot might need to deploy smoke extractors to cope with the ASCII porn that's now smouldering for all the wrong reasons.

Thankfully some kind soul Coral cached it: http://www.asciipr0n.com.nyud.net/pr0n/pinups/pinup09.txt

Re:yup

[JosKarith]

Obligatory XKCD reference -
http://xkcd.com/598/

Re:yup

[pRock85]

Lucky or me I am in the golden age, where my schlong is instantly available, as is the entirety of internet porn. Seriously though, the double standard gap is closing. Women are being empowered, and are being able to watch the porn they have always wanted, now with out being judged.

Re:yup

[Anonymous Coward]

The double standard gap isn't about societal imposed standards at all, it is just that the majority of women don't actually like porn where as the majority of guys like it. Women being empowered has nothing to do with it. Men and women alike need to wake up and smell the coffee and accept that men and women are just as different physically as they are mentally.

Exceedingly horny women who look at porn regularly are and always will be the minority, regardless of empowerment, and prevalence and or societal acceptance of porn.

Re:yup

[Anonymous Coward]

I'm curious... being a basement dwelling creature without any hope of female companionsship, what do women get off on, porn wise?

Re:yup

[hairyfeet]

This is why i think we all need to just look around and be amazed every once in awhile (no not at the porn, although I admit the new HD porn is quite impressive visually) at how far we have come. I was late getting into X86, with the VIC and Trash 80 lasting me most of the 80s so when I finally did get an X86 it was a whopping 60MHz Pentium with 8Mb of RAM, and hard drives were...what? 4200RPM? I remember them being slow as Xmas and more than a little prone to head crash and mine was a huge 200Mb. Graphics of course were 2D, I wouldn't be getting my first voodoo for another couple of years, and finally Internet was a 28k modem that frankly on a good night at 3AM you may get a quarter of that speed and had to run a background mouse program to keep the ISPs from kicking you off while you were trying to read.

Now I type this on a computer with 6 cores at 2600MHz, I've gone from 8Mb to 8Gb on the RAM front, hell my $50 GPU has more memory and faster clocks than my first four PCs combined and the thing has 3Tb of capacity and can even run every OS I used from 81 until today at the same time! And of course laptops then were these heavy power sucking "backpack busters" as we called them and frankly if you didn't have some serious money to spend good luck getting one. Now across from me is a dual core netbook that weighs 3 pounds and cost less than my VIC and maxing it out at 8Gb of RAM cost less than i paid for the floppy for my VIC.

So I think we should all stop and look around once in awhile at all we take for granted now because its truly amazing how fast and far we have come. Now even the machines I shitcan because they are simply too old are 10 times faster than my first X86, its truly amazing. Now most of us have crazy pipes that hardwire us instantly to the world, HD screens, surround sound, its just nuts how much we all have now.

Re:yup

[Anonymous Coward]

Haha blocked at work. 597 good, 599 good 598 BAD BAD BAAAD.

Re:yup

[Dishevel]

It took 30 min to load a porn site and 30 seconds to load your new game.
Now it takes 2 seconds to load up a porn site and 30 min to load your new game. Plus 3 updates at 1 gig each and a driver update and 3 reboots.

Re:yup

[owenferguson]

Mostly gay porn, from what I've heard...

Re:yup

[Dishevel]

On pinup18 Chrome tells me the site is in Maylay and asks if I want to translate.

Re:yup

[datavirtue]

HD screens, surround sound, its just nuts how much we all have now.

With a social disaster, and a failed government brewing all around us. Progress.

Re:yup

[fyngyrz]

I'm curious... being a basement dwelling creature without any hope of female companionsship, what do women get off on, porn wise?

The same things they always have, and in this order: Security, money, power, looks, personality, sexuality. Exceptions certainly exist and you should be watching for them, but that's the way to bet. This applies to porn, to real life, to movies, you name it. Male-female hard-wiring is radically different, and no amount of political correctness will ever suffice to change this.

Re:yup

[fyngyrz]

So I think we should all stop and look around once in awhile at all we take for granted

Yes, ok, fine, but... where's my flying car?

Re:yup

[Anonymous Coward]

For some women, porn is just different. Have you hear of house porn?

Basically magazines with pictures of beautiful, yet unattainable objects of adoration that get your juices going. Articles about implausible situations designed to tickle your imagination. Advertisements about accessories that could give you a taste of the life in the magazine or accessorize your experience. If only you had enough money to afford these objects. I mean houses of course... ;^)

Re:yup

[schlachter]

on your 640x480 screen!

Re:yup

[Anonymous Coward]

hell my $50 GPU has more memory and faster clocks than my first four PCs combined

My phone has more memory, drive space and clocks than the first 4 PC's I owned and 10 times the funtionality.

Re:yup

[hairyfeet]

And whose fault is that? look how many are happily willing to vote for old Mittens who is an admitted tax dodger simply because "We gotta get THAT guy" aka nigger, out the white house? How many vote without a second thought as to what that person stands for simply because of the letter that is besides their name? Sadly you reap what you sow and when more people can tell you who Snooki and the Kardashians are fucking than who their elected reps are what the fuck do you expect?

Oh and just FYI but this government has been pretty much in the bag since the end of WWII when the MIC saw the gravy train about to end. We haven't had 10 years of peace since before WWII and we haven't had 5 years of peace since the 80s. All so the MIC can make insane profits or so some corp can get bananas cheaper by having the USA install some dictator.

So don't think the past was all sunshine and roses, it was just easier to hide the corruption before CNN made everything televised.

Re:yup

[HapSlappy_2222]

"lolol you both said gap rofl!"

There ARE some things haven't changed since 1995.

Re:yup

[Anonymous Coward]

while possibly accurate, it's not exactly on topic.

Re:yup

[HapSlappy_2222]

I think you're focusing too much on the biological hard-wiring macro point of view, and it's very, very dangerous to bring that type of thinking to an individual level. I liked how you pointed out your awareness of exceptions, but it's absolutely NOT wise to make psychological-level assumptions based on sociological-level statistics. You could be missing out on the greatest opportunities of your life, or you could just end up looking like an presumptive asshole.

Your best bet in this case is actually to explore sexuality with an individual woman (actually, that should read "partner", the same is true for dudes) to find out what she "gets off on", instead of assuming how likely she is to desire certain characteristics in a mate or her porn. Any woman you meet *could* be just as freaky about porn as any guy you know, while on the other hand, lots of dudes shy away from it as quickly the woman you refer to. Also, minor variations on specific characteristics or acts can change something that is unpleasant into something that's hot as hell (i.e. the porn could be unpleasant entirely because of fake moans; turn the sound off and ta-da!). And, of course, there are many, many people who may not even KNOW if they like something because they've yet to be introduced to it. That's part of the fun. For what it's worth, in my own experience, I have never, ever, ever met a woman that isn't interested in some part of the wide variation of naked people touching each other that exists on film, unless for religious reasons, which have nothing to do with gender. I've even been surprised by this in the past because I made my own assumptions without even realizing I had done so.

It's not about political correctness, and it's not about probability, and it's most definitely not about knowing things about people you've never met. It's about making sure you never, ever, ever pigeon-hole a person based on statistics, no matter how reliable the numbers seem. You should, instead, always make your own judgement based on your own personal experience with that person, and this is true for gender, race, sexual orientation, age, geological location, or any of the other bazillion demographics we like to put people into. I've found this actually frees me to have whatever opinion I want about anybody, without any outside pressure whatsoever. It's just: "that guy's an ass" or "that dude's badass" or "this girl is TOTALLY into the same porn I am!" instead of "I can't hate him for being a dick because he looks kind of Asian (or white, or black, or whatever) and then I have to worry if I'm racist! Ohnoes!"

Most of us have read the same studies you have, and they do provide valuable and useful data on overall sexual trends (by the way, I doubt, outside of fraternities, there are many double blind sex-periments being done these days, so what we think we know is mostly based on what people are willing to say. This probably explains why Cosmopolitan thinks I want my balls yanked on... but I digress). That in no way means this data is useful in a one-on-one situation. Statistics are used to track trends and it should be considered socially unacceptable to use them for any other purpose than this.

Re:yup

[Solandri]

I remember playing with a beta version of a JPEG viewer around 1990. Back then GIF ruled the graphics world. JPEG promised substantially better compression and color depth than GIF on real-world scenes (i.e. photos). But on the computers of that era (and with poorer algorithms), it took about 15-30 sec to decompress a 640x480 image. Creating the JPEG from a bitmap took 5-10 minutes. I remember thinking that despite being lossy, the compression ratios (at least a 10:1 advantage over GIF) were so compelling that JPEG wold probably rule online photo distribution once computers got faster.

Re:yup

[omnichad]

Another 3 years

Re:yup

[maple_shaft]

For what it's worth, in my own experience, I have never, ever, ever met a woman that isn't interested in some part of the wide variation of naked people touching each other that exists on film

Sure I have had a few female partners in my life that would occasionally indulge in the scandalous affair that is adult film. I have never personally been with a girl that watches porn to the extent that most guys do though where they would be jilling in front of their computer all night every night, but then nobody is saying that these individuals don't exist. On a biological level women tend not to have the same neural responses to erotic imagery as men. This is a proven fact based on research studies with MRI machines. This just happens to coincide with my worldly experiences. Men tend to take in the visual beauty, women tend to take a macro perspective of the whole thing from all senses.

Human sexual behavior on a macro scale is most apparent at its most primitive form in chat rooms, it is quite fascinating to just watch really. Usually an 10 to 1 or 8 to 1 ratio of men to women. The men are highly competitive for the women, many resorting to flashing their genitals like peacocks. The women are outnumbered because most women are not actively sexual by themselves, but are situationally sexual or sexual when the situation they happen to be in feels right for them. The few women that are there in the chat room are actively seeking a sexual experience but the way they tend to behave in the chat room is uniquely feminine. They will look provacative and behave sexually, tease with glimmers of imagery, and revel in the male competition for their attention. They tend to look for the right partner, the one that stands out and piques their interest. They have the luxury of being picky.

You can witness a more PG version of this very behavior in just about any bar or lounge. Even the unattractive women could probably go home with someone that night if she waits long enough, because some guy will eventually give up on the others and settle for what he can get that night.

Re:yup

[Tablizer]

Hey, the journey itself is the rewa.........z..zzzzzzzZZZZ

Re:yup

[Genda]

Gawd, I know the running gag here, is that y'all haven't been with wimminz, but there are in fact a few ladies on this site. Mayhaps you would think to inquire rather than shoot off your opinion maker. I realize that geek gurlz are a breed unto themselves, but they have friend and unlike guys, girls actually like to talk about their personal lives (at least as a rule) with other girls.

I think most girls wonder what the big deal is... its like being more interested in the menu than the meal... odd behavior. Yes, brain wiring is different, and I guess that male hunter-gatherer visual thing has made men far more interested in the way things look than the more socially oriented female folk. It also probably points to the very existence of the film genre "Chick Flicks".

As for the chat room thing... I hate to be the one to tell, but the 6 times out of 10, the one girl in the room is a guy posing. I wouldn't be using chat rooms as my measure for female behavior. If the conversation is about instant sexual gratification, you've already left the ladies at the door.

Re:yup

[HapSlappy_2222]

Ha! Agreed about the chat room, and there are certainly reasons why chat-roulette is just a bunch of video-wieners.

However, I'd argue that men are, generally more visual and public with their sexuality than women, and are drawn to mediums that allow them to behave as such (I am aware I'm breaking my own rule about generalizing, here, but stay with me). I like your example of the bar much better, where both the strutting peacocks and the sultry kittens can ply their trades with equal chance of success. The ones I frequent are filled with women that are just as competitive as the men, it's just that the competition is far more subtle, and, as you point out, women do tend have more and better choices available to them. Still, I often see women choosing the same target, and THAT is amusing to watch - doubly so as the vodka flows. It's especially amazing when the target doesn't know it's going on, because, as men, we sometimes miss the cues. My girl LOVES pointing out the things I missed when we're out; and the sneaky sabotage is absolutely jaw-dropping sometimes. Still, I think these behaviors result from a frothy mix of cultural expectations and biological tendencies. Things change once you get into a committed, monogamous relationship; this is most noticeable, right around the time she starts farting for you on the couch during Mad Men. Once you can both laugh at this, the chase has (naturally) concluded, and sexuality is hopefully something to be safely explored without expectations or limitations. Time to get that freak on, as they say!

It's also particularly interesting to watch "the chase" occur when the sexual orientation lines are blurred. If you want to see how little we really know about how humans separate their mates from the pack, hit up a gay bar (for either sex). Chances are, you'll be welcomed, chatted up, and then promptly ignored, allowing you to observe in peace (just don't be creepy). There are a great many similarities to the hetero chase, some of which follow classic gender roles, but so many of the rules we think we know get tossed right the fuck out the window. It's rather freeing to see it happen, and can serve as a lesson to be yourself instead of who it seems like you should be (mom was right all along!).

Back on point, though. You mention that women are hardwired differently, visually, and I accept that (and embrace it!). But, in a broad sense, I also embrace that women like sex every bit as much as men, and that all people are unique and unpredictable creatures. From what I've experienced, have been told, can intuit, and know about myself, women fantasize, masturbate, watch porn, and enjoy sexual release every bit as much as men. The general difference is one of expression AND degree, I think, but that's true if you compare any two people, gender not required. It's unreasonable to think that what interests a man and what interests a woman will be same, but then again, it's also unreasonable to think that what interests one woman will interest all women, too. And that, my friend, is a big part of why we look so hard for the kitten that best fits our peacock.

Now, perhaps we should move back to reading posts about 1995's computers and how laughable 8 Mb of memory is.

Re:yup

[Anonymous Coward]

HD screens, surround sound, its just nuts how much we all have now.

With a social disaster, and a failed government brewing all around us. Progress.

So? That always happens. Since the beginning of civilization. We deal. Doesn't mean we're not making progress; heck, it's part of the progress-making method.

Re:yup

[fyngyrz]

Most of us have read the same studies you have

Your assumptions are wrong. I'm in my 50's and I'm going by personal experience with (by today's standards) quite a few relationships. I view most relationship studies as absolutely worthless, except where they manage to spread their crazy ideas around. Women are unique individuals one and all, and every relationship is as different as a snowflake... but they're still all carrying huge underlying similarities just as snowflakes do, and over the long haul, the vast majority lean towards security first and foremost and etc., as per the above short list.

It's not about how you pursue any one relationship; it's about how they generally turn out because of these low-level but powerful and ultimately dominating sets of priorities. If you can't (or won't) provide security, you're going to be rejoining the ranks of the single. If you have money but don't provide security, same thing. Etc., on down the list. Sex may be one of the openers for a relationship, but it sure as heck isn't going to close or hold the deal, and porn is just a sideshow for general sexuality for the vast majority of people in relationships. If it isn't, watch out, because something is seriously awry. There's nothing wrong with porn, but there is something very unusual about any relationship where porn is important.

It's not about political correctness

Yes, actually. a great deal of it is. Things are as they are, and no amount of psychobabble will turn that around. Time, however, will -- there is so much broken about today's male and female gender roles today it'd take a book to really lay it all out. Bottom line, we'll be back to ladies and gentlemen trying to look good for each other soon enough. In the meantime, the current generation is in one very sad place, and I'm very sorry for them.

This probably explains why Cosmopolitan thinks

You're doing it wrong. Cosmopolitan doesn't think anything. It's engaged in selling ads by attracting the low-functioning and feeding them utter pap -- no more, no less. It's a complete and utter waste of paper. And that's being too kind.

Re:yup

[RocketRabbit]

Actually there were .dl and .gl files back in the DOS age. Full motion video, no sound however.

Re:yup

[Hognoxious]

they're still all carrying huge underlying similarities just as snowflakes do

Women are hexagonal?

Re:yup

[Mr Z]

I'm with you. Heck, the next crop of cell phones coming out will beat the crap out of desktops from just a few years ago. Cell phones! Heck, my approx 2 year old cell phone is still 2x to 10x the specs of the computer I bought in 1997:

• Processor: 300MHz Pentium II vs. 600MHz ARM Cortex-A8 + C64x+ DSP.
• RAM: 64MB EDO RAM vs. 256MB of embedded SDRAM
• Storage: 3GB of SCSI 2 UltraWide (oooOOOOooo!) on a 7200 RPM SCA disk (yeah, I bought a server drive, and paid $$$...), vs. 32GB of flash storage.
• Connectivity: 56k dialup modem vs. 3G wireless+802.11 wifi.
• Graphics / display: 1152x868 on a 19" CRT vs. 800x480 touch screen -- ok, apples vs. oranges on this one.
• Sound: AWE32 Wavetable Synthesis vs. hardware accelerated MP3+whatever you can shove across a 48kHz 16-bit pipe -- again a bit of apples vs. oranges, but the main point is that the old computer couldn't really keep a DAC fed and relied on hokey hardware to generate complex sound, but the new hardware just gives you a fat, clean pipe to output whatever you want, and the CPU's up to the task.
• Energy consumption: Easily 200W or more (display + computer + speakers) vs. all day on a 1350mAh battery with charge to spare.

And that's for a nearly 2 year old phone. The next crop of high end phones will have 2 to 4 ARM Cortex-A15s running 1.5GHz, likely with 2GB of DDR or more of system memory and embarrassing amounts of flash storage. And that's just phones.

My first computer had a whopping 16640 bytes of RAM, and ran 3MHz. (16K video RAM + 256 bytes of CPU addressable memory.) I wrote everything in BASIC at first. Later, after I got a battery-backed 4K RAM cartridge, I learned assembly language. Amazing stuff. I look back at everything I did with that machine with painstaking effort, and how trivial it all is now. An icon on my desktop takes up almost as much storage as that entire computer had available to it. Its display resolution (256x192) is roughly a postage-stamp sized preview on a modern display. And yet, we got stuff done with those old machines.

I too am continually amazed at what we can do these days. And, in my day job, I work to keep advancing that curve. I love it.

(Ok, I don't know why my <UL> and <LI> tags aren't working in the preview, but trust me, that list up there has them. I don't feel like fighting w/ Slashdot any more this morning.)

Re:yup

[Anonymous Coward]

Dude, wtf don't you use commas? Or semicolons, something. Do you speak like that in real life too?

Re:yup

[Anonymous Coward]

If your work blocks XKCD they're doing you a favor anyway.

Re:yup

[K10W]

there is a price for flying cars my friend http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Nq2GWRG8s0s

Re:yup

[Anonymous Coward]

Yes regardless of the brilliant tech advances, we have still not eliminated greed from our list of "sins" - so much for progress.

Re:yup

[DEN_GUY]

Those were the days....when it took 30 minutes to load a porn site

I used to download 16 parts and have uudecode it just to get a porn pic...

Re:yup

[Anonymous Coward]

Add we we had music with a transister radio picking up the static from the IBM main frame, and yes the 1100 LPM IBM 1402 printer could make music too. Hell, forget Adele, "anchors away" on an 1403 was groovy, er... the bomb! http://www.columbia.edu/cu/computinghistory/1403.html

Re:yup

[tzot]

> Exceedingly horny women who look at porn regularly are and always will be the minority, regardless of empowerment, and prevalence and or societal acceptance of porn.
And even those few porn-watching women, do watch the porn till the end in the secret hope that the starring couple will get married on-screen.

Eh

[DogDude]

Eh. There's not much of a difference. We're still using the same hardware and architecture as 1995. Heck, I can run the same OS on a computer made in 1995, or in 2012. Yeah, hard drives are bigger, and Intel's chips are faster, and yeah, PC's have a bit more RAM, but other than that, it's just more of the same. If anything, I'm amazed at how little computers have changed in the past 18 years.

Re:Eh

[Oxford_Comma_Lover]

it's just more of the same.

Yes, but the difference has consequences. Capabilities have increased by a factor of a thousand or more in several areas. This has made certain things practical--such as effectively removing these resources as important limiting factors on most programs. In addition, it has made areas previously almost impossible because of these limitations--such as complex digital video editing on a normal microcomputer.

Not to mention playing video of good quality on a normal microcomputer.

Re:Eh

[PsyberS]

True, things may be only a thousand or so faster/larger than 18 years ago. This might sound like slow progress, until you also realize that progress was made in other vectors such as physical size and power consumption. You do realize that the tiny smartphone in your pocket is significantly better than the humongous desktop PC of 1995, right?

Re:Eh

[Anonymous Coward]

Well - considering there is an OS that dictates the borders of the central hardware that can be used it is not so surprising.

Before the time this OS got his dominance very interesting developments where on the way. As an example: think about the RISC processor. It was developed by the guys at Acorn to run their RISC-OS. Today that is unthinkable. There are very little computers sold without the named OS, and that promotes stagnation...

Things are a bit different with tablets (but not much), but I am inclined to think that stagnation will set in the same moment the named OS "infects" the tablet word. Thinking about it - it is already starting. You kown - the OS that won't boot on a tablet with the "right" hardware (that prevents other OS-es as a "happy" side effect). Welcome to stagnation... again....

Re:Eh

[Anonymous Coward]

Do you realize that toilet paper has not changed in my lifetime? It's just paper on a cardboard roll, that's it. And in ten thousand years, it will still be exactly the same because really, what else can they do?

Re:Eh

[Concerned Onlooker]

Nonsense. Soon they will be Arduino controlled.

Re:Eh

[MobileTatsu-NJG]

Between broadband internet, 3d acceleration, dual monitors, and a stable multi-tasking OS, I have NFI what you're talking about.

-Sent from a smartphone that is far superior to the machine I had in 95

Re:Eh

[Patch86]

You mean you don't know how to use the three seashells?

Re:Eh

[sosume]

"the OS that won't boot on a tablet with the "right" hardware (that prevents other OS-es as a "happy" side effect)"
I take it you are talking about OSX/iOS?

Re:Eh

[DogDude]

Sure, there are some outliers in terms of improved capabilities, like video editing and even watching TV. But 90% of us are using PC's the 90% of the same way now that we did in 1995: Working with MS Office documents, handling email, web surfing, moving around files, etc. It may be prettier, easier, and faster, but it isn't dramatically different.

Re:Eh

[wisty]

> There are very little computers sold without the named OS, and that promotes stagnation

In other tab, I'm reading an article titled "Smartphone Sales To Beat PC Sales By 2011".

Ad in iPads, and there's big operating systems - Windows, OSX, and Android. Oh, and Linux is supreme in the server world.

Actually, I don't use my OS for anything. I use git, vim, a web browser, virtualbox, rsync, Nginx, Postgres, Redis, and Python. The OS just keeps these programs separate. If I have to use the OS for anything other than apt-getting a program, chowning a file, or SUDOing a process, I feel like I've lost. Actually, I feel like I've lost most of the times I chown or sudo.

Re:Eh

[Guy Harris]

Eh. There's not much of a difference. We're still using the same hardware and architecture as 1995.

(Modulo, for most of us, 32 extra bits, 8 extra registers, and a PC-relative addressing mode.)

Re:Eh

[macs4all]

Do you realize that toilet paper has not changed in my lifetime? It's just paper on a cardboard roll, that's it. And in ten thousand years, it will still be exactly the same because really, what else can they do?

The Three Shells.

Re:Eh

[LynnwoodRooster]

Bidets my anonymous friend! You haven't experienced high culture until you've had a warm jet of water shot between your ass-cheeks and a nice, gentle breeze across your recently wetted-and-washed rear end!

Re:Eh

[headLITE]

The only reason you can run the same OS is that the x64 architecture supports emulation of the old 32 bit x86 architecture which supports emulation of the 16 bit architecture that came before it. Maybe you didn't notice these jumps, but they were there. There's another jump just happening, the move from magnetic hard disks to solid state disks. That's again one you don't notice unless you know about the technical difference, but it's still a pretty big difference. And yes we have more RAM, and yes that's even an example of something that's essentially still very similar to 1995 RAM, but even then, miniaturization is kind of a big deal. The chips may still work in the same way but there were huge advances in the technology that is used to produce them, which are hidden from most normal users. The basic idea of how a computer works is still the same, of course, but then, that hasn't changed in almost a century. And it probably won't change anytime soon - the next big change is probably the move to smaller, portable devices that require even less inside knowledge to operate. Maybe, ten years from now, you'll look at your phone and say "why this is so different from the computers we used to have to put up with- finally they changed something!" because the package looks different, but the overall architecture will still be the same.

Re:Eh

[Lazy Jones]

This has made certain things practical--such as ...

Such as using unsuitable or bad algorithms, wasting enormous amounts of memory, disk space and bandwidth on trivial tasks, using layer upon layer of badly structured APIs and on top of that a browser with an interpreted language running software we use daily (like gmail). Who would have thought it possible back then?

Re:Eh

[Anonymous Coward]

Bigger hard drives, faster chips, and 'a bit more RAM' are considerable understatements.

Omit all the other niceties and another way to say that is a 1,000+ times more storage, 500+ times the RAM and lord knows how you'd start to figure processing capability with ridiculous clock speeds, multiple cores, various efficiencies, etc. And that's pretty standard.

Start working out the on-demand resources available to you for pennies and the advancement is far more impressive still. Anyone can crush a 1995 world's fastest supercomputer for less than a handful of change from your coin jar.

To me, a more impressive thing to consider is that we now kick around with better devices than the Star Trek tablets of TNG. We don't even think of how amazing it is that your grandmother or child might own and operate one of these devices like it's no big deal.

Now consider that most of all this touch and voice controlled computing wizardry is probably also in that inexpensive device you keep in your pocket.

So no, we don't have wires hanging out of our brains yet, but I'd say we've got quite a lot accomplished.

Re:Eh

[JasterBobaMereel]

apt-getting, chown, sudo are all apps ....

Run in a command line which is an app ...

The OS runs all of these for you and all your other apps, manages them, and allocates resources... you use it all the time ...

the OS is not a shell, not the interface, it is the manager that makes everything work, MS have muddied the waters ,,,

Re:Eh

[Anonymous Coward]

hahahaha "1995: ...handling email, web surfing..."

speak for yourself but i think somewhat less than 90% of the people currently using a computer had access to email or the internet in 1995.

Re:Eh

[Anonymous Coward]

Oh, I get a warm jet between my cheeks every night

captcha: loudly

Re:Eh

[Tukz]

This is actually want impress me the must.
My smartphone (HTC Desire) have more computing power, than my PC I used back in 1994 did.

If I were in one of those bad "time traveller" movies, and brought my cellphone, they wouldn't believe I only came from 18 years in the future with the amount of power my cellphone have.

Re:Eh

[KiloByte]

Capabilities have increased by a factor of a thousand or more in several areas.

What Intel giveth, Microsoft taketh away.

Re:Eh

[dingen]

None of those things (except the smartphone) weren't available in 1995. They just weren't accessible to most consumers.

Re:Eh

[Darinbob]

Word has not sped up any either. If anything it feels slightly slower.

Re:Eh

[Anonymous Coward]

"This is actually want impress me the must."

Huh?

Re:Eh

[badatnicknames]

Programmers back then knew how to right optimized and reliable code that took full advantage of the hardware. Also many programmers knew assembly language for extra optimization. If the programmers from back then were writing for the hardware we have now software would be much more efficient.

Re:Eh

[Anonymous Coward]

What were you expecting?
3D heads up displays, printers that print out from your CAD, and a space rocket on your desk?
Oh wait. We have all of those (check out thinkgeek for the last).
How about thought operated computers?
Well... we've got those.
Eye operated?
Got those too.
Virtual environments?
We've got haptics, virtual reality 3D suites, 3D cards that can handle pretty realistic stuff.
Only thing we haven't got down is smell.

And you can have that all in your home run on your desktop computer.

The reason it's not fundamentally changed, is because the purpose of a computer, is to compute. That's why it's called a computer.
Beyond that it's all just magic happening in a box. It doesn't matter how it's done. The computer takes inputs and gives outputs. How it gets from A to B does not matter as a user.

Since 95 we've added internet integrated into that box.

The major changes we've had are wireless and cheap access to fast internet. Otherwise it's all graphics which in turn makes computers more accessible to Joe Public, rather than Joe 90.

Re:Eh

[serviscope_minor]

Such as using unsuitable or bad algorithms, wasting enormous amounts of memory, disk space and bandwidth on trivial tasks, using layer upon layer of badly structured APIs and on top of that a browser with an interpreted language running software we use daily (like gmail). Who would have thought it possible back then?

Either you weren't around back then or you are too young to remember but...

The lavish 33MHz and 8MB RAM (compared to the older generations of 16 bitters and 8 bitters) allowed lazy programmers to write such terrible algorithms and waste vast numbers of cycles on interpretd languaes like Visual Basic etc etc. My god, I mean windows 95 wasted so much CPU just to look a bit prettier. Real programmers still did everything in DOS.

Also, while some programmers have got lazier, others have not. Many algorithms have got much, much faster.

Re:Eh

[rvw]

This is actually want impress me the must.
My smartphone (HTC Desire) have more computing power, than my PC I used back in 1994 did.

If I were in one of those bad "time traveller" movies, and brought my cellphone, they wouldn't believe I only came from 18 years in the future with the amount of power my cellphone have.

They wouldn't believe you anyway. What can you do with a modern smartphone in 1994? No youtube, twitter, facebook, gmail, no 3G, not even GPRS, no not even GSM, and after three days (because you're battery last 3x longer because you don't use video and 3G) it goes dead because there is no usb to load the battery. The only thing left is to use it to sniff some coke from the smooth touchscreen, but that's it.

Re:Eh

[Anonymous Coward]

I have been making this comment for about 5 years now. Our PC machines today are over powered for our actual typical PC processing demands. But the real move is to the new tablet and handheld form factor, and the server side infrastructure to support it. And on that front, we still have hardware limits.

Re:Eh

[Anonymous Coward]

exactly,
1995 : rendering a 640x480 8000 faces raytrace just about 7 days (486 with co-proc / floating point unit)
now : rendering a 640x480 8000 faces raytrace 0,5 sec on a gpu, 0,7 op a cpu (quad)

Re:Eh

[LatePaul]

A digital camcorder that fits in your pocket in 1994? They'd go crazy for it.

Re:Eh

[Gadget_Guy]

Broadband internet would have been rather rare, but we could run our S3 Virge 3D card along with a monochrome video card to get multiple monitors and multitask under OS/2. 1995 was a pretty interesting time in computerland!

Re:Eh

[Anonymous Coward]

yup, I remember that my Dad used to do some heavy OCR stuff on two 486 boxes one with 4 and one wth 8MB RAM. The latter was much much much faster...

And today OCR is basically free. What used to take ages with these two boxes can be done in 5 minutes. The limiting factor is probably getting the stuff from the hard disc.

Re:Eh

[ZiggieTheGreat]

"You can stream video over youtube over Wifi!" er...
"You can hook it up to your TV with HDMI" um...
"I can send text messages to anyone" wait...
"Angry Birds!" Ooooo....

Re:Eh

[Soul-Burn666]

Today it manifests in the ability to optimize developer time.
A script I can today code in 30 minutes and run for 5 minutes is better than an application I had to write 15 years ago that took 4 hours to write, just to be able to run it under an hour of processing.

It allows to developers to focus on developing new features easily, and not wasting time optimizing a 5 second operation to 2 seconds.

Re:Eh

[ZiggieTheGreat]

12 ply.

Re:Eh

[Anonymous Coward]

So what you're saying is, that beyond being better, doing more, and faster... Excluding every way the computer has changed... it hasn't changed at all.

Beginning of 1995: Total number of internet users - 16 million, 0.4 % of world population.
It's also only about 5% of the USA. So even if you're saying "the same way 90% of American PC users..." then you must mean that there were barely more than 5% of the USA using computers (assuming very wrongly that only the USA used computers back then).
Now, 70% of the USA uses the internet. So there you go. Pretty much no-one (by your estimation) even used a computer in 1995. Something major must've changed since then to make the majority buy a computer.
Oh yes. The computers got better, the technology changed, etc.

Computers are pointless if you don't use them.
So what matters more than the technology and infrastructure inside the box, is how it's used and applied.

So apart from computers running faster, doing more, looking nicer, being easier for people to use, having readily available access to the internet, being used by more people (because it's easy to use, fast, has easy access to the internet and looks nice), and apart from every other way computers have changed... there's absolutely no difference.

Re:Eh

[L4t3r4lu5]

I have a Toshiba T1910 from 1994 on my desk; I found it in a cupboard after a clear out at work. 4MB RAM, monochrome screen, 200MB HDD, 486SX 25MHz processor, Windows 3.11.

Boot time, from power on to ready-to-work (no HDD activity after boot), including a 3 second memory test, is 51 seconds. Yes, I can do a lot more with my 2GHz dual core 4GB RAM workstation (get prettier graphics, browse the internet) but this laptop has Word, Excel, Powerpoint, networking.

I am amazed that so little has changed.

Re:Eh

[neokushan]

I sincerely hope that you're being sarcastic, or at the very least, trolling.
Back in 1995, there were plenty of "lazy", inexperienced and just downright poor programmers. However, aside from a few cases here and there, the objective was always the same then as it is now - get the job done in a reasonable time. In 1995, we had to invest a lot of time optimising and hand coding ASM to meet that objective due to the mentioned limitations in PC's. These days, hardware is so fast and plentiful, we can get on with doing other things and spend less time optimising. It doesn't matter how much memory the program is using or how many CPU cycles are being wasted when the job gets done in 2s versus 1.4s.

Sure, you might see it as wasteful or even lazy, but all you're really doing is substituting one form of inefficiency with another - the inefficiency of the program with the inefficiency of the programmer's time. Hardware is cheap, good programmers are not. If a company is spending £40,000 a year on a single programmer, they'll get far more value spending an extra £1000 on a faster Processor or more RAM than they will out of having him spend weeks hand-coding and debugging ASM ops for every application/routine he writes.

Yes, there will always be the exception and "throwing hardware at the problem" isn't the right solution, either, but saving time is saving money and that's why we have "inefficient" programs.

Re:Eh

[Anonymous Coward]

There will not be a "jump" to SSD any time soon.
SSD is far less tolerant of write cycles (the flash deteriorates over times) meaning you cannot use it to contain a swap file without it deteriorating rapidly (and until Windows starts using RAM first, swap later [e.g. I have 8GB of RAM, yet Windows still insists on a 4GB swap file... then uses only 2GB of my RAM]).
It also has a much smaller capacity : price ratio [e.g. 128GB of SSD will set you back over $150. I just bought a 2TB external HDD for less] while I can get 500GB (four times as much) for $75. And if we were going like - for like, we'd be looking at closer to $50 for a 2.5 inch HDD.

So from a PC / laptop manufacturing standpoint - there is absolutely no business case for using SSD in the PC (it boots a little faster, but is less reliable).
For something portable - SSD is more tolerant of shock damage (jumping around with it in a bag won't damage it), it extends battery time (uses less power), works well in low access environments (i.e. in a netbook used for the net, running Linux). But, that increases the price of the product by a significant amount / eats into profit margins (e.g. the eee 901 shipped at the same price - either HDD + Windows, or 16GB SSD + Linux at the same price, meaning windows users would have to purchase Windows on top - thereby increasing the price by $100+, and have 1/10th the hard drive space).

Also, a cheap HDD will still give you high data transfer (both read and write) rates which can max out the data channel (e.g. Sata at 3gb/s), while a cheap SSD might be running at ~100mb/s read and ~10mb/s write, and only a top end SSD can match the data transfer speed of HDD.
Whilst there are still seek time, fragmentation, etc. to take into account - unless you're willing to shell out a whole lot of money just so you don't have to defrag your hard drive, there's no reason to use SSD.
For the future, there's little room for improvement in SSD in terms of capacity and cost.

Re:Eh

[Anonymous Coward]

None of those things (except the smartphone) weren't available in 1995. They just weren't accessible to most consumers.

Which is basically the same thing, isn't it.

Re:Eh

[petermgreen]

What can you do with a modern smartphone in 1994? No youtube, twitter, facebook, gmail, no 3G, not even GPRS, no not even GSM

GSM was arround in europe by 1994. Unfortunately I don't think most modern smartphones support conventional GSM data calls anymore but you should at least be able to use it for voice calls.

there is no usb to load the battery

i'm sure you could find some way to bodge on a power supply. Soldering irons, solder and voltage regulators all existed in 1995. Worst case pop the battery out and charge it with a bench PSU.

Getting data in and out of the device would indeed be a big problem unless you took a wi-fi access point as well.

Re:Eh

[maple_shaft]

Me and nearly all of my neighbors did, but then again we lived in a suburb close to many large IT employers at the time. The internet was prevalent enough in 1995 for it be featured in popular media. http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0113957/

Re:Eh

[TheRaven64]

I was doing both, but even there the differences are huge. For example, back then I would check my email once or twice per day. As in, people would send me an email and it would be stored on a server for a while, and then some time later I would get it. Downloading my mail often took a minute or two - and most of it was plain text. Now, my mail client is basically always connected to the server. I get notified as soon as mail is available and I read it as soon as I want a break from whatever I'm doing. If I wanted to send someone a picture, I had to upload it to some FTP or web space and then they'd download it (and I'd just hope no one guessed it was there).

The web back then was purely static. There was no JavaScript (depending on when in 1995, it was either not released, or so new that hardly anyone was using it). Frames were all the rage - they reduced bandwidth, which was useful, but also broke the back button, which wasn't. Animated gifs and embedded midi tracks were the height of dynamic behaviour. Most companies had a little bit of marketing information online, if anything. Things like online shopping were pretty rare - Amazon existed, but I couldn't order groceries online, for example. I could get news from the BBC, but not very much.

Re:Eh

[Anonymous Coward]

My 15 EUR WLAN access point has more RAM and processing power than my 1995 PC.

Re:Eh

[Anonymous Coward]

It's those 90% that I would rather not share the internet with.

Re:Eh

[Zero__Kelvin]

"Programmers back then knew how to right optimized and reliable code that took full advantage of the hardware."

... and now they don't even know how to right!

Re:Eh

[marcop]

I have an aunt in Italy that lives in the mountains on a farm. Their house is nice, but it's still a farm house. It has a bidet. You don't need high-culture to have used a bidet. And just wait until you visit Japan!

Re:Eh

[Zero__Kelvin]

"What Intel giveth, Microsoft taketh away."

... and the Penguin giveth back with interest!

Re:Eh

[TheRaven64]

In 1995, Visual Basic 4 was released. Anyone who thinks that there were no bad programmers around then was either not alive or not paying attention.

That said, there are now a lot more programmers and, more importantly, the number of tasks where slow code is fast enough has increased and speed has stopped being the main concern. Software projects often live for over a decade and being able to continue to modify the code to meet new requirements in ten years is a lot more important than having it run very fast now (and what does 'very fast' mean? If it completes the day's processing in 0.5 seconds instead of 0.005 seconds, who cares?). Back in 1995, throwing away your code after a couple of years was only just going out of fashion.

Re:Eh

[TheRaven64]

Also, while some programmers have got lazier, others have not. Many algorithms have got much, much faster.

And those layered APIs that the grandparent complains about make this easier. Now we don't have everyone implementing searching and sorting themselves, someone does it once and it's shoved into a shared library. The same with more complex things like image compositing.

Re:Eh

[Anonymous Coward]

You haven't experienced high culture until you've had a warm jet of water shot between your ass-cheeks and a nice, gentle breeze across your recently wetted-and-washed rear end!

That's not high culture, that's a sexual fetish. :-O

Re:Eh

[TheRaven64]

think about the RISC processor. It was developed by the guys at Acorn to run their RISC-OS.

This made me cringe. The RISC processor was developed at UCB. The ARM processor was developed at Acorn, inspired by the RISC processor and the 6502. Given that ARM processors now outsell Intel processors about 10 to 1, I don't think it's so unthinkable.

Re:Eh

[Lazy Jones]

A script I can today code in 30 minutes and run for 5 minutes is better than an application I had to write 15 years ago that took 4 hours to write, just to be able to run it under an hour of processing.

I don't dispute that when it concerns code you write for yourself. But when "optimized developer time" results in e.g. 5% of millions of Thunderbird users having to wait 3+ minutes to read their email because they have large inboxes and TB is terrible at sorting/storing/displaying mails in large folders, it does not seem to be a good trade-off. As one of the affected users, I'd much prefer it if they stabilized their ever-growing bloatware feature set (that has translated into no visible gain for users) and took some time to optimize their code.

Re:Eh

[tubs]

And of course , patecnt every feature of it that you can, so that in 18 years you can make tons of money. Oh yea, register e and then i as trademarks and domain names and stuff ... loads a monry.

Or just put the lottery numbers in your phone?

Re:Eh

[TheRaven64]

Really? Because I used Word 6 in 1995 on a machine with 5MB of RAM. It showed the splash screen for a well over 30 seconds before launching and I couldn't then run an image editor without exiting Word or the machine would thrash and become unusable. Saving a multi-page document would often take 5-10 seconds during which time Word froze. Word 2 was a bit faster (although saving was still slow). Oh, and Word 2 took about 15% of my total hard disk space just for a standard install...

Re:Eh

[chrismcb]

How has MS muddied the waters?

Re:Eh

[Tukz]

Oh please, you couldn't figure out on your own, that I meant "what"?

Re:Eh

[DarkOx]

I think the parent was suggesting that 90% of computer users are doing the sames things they were doing with computers in '95, that is not dependent on the number of computer users. So yes there certainly more computer users today than in '95, but I suspect what the parent states is also true, the same tasks are being performed with them.

Re:Eh

[Lazy Jones]

Either you weren't around back then or you are too young to remember but...

Both wrong.

The lavish 33MHz and 8MB RAM (compared to the older generations of 16 bitters and 8 bitters) allowed lazy programmers to write such terrible algorithms and waste vast numbers of cycles on interpretd languaes like Visual Basic etc etc. My god, I mean windows 95 wasted so much CPU just to look a bit prettier. Real programmers still did everything in DOS.

In 1994 I still used my Atari Mega STe every day as well as a SPARCstation IPC running SunOS and later NetBSD. In 1996 I switched to Linux on a PC, which had none of that bloated feeling Windows 3.11 and later 95 exhibited. I recall that while VB was widely used on Windows, none of the everyday tasks involved it directly (email, editing, programming). We used (fast!) native code email clients and IDEs on Windows that felt faster than Eclipse and Thunderbird today. I would still use Linux on a desktop PC, but the non-bloated options for everyday tasks have been greatly reduced, so it doesn't seem worth the hassle.

Many algorithms have got much, much faster.

Examples please. "

Re:Eh

[NJRoadfan]

The big thing in 1995 were computers that had the ability to play back QVGA (320x240) full motion MPEG-1 video without dropping frames. Also most new machines were 66Mhz or faster (133Mhz Pentium came out later in the year) and had 8-16MB of RAM. The killer app was still multimedia at the beginning of the year, changing to the internet towards the end.

Re:Eh

[DarkOx]

the objective was always the same then as it is now - get the job done in a reasonable time. In 1995, we had to invest a lot of time optimising and hand coding ASM to meet that objective due to the mentioned limitations in PC's.

I suspect that part of the activity turned lots of marginal authors into much better ones. I suspect that is happening less today, because we can just throw some hardware at it.

Re:Eh

[Bigbutt]

I can parse it but yea, I have the same problem with my "smart" phone and fat fingers :)

[John]

Re:Eh

[swalve]

Web surfing? Most home computers were windows 3.1, NCSA Mosiac was only two years old, and, if you believe Wikipedia, there were only 50 websites to visit, and yahoo had just begun. (And if I remember right, all yahoo was was a static list of the other web pages, and the coolest thing ever.)

If you count AOL, maybe you are right. They had 2 million subscribers in 1995.

Pine is not elm. Get off my lawn.

Re:Eh

[DarkOx]

I think if we operating under the hypothetical that he can pull off time travel here in 2012; it follows he will be able to find 5dc power source to tie across the pins of his device in '95.

Also a modern smart phone would be plenty impressive. Suppose you took a jail broken iphone back there with telnetd running and gcc installed. I suspect people would be pretty impressed with the pocket sized UNIX workstation.

Re:Eh

[AvitarX]

Not for me.

Opening a file used to be very slow. And the first run of word 95 was terrible, with clippy bringing my whole system to its knees.

Typing in word used to be just as fast, though the red squiggles appeared slower (or was that 97 that got them). Other operations took longer (open, close, save). Where there styles yet? Writing a consistent looking document with an accurate table of contents I suspect took far longer in word 95. Especially if you wanted to change its overall look.

Re:Eh

[Anonymous Coward]

3d acceleration - the Voodoo 1 didn't come out until 1996.
Hardware-accelerated DVD playback
GPU computing
Hardware accelerated physics
Death of animated flashing GIFs
Clean typography via CSS
Easily rentable servers
Virtual machines
DSL internet vs ISDN/T-1

That's about it for progress.
Anyone think of other advances?

Re:Eh

[Randle_Revar]

>We're still using the same hardware and architecture as 1995.

Yes and no. Sure things are broadly the same. And we still use a lot of x86 CPUs. But while many smaller archs died out (or at least became even smaller) (MIPS, Alpha, PowerPC, etc), there has been one big success story: ARM. And besides the internal architecture difference, ARM SoC system architecture is very, very different from anything in "IBM compatible x86" land.

And while we may be using x86, someone from 95 would barely recognize it. The Pentium Pro didn't come out until November 95, and 686 was very different from 586, not to mention 486. More modern x86 ISAs hide something rather more RISC-like. Not to mention the modern vector instructions, x86-64, and multicore everywhere.

And of course we are the far side of the integrated/discrete swing, with GPUs (which didn't even exist in 95), video decoders/encoders, cryptography accelerators, memory controllers, system bus controllers and more on one chip, even one die. And that is standard x86, not even a SoC!

Re:Eh

[neokushan]

No programmer - and I mean not a single one - knows absolutely every API and programming trick they're ever going to use. What makes a good programmer good is being able to adapt and quickly learn what he needs to use (as well as when he needs to use it) - ok, there's plenty of things that define what a "good" programmer is, but that one is crucial.

That practice happens a lot less because it's needed a lot less. Hand editing ASM and knowing how the compiler works is brilliant for efficiency and optimising work, but it can easily hamper your ability to write clean and maintainable code - which these days is far more important than saving a few clock cycles. I dare say if you took a decent programmer from 1995 and put him into a development house from today, he'd struggle to keep up with some of even the more novice programmers simply because things are done differently these days.

Re:Eh

[Randle_Revar]

Don't show it to the masses, show it to computer engineers, who will be properly impressed. And if you bring along even the barest electrical specs of usb, they could easily whomp up a charger at least

Re:Eh

[Randle_Revar]

>Word

Well there's your problem!

Re:Eh

[swalve]

I noticed this about the same time. The machine I use at work is a Compaq Deskpro 733 with 512 mb of ram. It is perfectly adequate for my uses (mainly a terminal emulator, office and the web)- the only thing that is making it start to show its age is the fact that it can't take any more RAM, and the occasional fucked-up website will peg the CPU with some kind of java crap.

My work laptop is a Dell D600 with a 1.5ghz Pentium M processor (basically a Pentium 3 with extra extensions) and 1.5gb of ram. Its only real downside is that it is a touch heavy compared to newer units, and that it only has USB-1. The upside, and the reason I'll keep it as long as I can, is that it has real serial and parallel ports.

My home media machine is super-fancy- it has an $89 Intel motherboard with $20 worth of RAM (4gb ddr3) and a $49 celeron dual-core processor, and it takes anything I throw at it.

Hell, I've got another machine, some kind of dual core, that has a few virtual machines running on it. A computer so powerful that it is literally capable of being a half dozen separate computers. And it is mostly cast-off parts.

You are right, hardware isn't the problem any more.

Re:Eh

[Anonymous Coward]

... and "most"!

Re:Eh

[JoeMerchant]

hahahaha "1995: ...handling email, web surfing..."

speak for yourself but i think somewhat less than 90% of the people currently using a computer had access to email or the internet in 1995.

My memory of web browsing in 1995 was spending forever to get Mozilla to load a page with three graphic files over dialup.

In many ways, the Lynx user experience (text based) was superior to Mozilla & autoloading of graphics.

Re:Eh

[JoeMerchant]

This has made certain things practical--such as ...

Such as using unsuitable or bad algorithms, wasting enormous amounts of memory, disk space and bandwidth on trivial tasks, using layer upon layer of badly structured APIs and on top of that a browser with an interpreted language running software we use daily (like gmail). Who would have thought it possible back then?

Yes! and, in 1905 you had to carry a competent mechanic and navigator with you if you intended to drive cross country in an automobile, they also helped with the hand powered fuel pump. Now any idiot can do it by themselves, and many do it less efficiently than a pro would, they don't even plan a route before starting!

Re:Eh

[webheaded]

Yes, and if I put Windows 95 on my current computer, it would probably take less time to do it. What is your point? We are doing more things with the computer now because we have all this extra hardware and you aren't even going to try and wiggle out of that and say Windows hasn't improved anything since Windows 95 because that's bullshit.

Seriously, I know that I was only like 9 or 10 around this time but I dealt with my fair share of computers and I don't get all this trolly stupidity in this topic. Yes, your computer takes a minute to boot still. You say you can do more on the current PC and then praise the other one for having 15 year old versions of IE and Office and that's apparently good enough? Come on. :p You are all being purposely obtuse. It's not just you either, I'm just reading this topic and I find all these posts really irritating.

Some people go into the future kicking and screaming, I guess. If it was "good enough" then you wouldn't have upgraded in the first place.

Re:Eh

[JoeMerchant]

In 1991 I joined a team that was just finishing up a 64K Z80 all assembly project. Efficient and maintainable are not words that applied... it was as efficient as it had to be where it had to be, and otherwise bloated to fill the available memory. Oh, and the home grown floating point library was a bad idea, never could get the same results on the non Z80 side from the same input data. By 1995, the code was frozen, solid, and the product was basically un-upgradable.

Re:Eh

[csnydermvpsoft]

"What Intel giveth, Microsoft taketh away."

... and the Penguin giveth back with interest!

Only to be taketh back again by Mark Shuttleworth.

Re:Eh

[JoeMerchant]

As one of the affected users, I'd much prefer it if they stabilized their ever-growing bloatware feature set (that has translated into no visible gain for users) and took some time to optimize their code.

I've been thinking this about Windows' cold boot times forever. How many lifetimes have been wasted waiting for the login prompt?

Re:Eh

[fishbot]

By equating the terms "operating system" and "user interface". What wisty was referring to was not "using the operating system" to chown and sudo, but rather "using a different user interface".

Re:Eh

[Billly Gates]

"Eh. There's not much of a difference. We're still using the same hardware and architecture as 1995"

There is a BIG difference. Did Wifi exist back in 1995?

Try booting Windows 95 on a PC today?

Heck unless XP is a SP 3 disk, the installation wont even see your hard drive.

We have SMP, GPU with 3D graphics, true multitasking, virtualizing in hardware, wifi, broadband, and the x86 is only x86 in name as it internally translates the CISC code into risc inside the processor itself. It is a virtual risc processor.

They are more than just faster iterations of our 486 packward bells of yesteryears. For those who say these were around for mainframes, I see it is unfair to compare them and supercomputers and very high end SGI virtualization servers as they were not in the same class as a PC.

Even without that we have wifi and streaming media which did not exist back then no matter what hardware you have. What really is different is how I use my computer today vs being a teen back then. I am on the net now with wifi watching movies. The net was not a platform back then in html 1.0. It was more like reading text documents with gopher and AOL/Prodigy is where the real social activity was ... sort of.

The only thing that is the same with the 1995 PC era is that I can type documents and print them and play a game or two. The use and the hardware/software have totally changed.

Re:Eh

[Zero__Kelvin]

You can give it to Shuttleworth, but he can't take it without your permission. That being said, I wholeheartedly agree. As far as I am concerned Shuttleworth is the worst thing to happen to Linux ever.

Re:Eh

[rubycodez]

I'm laughing at you as I have two virtual machines going to test a multi-tier app. later I'll edit a movie (using the vector supercomputer-type multimedia features of my cpu) and laugh at you some more.

Re:Eh

[fatphil]

Word 6 was *significantly* slower than Word 2. When the company I worked for rolled out Word 6, I remember loads of us surreptitiously used Word 2 for practically everything.

Re:Eh

[willie3204]

I live in the US (Michigan) and have a Toto e200

It's awesome in the winter when its freakin cold out and saves on toilet paper usage

Re:Eh

[zeronitro]

While you appear to have a solid technical knowledge base, it is clear you have little to no practical knowledge or experience with SSDs other than off the cuff comments you've read here or there.

Let's go through some of your misconceptions shall we...

Price. Yes they are more expensive than mechanical hard drives. But the speed boost is substantial and worth it. I remember paying $200 for a 30GB HDD a long time ago. Now I can get a 128GB SSD for $160. My 128GB Crucial M4 is limited by my 3Gbs SATA 2 connection. It maxes out at ~280MB/sec for reads due to the pipe. It is actually much faster than that (over 400MB/sec fast). Pretty amazing difference for the otherwise slowest piece of hardware in any computer. Plus with TLC NAND arriving drives are going to start getting cheaper. Pair the cheaper flash with more mature controllers and within the next year or so SSDs will be in their prime.

Yes they are not tolerant of vast amount of write cycles. That is what wear levelling and TRIM are for. Even if new 25nm MLC flash could *only* handle 3000 write cycles, do you think you will ever use it that much? Highly unlikely. New Intel drives in the worst case scenarios running MySQL databases are still expected to last for a few years. Are home users ever going to continuously do 1TB of writes per day on an SSD? Most enterprise systems won't even touch that.

Mostly wrong about the swap file. Microsoft recommends putting the pagefile onto an SSD. See: http://blogs.msdn.com/b/e7/archive/2009/05/05/support-and-q-a-for-solid-state-drives-and.aspx

Take a look at SSD caching. In particular Intel Smart Response. It's a great way to get the speed benefit of SSDs much of the time with a lower cost.

You are dead wrong about SSD speed. Where did you even come up with those numbers? My USB 3.0 32GB flash drive reads at over 120MB/sec. As already stated my SSD totally maxes out 3gb/sec SATA: something mechanical HDDs can only do in RAID. And that's only talking about sequential reads/writes. I dare you to open up firefox, photoshop, and start a 1080p movie off of a mechanical HDD, and then off of an SSD. Access times on SSDs are near instant. See http://www.anandtech.com/show/2829/20

Yes SSDs are still relatively young and immature in some areas. That doesn't change the fact that support for them is substancial and they are above and beyond mechanical drives in anything related to performance.

Re:Eh

[maple_shaft]

We may not have had much in the way of web surfing, because while most of my neighbors had AOL and were confined to their little playground, I was in middle school and toying with text based browsing, email and IRC chats all over my dad's dialup through his work and this was all in 93-94 as I recall. I was king shit in my neighborhood in 95 too because I had the top-dog gaming machine with a 200mhz Pentium processor and 32mb of ram all with a blazing 28.8kbps modem so gaming was a breeze for me.

True online gaming hadn't really come into its own yet at that point but many games had direct dialup connection options so multiplayer was possible with friends in my neighborhood and people I met on chat. Needless to say I usually hosted because of my specs at the time.

Ah the good ol' days... NOW GET OFF MY LAWN!

Re:Eh

[MuChild]

Sing it! I mean, when they wanted to make a reasonable operating system for a personal computer, they had to go back to Unix! Really?!? Nothing better was invented in the, what was it, 40 years of computer science? I know, I know, this is a simplification, and to some degree the 40-year-history was one of the reasons to use it, but you get what I'm saying.

Re:Eh

[Phasma Felis]

if you believe Wikipedia, there were only 50 websites to visit

Did you read that page you linked to? "Of the thousands of websites founded prior to 1995, those appearing here are noteworthy for one or more of the following reasons..."

Re:Eh

[Zinho]

If you're using Wikipedia as a reference for how many web sites there were in '95 then you're doing it wrong. And standing on my lawn.

That list you're referencing is the number of sites founded prior to '95 that are still operating today, which is a much shorter list than what was available back then. The internet in '95 was an exciting place, it seemed like everything was available if you knew where to look. Early adopters were rewarded with the opportunity to be part of building the new cyberspace, and it set the stage for the tech bubble of the late '90s; that's certainly true. But if you think it was some kind of barren wasteland you certainly didn't experience it.

At least you have good taste in email client =)

Re:Eh

[Dputiger]

I feel sorry for you if you think a 733MHz system w/ 512MB of RAM is "perfectly adequate." I'm guessing you surf one page at a time, keep nothing open in the background, and go for coffee every time you need to copy data.

Re:Eh

[DarthVain]

I was, but only because that was my first year university.

In 1994 I had a coop position at another university and had access to the internet (if you could call it that) and an email address that was really only good internally as I didn't have anybody else to send an email too! I wrote a user guide for some free software that a university was using. Pegasus Mail was free apparently, but the user guides to use it were not.. (ha ha, nice business model) so they hired a high school student to write a guide. The internet so far as I was concerned were news groups and forums where people argued a lot (gee so much has changed!)

Prior to that it was all BBS's from 91-94. My parents were actually forced to buy a separate phone line for the computer because we used it pretty much constantly, and there was a lot of screaming when my sister and I were trying to get our turns in playing the "door" game Trade Wars 2002, and having mom or dad pick up the phone to make a call and disconnecting us all the time. I almost miss the modem connection sound, a bit nostalgic. Thought about attaching a sound file to when I boot up a browser now, but never bothered.

Back then you used to try and connect to anything, because there wasn't much out there. I recall connecting to some municipal modem that was 300 Baud... I also recall Sysops running banks of modems out of their houses to allow for multiple users, or scheduled updates to a network of BBS, to give the illusion of an internet. People forget that is where phone preaking came from, broke BBS users trying to connect to systems over the phone lines long distance all the time and staying on for hours. Fortunately for me, by the time I came around, Bell was doing 20$ unlimited long distance in Canada, and I recall abusing that pretty bad... Ah good times... I even recall going to a bar underage to meet with a whole bunch of users of BBS where they decided they would all like to meet each other, they of course were all older.

It was when I coined my handle. Darth after the hacker sign for the Ma Bell deathstar logo, and Vain after the character of the same name in the Stephen R Donaldson series of books about Thomas Covenant, who was a special ur-vile that was invulnerable to attack unless specifically targeted (or something like that).

Anyway goodtimes.

Re:Eh

[mcgrew]

We're still using the same hardware and architecture as 1995. Heck, I can run the same OS on a computer made in 1995, or in 2012.

Yeah? Sure, Windows 95 or DOS 6 will run on a new computer, but lets see you get Windows 7 or kubuntu 11.10 to run on a .386 with a 20 mb hard drive and 32 meg of RAM. Hell, you can't get FoxPro 6 to run under XP. Screamer 2 was fairly new in 1995, it wouldn't run in Windows 98.

Why would you expect a radical change in archetecture? And actully, considering that multi-core CPUs are more common than not these days, I'd say that's a huge difference.

Back in 1995 there were dip switches, because plug n play wasn't around. 16 color CRT monitors (and even monochrome monitors) were the norm. Most PCs weren't networked. You got on the BBS with a 33.6 POTS modem.

Either you're too young to remember computers from then well, or so old you've gotten alzheimer's.

Re:Eh

[Gr8Apes]

Naah, there were more, and there were sites fed by Archie and Gopher, as well as FIDONET, depending upon how far back you want to go and what you're interested in looking for. Granted, they weren't HTML, but they did have content.

Re:Eh

[mister_playboy]

SSD is far less tolerant of write cycles (the flash deteriorates over times) meaning you cannot use it to contain a swap file without it deteriorating rapidly (and until Windows starts using RAM first, swap later [e.g. I have 8GB of RAM, yet Windows still insists on a 4GB swap file... then uses only 2GB of my RAM]).

With 4GB of RAM being the lowest you can typically get in a new computer, I'd argue swap files are obsolete for most users. There's just no need to put things on the slow disk when they all fit in fast RAM.

Re:Eh

[hexagonc]

But I don't know that that is necessarily true. How does being able to hand-optimizing ASM help you do anything but optimize certain types of algorithms for a particular CPU and memory architecture? Does it make you better at finding the right software abstraction to tackle a business problem? Does it make your code less likely to have errors? More secure?

Except in the few cases, attempting to optimize ASM is best left to the compile. This is one case where a little knowledge can cause more harm than no knowledge.

Re:Eh

[datavirtue]

You think that's kewl, well get this: I have a Phenom II hex core at 3.4Ghz with 8GB of RAM running Windows XP 32 bit! YEAH! The lovely people at Gnome and Ubuntu are to blame for this--thanks for the free OS guys!. The 64bit versions of Ubuntu/Mint coupled with the fabulously buggy modern Gnome environment literally rendered my machine unusable. I had to install crappy old XP just to get stuff done. I'm sure someone is going to jump the yarn and tell me what I was doing wrong, but I played with different setups for months trying to get things right. Getting XP up and running, as gut wrenching as that is, was a relief after that crippled mess hampered my productivity for so long. Ubuntu 10 was so freakin awesome. WTF is wrong with these people hosing a good distro? Sorry, I drifted off topic. No I'm not new here.

Re:Eh

[operagost]

Heck, I can run the same OS on a computer made in 1995, or in 2012.

Run Windows 7 or Mac OS X on a computer made in 1995.

Backwards compatibility is not a flaw. You could always get a PCI that uses EFI if you want to make sure it doesn't run an old OS.

Re:Eh

[Anonymous Coward]

Boot time? Really? I reboot my machines when software updates require it, which is maybe as frequent as once a month. Boot times could slow to 10 minutes and I would still much rather have a 2012 machine rather than one from 1995.

What a trivial and meaningless point of comparison.

Re:Eh

[Anonymous Coward]

Now consider that most of all this touch and voice controlled computing wizardry is probably also in that inexpensive device you keep in your pocket.

My flashlight has touch and voice control? I didn't know that! :-)

Re:Eh

[datavirtue]

The problem I have not optimizing is the net usage of energy. More cycles uses more energy. This powerful hardware you speak of now uses considerable power compared to those of 1995.

Re:Eh

[Anonymous Coward]

I remember going to Yahoo back in '94. It was a stanford.edu site then.

Re:Eh

[Rick17JJ]

The small city where I live, did not yet have a local access number for AOL, Compuserve, Prodigy, or a local Internet provider until somewhere later on in the late 1990s. I was told that our local calling area was too small to bother providing us with a local access number.

Later on in the 1990s, it seemed like we must have one one of the last places in Arizona to not have a local Internet provider, or access to AOL, Compuserve, or Prodigy. We did at least have several local computer bulletin boards that I could try out instead.

When Internet access did finally arrive several years later, the telephone lines in our neighborhood were not good enough for 28.8k. Most of the time, the modem would connect at 26.4k, and occasionally just at 24k. I am not sure what year 56k modems became available, but when the did, they would only connect at 26.4k here.

In the late 1990s and beyond, internal modems would only stay connected for a few minutes at a time on the telephone companies old local telephone lines that connected to where I live. Fortunately, I soon discovered that external modems would stay connected just fine.

It was not until fairly recently, like probably about 2007, when DSL finally became available where I live. I did not have cable either (and still don't). It was probably only about 5 years ago, that I was still only able to connect to the Internet at 26.4k.

Re:Eh

[hexagonc]

Such as using unsuitable or bad algorithms,

I don't see how this abuse is more likely today than in 1995. Not saying it isn't, though.

wasting enormous amounts of memory, disk space and bandwidth on trivial tasks,

This needs some detail. A lot of systems today simply have to use more resources simply because they are actually doing more under the covers than similar systems did in 1995, even if the user interface doesn't look that different to the end user. At the very least, they'll have to suffer under the bit of bloat that it takes to make them more secure and for good error handling.

using layer upon layer of badly structured APIs

Badly structured APIs are bad no matter how you look at it but there is no free lunch here. Unless the core problem you are trying to solve directly involves computer hardware, I don't see how you can avoid wading through the layers of abstraction. Either you're dealing with those abstractions yourself with your own code or you're using someone else's framework or API that already bridges those layers. Admittedly, it is hard to avoid bloat when the industry standardizes around a small number of large frameworks and libraries that try to satisfy everyone's needs.

and on top of that a browser with an interpreted language running software we use daily (like gmail).

A very small fraction of the code for gmail runs client side.

Re:Eh

[badboy_tw2002]

Tell that to the phone in my pocket which would smoke 20 of your 1995 computers in both CPU and RAM and has always on connectivity with download speeds 100x what you could get through your wired phone line. Also weighs maybe 1% of your computer, fits in my pocket, and has 10x the resolution. With it I'm always connected, can watch pretty much any piece of content anywhere, find any fact in 10s or less, video chat dick tracy style with anyone in the world, talk to it to have it search for things for me, navigate my way across america using signals from fucking space, and film HD video that no one had a playback device for in their house for in 1995.

But yeah, besides that, pretty much the same.

Re:Eh

[datavirtue]

The relationship started out OK, but when things got serious he went a little crazy.

Re:Eh

[mcgrew]

I think you misunderstood him, that was no typo. He meant that programmers back then took optimized and reliable but left-leaning code and righted it. As in "this code is too damned liberal!"

Same thing as when someone says "they should loose their money." It's no typo, they meant what they wrote. They want them to set their money free, not lose it.

Re:Eh

[tlhIngan]

Programmers back then knew how to right optimized and reliable code that took full advantage of the hardware. Also many programmers knew assembly language for extra optimization. If the programmers from back then were writing for the hardware we have now software would be much more efficient.

Not quite true.

In fact, "clever" optimizations done back then can often come to bite you back in the ass.years later. Heavily optimized code can also be a pain to maintain - it's great back then when we usually threw away programs after a year or two but stuff like Y2K illustrated that a lot of software is starting to be used far longer than ever imagined (decades, or half a century).

And the mess of certain optimizations can restrict maintainability in the future. Hell you still run into minor Y2K bugs now and again (Years reading out as 19112 for example).

Heck, here's an optimization done way back in the Windows 3.1 days that persisted until Vista. It's clever and it optimized memory use (back when you had 4MB of RAM, using 64K of RAM for an API call was gratuitious), but really pointless now as it's much faster ot just always take 64K of RAM rather than try to save it. (And 64K out of 4MB was much bigger than 64K is out of 4+GB)

http://blogs.msdn.com/b/oldnewthing/archive/2012/02/10/10266256.aspx

These days, the goal is to write maintainable code first, then optimize that. Otherwise you'll end up having to refactor and rewrite chunks later as performance tweak after undocumented performance tweak leads to a huge mess of spaghetti code that's indecipherable.

Or writing huge chunks of code in assembly that aren't performance critical (i.e., non-kernel codec/dsp stuff). ("kernel" in the codec/dsp world is the chunk of code that's doing the actual processing - e.g., the multiply-accumulate of FIR/IIR filters, completely unrelated to the OS kernel).

Tuning for performance is fine, but trying to do all the nasty tricks you had to do a decade and a half ago leads to an awful mess of code that some poor schmuck has to maintain later. And general trends indicate that the optimizations work then, but then become irrelevant and possible even slower than the straightforward implementation.

Re:Eh

[JeanCroix]

Yeah, firing up Mosaic or Netscape was only a once-in-a-while type thing. I remember actually buying music online by telnetting in to cdnow.com to browse and buy cds.

Re:Eh

[neokushan]

That is true and it's something that's still somewhat crucial in the mobile/embedded sector, however therein lies a significant difference - in 1995, we didn't have the incredibly efficient ARM chips that we have now. Where power draw is crucial, we have a solution for that, too - low-power Chips. When you have serious number crunching to do, power draw and the environment probably isn't a major concern.

Re:Eh

[Anonymous Coward]

Right, because nobody got anything done back in 1998

Re:Eh

[datavirtue]

Hopefully in 10,000 years we will be civilized enough to use bidets.

Re:Eh

[datavirtue]

Don't use page files. I disable page files when I have more than 2GB of RAM. Everything works great and the hard drive gets to rest until I need it. Where is the issue?

Re:Eh

[datavirtue]

Some people become overly annoyed at the obtuseness of others. Grow up. How do you find posts irritating? Do you become this ruffled in every debate? This is just healthy debate; let everyone air their thoughts and you can come to your own conclusion.

Re:Eh

[Creepy]

I was in college before you and was emailing like crazy within weeks of starting. I also had parents that were too cheap to buy a second line, so I had to run my BBS after hours (it lasted about 6 months before I gave up, having to manually switch it on ever evening and off every morning).

Phone phreaking in the traditional sense was largely broken by the mid 1980s and came from a whistle that came from a Captain Crunch box, and was later a bunch of colored boxes that reproduced multiple tones that replaced the single tone long distance signal. Hacked (generated fake cards billed to a fake address) and stolen credit cards were the way of the late 1980s-1990s after the phone companies killed multi-frequency. I was not part of the credit fraud scene, but did build the last generation of phreaking boxes before they changed the hardware at the CLEC.

I did BBS's about 1983-4 through 1988 or so, and then lacked time for it (music, car, girls, job... those things took priority).

The coolest thing I remember was a chain of modems connecting from Chicago to Minneapolis to avoid long distance charges by having people with two lines at the border where there was overlap. They tried to do Chicago to LA as well, but I think they failed to connect in the middle

Re:Eh

[flappinbooger]

I see your point, x86 architecture, monitor, keyboard, mouse, magnetic storage. Same thing.

But multiple orders of magnitude larger and faster isn't really exactly the same thing.

Sorta like saying a new ferrari is the same as a model T... 4 wheels, seat, steering wheel, engine - yep! Same thing! Hasn't changed a bit.

Re:Eh

[jedidiah]

> My memory of web browsing in 1995 was spending forever to get Mozilla to load a page with three graphic files over dialup.

Dealing with the web on a mobile device is very much a blast from the past in this respect. You are limited in bandwidth and the power of the "terminal" device. Quite often you have to scale back the features of the webpage, shrink images, and otherwise adjust the interface of the page to suit a smaller screen with much less powerful machine attached to it.

I have poor relations still on dialup. Dealing with the capacity of mobile web browsers is a bit of deja vu.

Re:Eh

[jedidiah]

I have no idea what you were "doing wrong". I run and have run GNOME on all manner of hardware big and small and have never felt the need to "flee to XP".

I even rescued an old laptop from XP by using Ubuntu and Gnome. Under XP it ran too hot and too hard and tended to shut itself down for it's own protection.

If anything, I upgrade the XP installs of friends and family to Win7 so that they can get decent wifi. When I see what XP users have to deal with in that regard I am amazed that anyone ever complains about Linux in this regard.

Re:Eh

[JoeMerchant]

I was using cdnow.com to kick ass in the afternoon "name that song title and artist" call in contests, often I'd have a song title fragment and cdnow would fill in the blank for me before the radio station answered the call...

Re:Eh

[Anonymous Coward]

"Booting Linux on an Asus EeePC 901 in 5 seconds"
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s7NxCM8ryF8

Re:Eh

[AdmiralXyz]

A few months ago a friend and I went to Japan for a week and a half of tourist-ing it up. I had been before, he hadn't. When we got off the plane and he had to go the bathroom, I made sure to follow him in and stand outside the stalls so I could hear the scream as he used a Japanese toilet for the first time. That alone was worth the price of my plane ticket.

Re:Eh

[quacking duck]

Nah, better than that.

If you brought an iPhone back to 1995 they wouldn't believe you were from the future because it has an Apple logo on it, and everyone knew they were always just a few months from going out of business.

Re:Eh

[tjb]

Many algorithms have got much, much faster.

Examples please. "

MapReduce?

FFTW?

Anything parallel enough to run on GPGPU?

Re:Eh

[DarthVain]

"The coolest thing I remember was a chain of modems connecting from Chicago to Minneapolis to avoid long distance charges by having people with two lines at the border where there was overlap. They tried to do Chicago to LA as well, but I think they failed to connect in the middle"

That is hilarious and awesome all at the same time! Hella dependency though, "Sorry the whole thing went down, Dad needed to make a call and picked up the wrong phone!"

Yeah the phone stuff was way before my time. Though I read all about it from text files available on BBS.

Re:Eh

[Lazy Jones]

MapReduce?

That's not an algorithm ...

FFTW

That's a faster implementation, but "much, much faster" is an exaggeration.

Anything parallel enough to run on GPGPU

Just because stuff can run on faster or more parallel hardware nowdays, it doesn't make the used algorithm faster... In the old days, we had specialized algorithms for specialized hardware (DSPs) too.

Re:Eh

[mcgrew]

after three days (because you're battery last 3x longer because you don't use video and 3G) it goes dead because there is no usb to load the battery

You're telling me someone smart enough to invent a time machine is stupid enough to leave his phone charger behind?

you're battery

Sorry, I take that "stupid enough" comment back.

Re:Eh

[sjames]

SOMETIMES that is true, but often it is not. Consider, taking 6 months to optimize a program that runs on 100 servers costs 20,000 pounds but saves 100,000 pounds. It's not done because the programmer's salary comes out of one budget but the hardware is someone else's cost./

Re:Eh

[excelsior_gr]

Still, even an own implementation of the crappy BubbleSort can, in some cases, be a better choice than loading a huge library that will bring everything to a halt, just so that you can call HeapSort to sort 20 elements... Neither good APIs nor fast CPUs are a replacement for common sense.

Re:Eh

[Darinbob]

Maybe the point is not necessary that computers have gotten bigger and faster, but that they have not actually improved computing as much as it should have. We have in some senses not advanced very far at all, except for size. We're not fundamentally doing that much more. Yes, some people are doing video editing or stuff that used to be very expensive, but that's really a minority. The vast majority of computer users are really not doing much more than they used to except for having the web.

There's this joke that programs expand to fill the size of memory available. And this shows up with your standard MS Office applications. If computers have gotten so much better then why is Word just as slow as ever, takes just as long to load up, and has no extra must-have features that most people use other than changes in look and feel?

Re:Eh

[scot4875]

Don't forget that since 1995, optimizing compilers have gotten *much* better. To the point that now, the most effective optimization is done at the design level, not at the instruction level.

--Jeremy

Re:Eh

[Anonymous Coward]

no windows 95 offered some advantages over dos in return. this is VERY different than today where everyone's writing code in 'managed' runtimes that sit on top of the host os, wasting cycles and ram to do something that could've been written in roughly the same time in C++ (or another native lang) had they been competent. today's programmers seem to care more about features than speed, and it shows. the issue is that the hardware gets better but the programmers keep getting lazier, making very little room for either real new capability and/or faster results.

for example, today's windows 7 is TEN GIGABYTES on the hd. That's before software installs, before patching.. Seriously? there isn't THAT much legacy api code floating around in win32.

Re:Eh

[epyT-R]

..which is great.. however now instead of reinventing functions, we're reinventing whole damn apis for the sake of market grabs (java/.net/python/ruby/etc). instead of a cd burning utility taking maybe a meg on the hd and a few megs of shared resource while running, it takes 200MB on the hd, and 60+ of ram just to load its stupid, redundant runtime.

Re:Eh

[mattack2]

Dealing with the web on a mobile device is very much a blast from the past in this respect. You are limited in bandwidth and the power of the "terminal" device. Quite often you have to scale back the features of the webpage, shrink images, and otherwise adjust the interface of the page to suit a smaller screen with much less powerful machine attached to it.

I'm not sure what mobile devices you're using, but that seems to largely not be the case since the iPhone. (I'm not saying ONLY the iPhone has it, nowadays.)

Sure, some sites default to giving you a "mobile optimized" site, but IMHO usually those are WORSE than the full site, on the same phone, so I switch to the full site when possible.

(Yes, one feature "scale[d] back", i.e. not available, is Flash.)

Re:Eh

[marcosdumay]

A blast to a past where computers had 256MB of RAM, a reasonable Javascript capacity (but it slows pages down), and 56kbps connections were the most common. You can play videos on your cellphone!

That is the past, but way more recent. In 1995 you couldn't take for granted that your computer had enough memory to open an image (Photoshop users were recommended to buy computers with more RAM), most telephone lines weren't fit for 56kbps comminucation, and Javascript was a newborn.

Re:Eh

[marcosdumay]

Sorry, but I can make runtime imports on Python, and it is great. Yeah, it also means that every symbol is now a string, and must be parsed every time, too bad, it is still great.

Re:Eh

[maple_shaft]

Seriously, you should be modded insightful just for remembering Gopher protocol!

Re:Eh

[Bent Mind]

Web surfing? Most home computers were windows 3.1, NCSA Mosiac was only two years old, and, if you believe Wikipedia, there were only 50 websites to visit [wikipedia.org], and yahoo had just begun.

Yep, and then Microsoft created a free web browser and included it in their OS in August of that year. Everyone was quick to jump onboard. Al Gore invented the Internet and Netscape copied Microsoft and then sued.

Oh wait, it might not have happened that way. You should check your facts... Of course, I remember using an account a friend had at the university to access the Internet in 1985 and using Netscape Navigator in 94.

Re:Eh

[Anonymous Coward]

Yeah, it's a shame that you have only two OS options to use a modern computer: either Ubuntu 11.10 or Windows XP 32 bit. No older Ubuntu will EVER be able to run on your machine. There are no other Linux distros or desktop environments. There are no 64 bit versions of Windows. XP was the last OS Microsoft ever wrote. Hackintosh is impossible. BSD is dead, Netcraft confirms it. Etc, etc, etc.

Seriously. You fail at installing/configuring Ubuntu+Gnome, so you drop Linux altogether and go to an old Windows verson that can't even see your hardware? That's smart... Now that I think about it, you did well. Such a stupid, single-minded luser is better off being away from any of the better distros. The noise you'd add to a Fedora mailing list complaining that "aptitude is not installed, I can't aptitude install gimp, HELP!!" would be revolting.

Re:Eh

[Anonymous Coward]

Nonsense. I run Word 97 and it starts almost instantly, like software in 2012 should.

Re:Eh

[swalve]

Duh. Sorry.

Re:Eh

[froggymana]

So how do I upload these video's/pictures to a computer then? USB was barely around, and only at the 1.0 spec.

Re:Eh

[wisty]

Really? apt-get is part of the OS. It's *not* part of the kernel, but it's arguably part of the OS. Exactly where the boundary of the OS lies is a flamewar roughly as old as operating systems.

Is the registry part of an OS? What if the registry sits in a DB, like on OSX? Is the database then part of the OS? Unless you take an extreme view (the microkernel is the OS, and bigger kernels are just wrong), then it's bound to be a wee bit fuzzy.

Re:Eh

[TheRaven64]

True in some cases, but not always. For example, all of the examples you listed use libicu to provide all of their unicode support on most platforms. Support for things like regular expression matching on unicode strings is very complex (especially if you don't want it to be painfully slow). They may all expose it via different APIs - as you'd hope, since the C APIs don't naturally fit into the patterns of other languages - but they are all calling the same libraries underneath. They're all likely to be using Cairo for 2D graphics. They're all using FreeType for font parsing and glyph generation.

Re:Eh

[Gr8Apes]

Thanks, but since I actually ran both servers in their time, I'm not sure I should get extra points just for remembering stuff I worked with.

But for remembering Hobbes and Simtel, huge repos of what we would now term Open Source code, now that I could see. That was back in the days of straight FTP and having machines 1 or 2 hops off of the backbone. Those were the days... of no firewalls nor anything else, just one big happy family. It gives me shivers thinking about how insecure it all was.

Re:Eh

[bdh]

I certainly did, as did most of my friends. I contracted at IBM from 1990 to 1992, and I remember helping several co-workers set up home internet access. Being IBMers, they were familiar with internal email, but the internet was something new, something that they could use to connect with non-IBMers.

At the time, most international email was done though BBSes, although even as far back as 1990 or so, internet email was accessible though those gateways at those BBSes, such as Canada Remote Systems (I was user 283 :-) and Rose Media.

By 1993-1994, everyone I knew was messing with various versions of WinSock, and using FTP and Telnet. And once O'Reilly started selling their "Internet in a Box" kit, it provided one stop shopping for non-technical users to get online. At that point, Microsoft and Apple were jumping online by adding native TCP/IP and phone dialer support in their current operating systems, so pretty much anyone buying new PC, or a copy of Windows 95, was online in some capacity.

It wasn't like today, where everyone has a 7/24 connection. Most people with dialup had 20 hours a month or so, but for most non-technical people, that was enough.

Re:Eh

[tjb]

Mapreduce most certainly is an algorithm, just not one that fits your narrow minded definition is all.

I've done plenty of DSP programming, it really doesn't compare to how things need to be thought of for GPGPU - it's a different and much faster approach to doing anything embarrassingly parallel

Re:Eh

[Anonymous Coward]

> Heck, I can run the same OS on a computer made in 1995, or in 2012.

If you really run the same OS in 1995 and in 2012 and neither sucked, chances are it's the same OS you'd be running in 1990 and 2020.

Re:Eh

[toddestan]

"Apple? I would have never thought that Apple Computers would still exist in 2012."

"They don't. Apple is now a phone and gadget company."

Re:Eh

[Anonymous Coward]

ARM7TDMI was introduced in 1994.

Re:Eh

[dave87656]

I'm amazed at how little computers have changed in the past 18 years.

True, but the other side of the coin is, how much they really have changed, if you count smart phones and tablets. Back then it was a used as a data storage, game and calender device. Now it's all that, plus it's your phone, your camera, your video camera, your alarm clock, your note taking device, your shopping list, your GPS, your game controller, your TV remote, and so on. That, I think is amazing.

Re:Eh

[dave87656]

Almost, forgot, it's also your bookshelf, your TV and your stereo.

News for Nerds?

[Anonymous Coward]

Wait, what? Computers have orders of magnitude more speed and capacity today than they did 17 years ago? Awesome! This is definitely good "News for Nerds".

Re:News for Nerds?

[rsmith-mac]

Be quiet you. We're reminiscing and we enjoy it.

A bit outdated

[ShakaUVM]

The article is a bit outdated, but I mean that in the opposite sense of it reporting computer stats from 1995. It seems a bit a year out of date on its stats. Am I nitpicking? Sure.

The 28.8 modem was introduced in 1994, and I recall it being in fairly wide use by summer 1994. Likewise, 17" monitors were not unusual or prohibitively expensive back then. I had a decent enough 17" that ran maybe $300 or so. The Apple repair tech knocked it off my table, and I ended up with a really nice 17" Sony CRT and a massive (for the time) 24" monitor for my troubles. Ended up selling the 24" for a thousand bucks or so to pay rent, kept the Sony, and fixed the Shamrock.

Likewise, I had a Power Mac 6100 at the time, which released in 1994, but had a lot of the "upgrade recommended" features they listed for 1995. 8MB RAM standard, 72MB maximum, etc. 500MB HD though, which was a bit light. But it had built-in ethernet, which was an amazing experience in the dorms after living in dialup land for all of high school.

I got nostalgic for all the good times I had on that machine a while back, and reinstalled Marathon (which is available free now). You know what they say, though: you just can never go back to keyboard look.

Re:A bit outdated

[wvmarle]

I do recall that CRT monitors were for a very long time much cheaper than LCD/TFT screens. And for an even longer time faster (especially in refresh rates). Also CRT never really came down in price - stayed more or less the same, as materials/manufacturing/transportation are the bulk of their cost.

Indeed back in the days 17" was not expensive, back in 1995 I was using 15" already. I got a cheap second-hand one, a few years old, excellent condition. And early 2000s switched to a flat screen one.

A 24" CRT is still massive. Never ceased to be massive. I mean, ever tried to lift such a beast? You may have had to reinforce your desk before putting one of those on it! That huge chunk of glass just won't get any lighter, no matter what.

Re:A bit outdated

[Anonymous Coward]

The glass isn't the heavy part, the big hunk of lead that is used for the shielding is.

Re:A bit outdated

[PCM2]

A 24" CRT is still massive. Never ceased to be massive. I mean, ever tried to lift such a beast? You may have had to reinforce your desk before putting one of those on it! That huge chunk of glass just won't get any lighter, no matter what.

I still have a 32" CRT TV, and one of the main things that's keeping me from getting a flat screen of some kind is WTF am I going to do with this beast? It's 150 lbs, but that's deceptive. It's 150 lbs of poorly-balanced, somewhat fragile dead weight. One person cannot carry it anywhere, at least nobody I've seen has figured out how. Two can manage, but I don't own a car. Funny how people are willing to deliver stuff for next to nothing, but you can't find someone to haul it back out again.

Re:A bit outdated

[Xest]

"Also CRT never really came down in price - stayed more or less the same, as materials/manufacturing/transportation are the bulk of their cost."

Didn't it? the whole reason I bought a 17" CRT and then a few years later a 19" as a teen was because they drastically dropped into my price range. They most certainly did drop in price, just as drastically as larger LCD/TFTs have in recent years since the panel manufacturers got their wrists slapped for colluding on price.

I firmly remember the standard monitor size available on computers in the early 90s onwards into the early 00s jumping from 14" to 15", to 17" and to 19" and above before the LCDs and TFTs started to steal the show. The sizes increased for no reason other than costs came down. I remember this because I had the unfortunate job of replacing the flyback transformer and such on a fair few of them over the years until the cost benefits of doing so deteriorated away.

Re:A bit outdated

[JosKarith]

I've worked in IT support for about a decade and a half now and the move from CRT to TFT is an absolute godsend.
My personal favourite was when someone wanted their PC under their monitor to save desk space - you had to lift 50-odd lbs of monitor and then brace it with one hand to slide the desktop underneath cos' there was no way the desktop would slide into place with the monitor resting on the top.
When we migrated to TFT's I wrecked my back for about a week lifting all the old monitors as we got rid of them but the pain was worth it to never see those b4stards again...

Re:A bit outdated

[Darinbob]

This is true. I think the change from everyone CRTs being standard to LCDs being standard and larger and cheaper took less than two years. I think even from 1985 to 2005 the monitors did not change that radically, except that the big monsters on Unix workstations became the big monsters for high end PCs.

Re:A bit outdated

[Darinbob]

Same here. I got the big CRT TV because my friend let me have it for free if I could take it myself. Now I'm considering a new one because the color is a bit off in some places. Now I don't want to deal with taking it to the recyclers.

My thinking is that I'll push the old TV back about 6 inches and stick the flat screen in front of it.

Re:A bit outdated

[Anonymous Coward]

i just picked up a 150lb jvc 322" crt off the side of the road for a hardware project. i on'y weight 135 lbs but i got it up a flight of stairs solo by bear hugging it with the front of the tube against my stomach. a customer of mine told me once "if you really want to move a heavy load, pretend it's a dead body." funny, but it worked.

Re:A bit outdated

[Anonymous Coward]

>I still have a 32" CRT TV [...] WTF am I going to do with this beast?

Wrap it in two or three huge plastic bags and club it with a sledgehammer until you can handle it.

Works and is fun.

Re:A bit outdated

[na1led]

CRT's are great for playing Light Gun games. I have an old 26" CRT TV in my basement hooked up to my PS2, and it works great with my GunCon lightguns. The light guns they have for LCD are junk and not accurate.

Re:A bit outdated

[Anonymous Coward]

It dropped in price because the price premium (profit) dropped to almost zero. The manufacturing costs didn't and really couldn't change. Companies had fixed sunk costs that couldn't easily be transferred to other technology so they kept producing, but once flat screens dropped in price, consumers wouldn't buy CRT even in a zero profit scenario.

Re:A bit outdated

[Bob the Super Hamste]

I love those old light gun games. I dug out my old NES and hooked it up to my hi def LCD TV only to discover that the light gun didn't work there. Hooked it up to the old CRT TV in the basement and it works like a charm.

Re:A bit outdated

[eharvill]

Craigslist is your friend. I got rid of a 36", 225lb Toshiba in less than an hour. I had multiple inquiries and had to pull the ad relatively quickly. I put it in the free section. It's amazing how much space was freed up in the room when I got rid of that beast.

Re:A bit outdated

[Anonymous Coward]

FREECYCLE/Free Area on CL

Re:A bit outdated

[darkonc]

Grab it at the screen. Hold the screen against your chest, and your hands around the bottom of the screen. about 80% of the weight is in the glass in the front of the screen, and the rest of the monitor will balance properly. It's kinda counter-intuitive.but it works.

I started moving 30" screens around in the late '80s when they cost a few thousand dollars. Never had to pay for dropping one.

I still have a 32" CRT TV, ..... It's 150 lbs of poorly-balanced, somewhat fragile dead weight. One person cannot carry it anywhere, at least nobody I've seen has figured out how.

Re:A bit outdated

[Anonymous Coward]

Offer it for "Free, you carry" on Craigslist.

Re:A bit outdated

[Anonymous Coward]

Post to Craigslist?

Re:A bit outdated

[Trixter]

I still have a 32" CRT TV, and one of the main things that's keeping me from getting a flat screen of some kind is WTF am I going to do with this beast?

Get the flatscreen anyway but hold onto your CRT for any vintage console gaming you do. Modern LCD/Plasma TVs, even with a "game mode", add one frame of latency to all analog inputs; CRTs obviously do not.

Re:A bit outdated

[irussel]

get a friend with a car to help you take it to the nearest Goodwill.

Re:A bit outdated

[Anonymous Coward]

I have lost a lot of upper body strength since CRTs went dodo.

Re:A bit outdated

[ShakaUVM]

A lot of TV recyclers will come to your house and pick it up for free, especially if the TV works (so they can resell it).

I actually saw a pair of them in my apartment complex, asked them if they wanted a 300lb 36" CRT TV, and they jumped on it. Had the thing hauled out of there in under a minute.

Damn thing was so heavy, I couldn't get it up the stairs to begin with... had to hire a guy to help me.

Re:A bit outdated

[ejoosten]

Sell it for a dollar on ebay. That's what i did with my old 20" monitor.

Re:A bit outdated

[toddestan]

If you do this, make sure your belt buckle or whatever won't scratch the screen. The glass screens are pretty durable, but you can still damage one.

Re:A bit outdated

[PCM2]

I thought of that. Last time I put something up on the free list, it was gone in no time. But something like this? When LCD TVs are so cheap, and arguably much better? It seems unlikely I could find anyone willing to go through the effort (but I'd probably be surprised, I guess).

Re:A bit outdated

[eharvill]

It's hard to beat free though. One person's junk is another person's treasure. I'll put random "junk" out with the trash that Goodwill won't even take and invariably one of my neighbors will grab it before the trash truck makes its rounds. It's kind of scary as I feel like I live in a fairly nice neighborhood and I would think my neighbors wouldn't want this "junk" either. /shrug

Windows 95 vs Windows 7

[MrEricSir]

Windows 95 came with a 3d capture the flag game and a Weezer music video. Windows 7? Nope.

Therefore, computers in 1995 were better.

Re:Windows 95 vs Windows 7

[Trentula]

Hover! was an amazing game. I played it a ton as a child. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hover!

Re:Windows 95 vs Windows 7

[amanicdroid]

(yes, I realize you were kidding) Hover is available for download here http://www.stanford.edu/~cammat/HOVER/index.html and here's the Weezer "Buddy Holly" video. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kemivUKb4f4 (Vevo account unfortunately)

Re:Windows 95 vs Windows 7

[phantomfive]

Ironically, Windows 95 didn't come out until 1996

Re:Windows 95 vs Windows 7

[phantomfive]

Nevermind, I was wrong about that. First service pack was 1996.

Re:Windows 95 vs Windows 7

[Anonymous Coward]

That's OK. This is Slashdot. You'll be modded up to +5, Informative, anyway.

Re:Windows 95 vs Windows 7

[Anonymous Coward]

And look at RAM... double the ram made a "dramatic difference". Now we have windows 7 which is a RAM junkie and people buy double ram just for kicks, it doesn't matter how much you have, W7 and Firefox eat it all!

Re:Windows 95 vs Windows 7

[Custard Horse]

"Buying 4Gb or more will only make a difference on a 64-bit OS" - you would have been locked up in 1995 for saying such a thing. Madness!

Re:Windows 95 vs Windows 7

[jones_supa]

Yep. These days, I from the start usually just fill the board with as much as RAM it can take.

Re:Windows 95 vs Windows 7

[Anonymous Coward]

You can download it straight from Microsoft.

Re:Windows 95 vs Windows 7

[marcosdumay]

No, he's only at +4 for now.

Would it help if I remember that the first proposed release date for "Project Cairo" was 1992? It was renamed to "Windows 95" at 1994.

Eight Megabytes And Constantly Swapping

[martin-boundary]

For me, the most dramatic example of the progress of hardware in the intervening years is Emacs.

It used to be regarded as a heavyweight editing environment, comparable in scope and resource requirements to a full programmer's IDE. There was even a special server designed just to allow several editing windows (aka frames) to coexist.

Now, it's so lightweight and fast to load up, my web browser launches a completely independent Emacs for each comment field in a web page, my MUA launches its own Emacs for writing mails, I have multiple independent Emacs processes for editing code, and another for writing LaTeX.

Re:Eight Megabytes And Constantly Swapping

[philip.paradis]

"Emacs is a wonderful operating system. All it's missing is a decent text editor."

Re:Eight Megabytes And Constantly Swapping

[Anonymous Coward]

The thing that surprises me isn't that there are many differences between now and 17 years ago, but that there are so few meaningful differences between now and 10 years ago. Other than the hardware form factor, the main significant difference is that the internet has so much more content (which isn't really an improvement in home computers themselves). The OS upgrades generally have stayed in the continuum of minor to annoying.

Re:Eight Megabytes And Constantly Swapping

[nightfell]

I was going to make a pithy comment about the way you're using modern hardware to run emacs all over the place, but I just can't bring myself to do it. You've already suffered enough.

Re:Eight Megabytes And Constantly Swapping

[Robert Zenz]

Everytime I hear somebody talking about emacs/vi I think to myself: "I have to learn that finally". Though, I always say that about Dwarf Fortress and Nethack, too.

Re:Eight Megabytes And Constantly Swapping

[martin-boundary]

There's a perfectly rational explanation for my madness :)

One of the things that infuriates people who like GUIs is when Cut'n'Paste doesn't work properly in some applications. Even when it works, the data transfers through cut and paste depend a lot on what an application will recognize or let you copy. E.g. you might copy an image from the web browser and yet you can't insert it as a background for your music player.

I'm the same way with editing text. Nearly every application requires some text input somewhere, and the ways the native text fields work are slightly (or a lot) different in each application. By using Emacs everywhere possible, I can have a uniform editing experience that improves the overall UI a lot. I can spell check a slashdot post without needing a special module in my browser or my MUA, I can move forward/backward by single characters, words, sentences, or paragraphs, I have automatic saving in case of an application crash, load/save from external files, syntax coloring which adapts to the content type and macro capability in *all* the applications I regularly use, and it all works the *same* way everywhere.

Re:Eight Megabytes And Constantly Swapping

[Darinbob]

Technically I don't need the modern hardware to run emacs, but I can't find decent old hardware anymore.

And really, the only reason I prefer the modern hardware is for resolution; I can stack up a lot more Emacs windows on screen with larger anti-aliased fonts.

I'll forgive all you VI users. After all we'll be in the same rest home some day. IDE users though will feel my cane of righteousness upon their heads.

Re:Eight Megabytes And Constantly Swapping

[nitehawk214]

I'll forgive all you VI users. After all we'll be in the same rest home some day. IDE users though will feel my cane of righteousness upon their heads.

Why is it that Emacs fans assume anyone that hates Emacs must be a fan of VI? I hate them both equally for different reasons, and I can imagine many people do.

In the war between Emacs and Vi there are no winners. Only losers.

Re:Eight Megabytes And Constantly Swapping

[greed]

Heh; I build a lot of software from scratch for developers, so that includes both Emacs and VI(mproved).

Last round, when I found out Vim was now a larger download than XEmacs, felt just so... wrong. Fortunately, that was because XEmacs has most of the packages out-of-line with the main download, so it was really bigger in the end, the Universe was still OK.

(And I switched back to GNUmacs 'cause XEmacs progress seems to be stalled.)

Re:Eight Megabytes And Constantly Swapping

[darkonc]

I would have modded that comment insightful, not funny.

Re:Eight Megabytes And Constantly Swapping

[Just Some Guy]

I agree with everything, but the point of the Emacs server is so that when a program runs $EDITOR, you quickly get a new Emacs window with access to all the buffers you're using in other windows. Say you launch the client to edit an email. You can also copy-and-paste from the program you're editing in another Emacs window, or from a shell session, or from any of the other 1,000 buffers you're using elsewhere.

It only takes 2-3 seconds for me to launch Emacs from a cold start, but the client/server benefits are far more interesting than just that time savings.

Re:Eight Megabytes And Constantly Swapping

[Anonymous Coward]

One of the things that infuriates people who like GUIs is when Cut'n'Paste doesn't work properly in some applications.

LOL Linux.

- Regards, Mac users everywhere.

Re:Eight Megabytes And Constantly Swapping

[Darinbob]

This is because the traditional war was between Emacs and Vi.

Re:Eight Megabytes And Constantly Swapping

[Anonymous Coward]

Why in the wrold would you want to spellhceck a Slashdot post?

Re:Eight Megabytes And Constantly Swapping

[martin-boundary]

I know. Personally, I don't particularly like that aspect because it breaks the mental mapping between editing frames and tasks. I also like the fact that independent processes are more crash proof.

BTW, 2-3 seconds seems a little slow to load. If you start with a plain vanilla invocation, it should load instantly:

emacs -nw --no-site-file -q ;

The graphical version (emacs -Q) does something similar. X resources introduce a small delay, that can be optimized by doing the equivalent setup in elisp.

Re:Eight Megabytes And Constantly Swapping

[jgrahn]

For me, the most dramatic example of the progress of hardware in the intervening years is Emacs.

It used to be regarded as a heavyweight editing environment, comparable in scope and resource requirements to a full programmer's IDE. There was even a special server designed just to allow several editing windows (aka frames) to coexist.

Now, it's so lightweight and fast to load up, my web browser launches a completely independent Emacs for each comment field in a web page, my MUA launches its own Emacs for writing mails, I have multiple independent Emacs processes for editing code, and another for writing LaTeX.

You're right, yet wrong. My first PC was from 1995, and already back then Emacs was a lightweight thing. Now it launches in a fraction of a second; back then it took a second or so. I remember when Emacs was *truly*, Eclipse-style heavy -- it was on aging Sun3 machines around 1991.

I had four megabytes and it was pretty

[AdamHaun]

My 486 only had four megabytes of RAM. I had to reboot and bypass CONFIG.SYS and AUTOEXEC.BAT to run Doom. The reason? My mouse driver took up too much memory. And this was in DOS, where you only had three or four drivers to begin with.

(Before any other old folks ask -- I already had other drivers in upper memory so the mouse driver wouldn't fit there.)

Re:I had four megabytes and it was pretty

[Zarhan]

Doom used a DOS extender. As such, you could pretty much have all your drivers in base memory without any of that UMB mangling.

Ultima VII and the Voodoo Memory Management (http://ultima.wikia.com/wiki/Voodoo_Memory_Manager) on the other hand....required a lots of base memory and you really couldn't run anything like EMM386 reliably. Was...interesting to get Ultima VII working with 2MBs of RAM.

Re:I had four megabytes and it was pretty

[Dwedit]

I think the real problem is that CuteMouse hadn't been written yet.
Sometimes you may have been able to get away with another compatible mouse driver that used less memory.

Re:I had four megabytes and it was pretty

[Anonymous Coward]

I'm still running a Compaq 944CDS, although I've bumped the RAM up and extended the 1/2G hard drive space with an ISA EIDE card and a 60G hdd. By far the most durable machine I've ever owned, but limited for usingmost modern software.

Re:I had four megabytes and it was pretty

[eharvill]

If my memory isn't completely failing me, you could actually free up more usable RAM by loading the various drivers up in different orders. I think when some drivers loaded their memory usage initially expand and then contract. It seems like it was always best to load CDROM driver first, then sound, mouse and whatever else.

Again, it's been almost 20 years, so I could be full of crap. ;-)

Re:I had four megabytes and it was pretty

[khr]

Ah, the memories... In the mid-90's I did tech support for a DOS-based utility software company. Most of my workdays were spent on the phone helping customers configure their config.sys and autoexec.bat files to optimize memory usage. Days upon days of customers reading them to me line-by-line while I told them what to type to make changes...

Re:I had four megabytes and it was pretty

[Billly Gates]

Both your post as wella s AdamHaun's is how I became a MS hater, hence my name (this is an old account from 1999).

DOS SUCKED. Why on Earth would I need to run a config.sys and an Autoexec.bat for 25k a of ram when my PC had 8 megs??

Worse I did this to run Doom then Dune 2 or Masters of Orion would whine about needing expanding memory, not extended. It is all the same ram so why the stupid naming and virtual partitioning? My friends at school informed me it was because of the 1978 limits of the 8086. ... hello this is 1994 some 15 years later.

Memaker in Dos 6.2 was just a hack.

I wanted a Mac BAD back then and saved for one. Then I discovered NT 4.0 and switched. I was happy to leave Windows 95 after only 1 year and switch to a real operating system without the baggage. NT 4 reaked I know, but running DOS or hiding it in a gui via Windows 95 was unacceptable in 1995 and I discovered Linux later. I do not care about office workers or those who thought DOS WAS DA BOMB because it was so hard to use. Therefore, it had to be awesome and I am better than you because I do not use a mouse.

I do not miss those old days at all.

Re:I had four megabytes and it was pretty

[Nimey]

I did this too back when my 486SX with 4MB ran DOS 5.0. Then I upgraded to DOS 6.x and learnt how to use the config.sys configuration menus, which made loading games a breeze - you'd set up a configuration and put some if statements into autoexec.bat, and you'd launch your game straight from the boot menu with an optimal configuration.

It required a bit of manual work, since memmaker wasn't smart enough to understand the config menus - you'd have to create scratch config.sys and autoexec.bat files configured specifically for that game (or games with similar requirements, anyway) then run memmaker and paste the results into your main files.

Sticking your mouse driver in upper memory probably wouldn't have helped anyway on a 4MB system. Doom really wanted all of that 4MB and it used a DOS extender so all its memory was a flat space. If you had 8MB you could have loaded the mouse driver into conventional memory and Doom wouldn't have cared.

Re:I had four megabytes and it was pretty

[Nimey]

Yeah, I couldn't believe how bloated and unoptimized some of those vintage mouse drivers were. Good TSRs and drivers back then would claim a certain amount of space when they started up (initialization and displaying a splash, mainly) and then give back a predictable and contiguous chunk of that once it was only the resident stuff that needed to stay in memory, rather than always claiming the ~25kb.

This could confuse the hell out of early memory managers, though; IIRC QEMM and 386max were especially good about dealing with those.

Re:I had four megabytes and it was pretty

[dabblah]

Ah, but did you have the config.sys with the menu and autoexec.bat set to do almost nothing so that you could run the customized batch program to load whatever you wanted customized for the particular game?

Actually, neither did I but my gamer/CS major roommate did, and I was adept enough that I helped him debug those from time to time... He had the original Pentium chip with the on chip error and 8 MB of ram. I seem to remember it took a little while to get Dark Forces working on that.

Those were the days. I actually spanned that article by having a 486dx (dx=with math co-processor on chip if I remember properly, sx was without) which I upgraded from 4 MB to 16 MB ram. I ran OS2 warp on that thing...And then my next computer was the Pentium Pro 180 oced to 225 as per Tom's hardware guide back when it was just Tom, with the then revolutionary 6mb Canopus 3d card.

Re:I had four megabytes and it was pretty

[CharlyFoxtrot]

As an Amiga user I used to laugh at stories like that from DOS users. Of course I didn't get the last laugh.

Re:I had four megabytes and it was pretty

[AdamHaun]

I was familiar with the CONFIG.SYS menus, but my parents wouldn't let me do anything to complicate the startup process (they had to use it too). I might have put in one with a short timeout eventually.

Re:I had four megabytes and it was pretty

[DocSavage64109]

Ha! I had 3 copies of doom playing multiplayer with each other through windows 95 on my 4 megs of ram. Granted, it was kind of slow...

Too bad software didn't follow.

[Anonymous Coward]

It's amasing how the hardware guys just keep making faster, bigger and cheaper machines, and we software guys write more kludgier, more bloated, more slower software, that fucks up all their efforts. ( The biggest villain in all of this -- Microsoft, Adobe ). Yers we've added some ( more colors--though less resolution ) but not enough to compensated for the extra demands on hardware.

Maybe with more emphasis on llllllllsmartphones, netbooks and tablets which provide less resources, we will have to clean up our act. THough I really doubt MS will.

Internet, Software and Hardware

[Xolve]

Internet connection was an `option' which is not anymore these days. Also programs (OS and applications) are more seamless when you compare it with the '95 computers. Obviously in terms of CPU, RAM and storage its light years worth of leap.

Re:Internet, Software and Hardware

[martin-boundary]

Internet connection was an `option' which is not anymore these days.

Heh. The other day, I helped a friend set up his new USB wireless modem on his laptop. When he plugged it in, the ISP's app loaded automatically but Windows 7 couldn't recognize the hardware, and brought up a window to search for a driver on the internet, ...

Re:Internet, Software and Hardware

[dzfoo]

Ah... 1995. I remember back then talking to my girlfriend (now wife) about how things "used to be back in the day."

One of the things I noted even then was the reliance on the Internet. I recall stating something like, "back in the 80s, I could spend an entire stretch of days at a time, stuck in my room writing stupid home-brewed programs in my Commodore 64, with very little sleep; I could always find something to do with that little machine without any network connectivity or external communications. Nowadays, I sit at my computer desk, and if the 'Net is down, can't check my e-mail, can't use my browser, can't log into the BBS... it's useless, and I turn the fucker off."

Today, if my cable-modem connection goes down, I just grab my iPad and play Bejeweled or some other game, watch a movie, or catch up on my reading.

My, how times change.

It is not that I've grown less reliant on my Internet connection. I think it's just that modern machines are much more pleasant to use for many other use cases.

You see, in the 80s I was discovering computers and every silly "GOTO 10" statement was an adventure. In the 90s, I was exploring the vast frontiers of the Internet, and while using a PC was a fscking pain, I endured it for the value of the network and communications.

Now, the device is not a pain to use, and I use it for many other things than just exploring the Internet or communicating with others. This is the actual progress of our technologies: Convivial machines to fit human lifestyles.

It is amazing what we have now. I truly feel like I live in The Future.

            -dZ.

1995 computers were better for flight sims

[GoodNewsJimDotCom]

I'm saying this not because the power was so good, but because nothing compares to Red Baron, Secret Weapons of the Luftwaffe, and Xwing. EA/Bioware could have scored big with SWTOR by using Xwing vs TieFighter style combat in an MMO context where you can upgrade your ship. Instead the space combat is a gimmick and the game is barely an MMO with so few people on each server.

What if they brought back Stunt Island as Stunt Island 2? Allow people to autoshare videos on Youtube. Allow people to share/rate missions like they do on Little Big Planet. Have multiplayer with watchers/chatters. Have car racing too if you want to go all out.

Maybe I'm not in the mix anymore, but when I played some modern flight sims they showed an out of cockpit view and you just flew around using the mouse. Maybe someone could point me to where the good competitive gaming flight sims are that I am not aware of?

Another thing we're missing from the early/mid 90s is adventure games, but I don't miss them any further than I can get without the blue key.

Re:1995 computers were better for flight sims

[martin-boundary]

A nice one from that era I liked was Descent

Re:1995 computers were better for flight sims

[MacGyver2210]

Xwing vs TieFighter style combat in an MMO context where you can upgrade your ship.

Welcome to EVE Online.

Re:1995 computers were better for flight sims

[Anonymous Coward]

I'm not aware of any modern flight sims that default to an out of cockpit view. Lots of arcade-y Air Combat Games, but not flight sims. Red Baron's campaign was neat, but try Rise of Flight for your WWI fix. Try the Wings of Power or IL-2 Sturmovik games for WWII. And for Cold War era fighters, I'm partial to Falcon 4.0 Allied Force.

There aren't as many adventure games as there used to be, but there are still some. Telltale has the Sam and Max and Monkey Island series, for instance.

Re:1995 computers were better for flight sims

[nedlohs]

That has nothing at all similar to Xwing vs TieFighter style combat.

Re:1995 computers were better for flight sims

[Mr0bvious]

Indeed - Descent was certainly one of my favourites - 3 degrees of freedom and just felt good.

Re:1995 computers were better for flight sims

[Anonymous Coward]

I've tried EVE, but unless they changed things recently combat was the standard MMO "select enemy, automatically attack, periodically use special attacks or items, move on to next enemy", instead of any actual dog-fighting.

Re:1995 computers were better for flight sims

[RogueyWon]

We're not missing adventure games at all. Telltale and others do a good line on them; on PC, 360, PS3 and iOS (and sometimes Wii, though that seems to have fallen out of favour). Avoid Jurassic Park (which isn't a proper adventure game, just a dire sequence of quick time events) and the rest range from the passable (Wallace & Grommit) to the really quite good (the Monkey Island reboot). They don't tend to get boxed releases, but they're still there.

I do miss the flight sims - particularly the space variants - however. And as somebody else has already posted, a new Descent would be absolutely fantastic - not least since the control issues have been comprehensively sorted by the passage of time. With a bit of configuration I managed to get Descent 3 using my 360-controller-for-Windows and it was far and away the best way I'd ever found of controlling a Descent game; far better than all of the old finger-breaking configurations we tried to use back in the 90s.

Re:1995 computers were better for flight sims

[Anonymous Coward]

Have a look at Flightgear as far as good simulation is concerned or on the commercial side stop to FS2004 (V9) and have a look at ivao.aero, war is no more done with pilots on board nowadays,and don't know how long you will find one o a commercial flight, the golden age of flight has ended, if U want to competitive sim, buy a uav and drive it wit a cell phone you can make as real as u want it's quiete ceap these days.

Re:1995 computers were better for flight sims

[jank1887]

agree on the flight sims. I have 3 decents joysticks / flightsticks that have been collecting dust for ~10 years because PCs don't have gameports and I can't bear to toss them. Of course, I don't have time to play with them anymore even if they did work, but it's the principle of the thing.

Re:1995 computers were better for flight sims

[Lonewolf666]

That's correct but incomplete. Weapons loadout, range and transversal speed relative to enemy (or speed in general when missiles were involved) are also are important. That makes for a lot of tactical variants.

Overall, EVE is not like a flight sim, but more like Homeworld where each ship is controlled by a different player.

Re:1995 computers were better for flight sims

[Nimey]

Are you kidding? IL-2: Forgotten Battles destroyed any flight sim that came before it, and DCS: A-10C Warthog is an amazingly detailed study sim.

Re:1995 computers were better for flight sims

[Anonymous Coward]

I dunno if I agree with that. I tried to go back and play Red Baron again, and I found it totally unplayable. The trouble was seeing distant objects. It's hard to get into a game where your rival planes are 1 pixel unless you're right on top of them.

Wings of Prey is pretty fun for a hybrid arcade/realistic WW2 shooter. I appreciate the fact that most battles make you take a 4 minute climb to start out the battle. Plus the expansion "Secret weapons of the Luftwaffe" can be played co-op with a friend (Provided you can get their god-forsaken multiplayer app to work....)

For the hardcore, and I mean the deeply hardcore, there's always IL-2 Sturmovik. Nothing is deeper than that, sim wise.

That said, I deeply long for the day there is a stunt island followup. I spent many many hours designing and making movies with that system. I've still got the original box, manual (that sucker is huge!) and 6 floppy disks.

"You have, lacerated flanigal, a fractured pelvis, and a hangnail.... we'll have you patched up and flying again... tomorrow!"

Re:1995 computers were better for flight sims

[phoenix_rizzen]

I really miss the games from the DOS/Win9x era. That was the heyday of turn-based RPGs, flight/space combat games that weren't physics simulators, and racing games that weren't driving simulators.

Nowadays, everything is a simulator without any "fun" or "arcade"-ness to them. And every new game is a rehash of a FPS from last year.

Bring back the X-wing, TIE Fighter, Wing Commander, Secret Weapons series of games; the turn-based RPGs like the Forgotten Realms/DragonLance DnD games; the older Need for Speed games. Games that weren't near-perfect recreations of real-world physics and damage, and that were fun to play without ever taking your finger off the throttle.

Re:1995 computers were better for flight sims

[Fned]

EA/Bioware could have scored big with SWTOR by using Xwing vs TieFighter style combat in an MMO context where you can upgrade your ship.

Yeah, if Sony didn't patent that idea or some retarded shit.

Back in my Day

[mattydont]

I got my First computer when i was 8 in 97, i think my family paid about $2000AUD for it, being a 200mhz pentium with mmx, 32mb RAM, 2gb HDD 2mb S3 Video creative labs sound card, 17in CRT monitor and windows 95 PLUS!!! that thing lasted for about 5 or so years before it finally died from sea air causing rust. Used to play Age of empires and everything for years never had to update it to play a game, hell it even played MW3 (Mechwarrior 3), You never forget your first....

Re:Back in my Day

[Kell Bengal]

Wow. I had the almost exactly the same system in 1997 - same processor and video card, even (but with a 15" monitor). I paid A$2015 for it. For years I'd been using my dad's computer, using it for games and school... but this one was finally mine. I loved it with all the care and affection that a 1960s teenager loved his car. It was my generation's hot-rod. I upgraded it and tweaked it until it purred; first a new 17 gb hard drive, then more ram, then a Voodoo 2, then a modem to play MW2:Mercs with. I borked the OS so many times and reinstalled Windows so many times I'd memorised the cd-key. I didn't really think about it when I upgraded the motherboard and then needed a bigger case - I just moved on. Now I think back to that first beige box and I realise I had some of the best times of my life stuck behind that clunky monitor.

Salut, old friend, whereever your bits may be.

Three orders of magnitude

[FrankSchwab]

8 MB then, 8 GB now
1 GB then, 1 TB now
33 MHz then, 3 GHz quad-core now
0.0288 mbps internet then, 1-10 mbps now (only two orders)
600 MB CD-ROM then, 45 GB BluRay now (only two orders)
1.4 MB floppy then, 16 GB Flash drive now (four)

Price: (not in TFA): Probably $2500 then, around $750 today.

And yet, I'm betting that the 1995 machine boots faster than the 2012 machine...

Re:Three orders of magnitude

[Daniel Dvorkin]

Yep. And if you go with the informal version of Moore's law, "X doubles every year and a half" where X is just about any measure of computer capability, we're still almost on track. 2^10 = 1024, as /.er should know by heart; strictly speaking, this should mean about a thousandfold improvement between 1995 and 2010 rather than 2012, but everything you list was available two years ago, if at a somewhat higher price. And yes, X may just as well be boot time as RAM or processing power. ;)

Re:Three orders of magnitude

[drunkennewfiemidget]

On what planet? The computer in my house that takes the longest to boot is my wife's Intel Atom. It goes from power button to useable in 30s.

My laptop is an i3, it goes from power button to useable in ~11s.

Re:Three orders of magnitude

[six025]

And yet, I'm betting that the 1995 machine boots faster than the 2012 machine...

For the average PC / Mac user, sure, but not with SSD for the system disk. Consistent boot times of about 15 seconds here on a 2011 MBP.

Peace,
Andy.

Re:Three orders of magnitude

[spire3661]

32 GB flash drives are now pretty common and at roughly the same $/GB as 16 GB units . In the last month i have bought a 32 GB micro SD, and (2) 32 GB flash drives all at or below $1/GB. 64 GB and 128 GB units are also already available at retail., just not as common and the pricing scales fast.

Re:Three orders of magnitude

[JWSmythe]

    Well...

    I just built out a 4 Ghz 8 core machine with 16GB RAM and a pair of 1.5TB drives for right about $600.

    I recall back in '91 my 486DX/33 with 4MB RAM cost somewhere in the ballpark of what you cited ($2,500).

    Boot times are relative. My Linux machine with everything I don't need removed boots faster than the 486 with DOS, Desqview, and a fairly dirty config.sys and autoexec.bat. :) You can make anything boot slow if you try hard enough.

Re:Three orders of magnitude

[vrt3]

1024x768 then (IIRC), 1920x1280 now (from 0.78 megapixels to 2.46 megapixels, not even one order of magnitude!)

Re:Three orders of magnitude

[Anonymous Coward]

My standard is always that for many years it was $1,200 for 32 meg of ram. You can now get 32 gig for a quarter of that. People complain that computers are too expensive and I say are you crazy! Your iPhone has a 100X the power of my first computer and that was 25 years ago. I used to spend $1,200 to $4,500 for a computer which would buy you enough iPads for the whole family.

Re:Three orders of magnitude

[Anonymous Coward]

My Commodore 64 out of the stoneage, goes from powerbutton to useable in ~ 0.8 Seconds.

Re:Three orders of magnitude

[jovius]

Lossless Red Book Audio 1411 kbit/s then, 256 kbit/s lossy mp3/aac/etc now...

Re:Three orders of magnitude

[Robert Zenz]

And yet, I'm betting that the 1995 machine boots faster than the 2012 machine...

That depends on the OS and hardware. Linux+SSD is 4 seconds to GDM (don't you dare say something!). Though, the Windows XP on the 2TB Western Digital is also fast with around 20 seconds to Desktop...there's only Steam installed, though.

Re:Three orders of magnitude

[Jello B.]

Oh please, don't compare bit rates between codecs. That's just silly.

Re:Three orders of magnitude

[Asic Eng]

Also these days I use suspend rather than shutting down. In 1995 I couldn't do this on a desktop, but now Linux supports this very well. I use a master/slave power strip, so monitor, loudspeaker etc are switched on automatically when I press the button on the PC. Just takes a few seconds for me to log in - with a few hundred browser tabs open right were I left them.

Re:Three orders of magnitude

[L4t3r4lu5]

I posted this further up (risking "redundant") yet it's pertinent here too.

I fished out a Toshiba T1910 "laptop" from a cupboard a while ago, and it still boots. 4MB RAM, 486SX 25MHz CPU, 200MB HDD, Windows 3.11. Time to zero post-boot HDD activity is 51 seconds, including a 3 second memory test.

My Android phone takes over a minute to prompt me for my SIM PIN.

Re:Three orders of magnitude

[Tuan121]

And yet, I'm betting that the 1995 machine boots faster than the 2012 machine...

1) perhaps because you are still using an ancient hard drive from 1995, try these new things called SSD's for your boot drive...
2) it's interesting that out of all the performance measures of a computer you chose "boot speed" to be the end-all performance factor.... nice job mom

Re:Three orders of magnitude

[Dogtanian]

1 GB then, 1 TB now
33 MHz then, 3 GHz quad-core now

Notably though, most of the progress in these two occurred closer to 1995 than the present day. In particular, during the 90s and early 2000s, hard drive capacities were expanding at a high exponential rate. (I mean, two years before the 1GB figure in this article I was considering a 120 MB drive for my Amiga. Three years after 1995, the 3.2GB drive my new PC had was on the small side of "average", four years after *that* (2002) my next PC had an 80GB drive).

Nowadays? 1TB drives have been within the affordable range for around 4 years now, and even before last year's floods things had slowed down around 2TB with that only recently becoming normal, 3TB taking a long time to arrive and we *finally* got 4TB at the very high end.

Processor performance admittedly can't be judged by clock speed alone, plus we have more cores, but the latter doesn't provide the easy "free lunch" performance boost that previous improvements did.

The 1.44MB HD floppy actually came out in 1987 as an improvement to the original 1982 3.5" DD floppy. The Zip disc came out circa 1994-95, and was closer to what one would have expected a floppy to be by then, but while successful never replaced the 3.5" as a de facto "in every computer" standard. In fact, it wasn't truly displaced until pen drives got "no brainer" cheap a few years back, so it's a technology that stuck around well after it would otherwise have been superseded or obsolete.

Re:Three orders of magnitude

[Anonymous Coward]

On Ubuntu Lucid Lynx here, on a laptop that's a couple of years old, spinning hard drive, it takes around 40 seconds from power button to booted up and firefox open.

Re:Three orders of magnitude

[nitehawk214]

My Commodore 64 out of the stoneage, goes from powerbutton to useable in ~ 0.8 Seconds.

For certain values of usable.

Re:Three orders of magnitude

[Anonymous Coward]

My thinkpad T61 (now 4 years old, but I bought it used) boots Fedora 16 off a cheap 60gb SSD drive in about 7 seconds. The only computer I ever owned that booted faster was my old Atari 800XL, but it booted to a BASIC prompt, not a login screen for a full multi-user 64 bit Unix operating system.

Re:Three orders of magnitude

[Anonymous Coward]

My asus mobo can boot to a mini OS thats embedded in the bios, the same way your c64 boots from ROM. It takes about 2 seconds to do so.

Now compare booting windows 7 or ubuntu to booting GEOS ;) I'll even let you have a 20 meg hdd for your commie.

Re:Three orders of magnitude

[avandesande]

If you are talking about Windows 95, it booted fast and often! :-)

Re:Three orders of magnitude

[Tastecicles]

Yes, my 1993 gaming rig that I bought before Win95 came out (and subsequently upgraded to Win95 when it did eventually come out in 1996!) wipes the floor with my 2011 dual core Win7 laptop.

Re:Three orders of magnitude

[Tastecicles]

on the same timescale as the Zip/Jaz drives, I still have a functioning IDE LS120 that I bought in 1997. For those who don't know what the hell an LS120 is, it's an optical drive similar to the Zip in that it uses two heads for read/write - one for the LS120 disc which has a 120MB unformatted capacity, and one for the physically similar 3.5" 1.44MB DSHD floppy, so you could use either disc in the same drive, and fortunately for us who still use LS120, used the 40-pin IDE bus rather than the now deprecated 32-pin floppy bus. Zip and Jaz are proprietary devices using proprietary formats on proprietary discs, that are completely incompatible with anything else. And the drives were frankly, unreliable.

Re:Three orders of magnitude

[Anonymous Coward]

The problem slowing boot time down is just that OSes like win and osx are gettig heavier. My dual core 1.6 ghz Arch Linux machine will boot in about 15 seconds whereas a brand new quad core 2.6 ghz 4 gig ram computer takes close to 2 min to fully boot windows 7.

Still using a CD/DVD player?

[wvmarle]

I noted the article still thinks a CD/DVD/BluRay player is normal. Aren't they obsolete already?

It's been five years or more since I had a working DVD player in any of my PCs. Except my iBook which has one built in, and that's also some six years old now, and the DVD player in it has barely been used in that time.

I used to burn CDs with photos and so - still have some, from many years ago, and really should copy them to a USB stick or so before I really don't have a CD drive any more. I used to burn CDs for Linux installation; now that's done from USB stick. I used to burn CDs as archive as my hard disk got full. Modern hard disks are so big, they don't fill up. And if they do, the capacity of a CD-R or even DVD-R doesn't do much to solve that problem. A bigger hard disk is the only reasonable solution.

And monitor - well I still use 15". It's good enough, and my desk isn't that big. Those also didn't come down in price as drastically as the other components did.

What I also noticed is that in the US just 85% of adults have a mobile phone, and 90% live in a household with at least one mobile phone. I think that's a really low number. Where I live there's close to a 200% (yes, that's two phones per person, not only per adult - many people have indeed multiple mobile numbers, and many are used by regular visitors) penetration of mobile phones.

Re:Still using a CD/DVD player?

[Anonymous Coward]

DVD players are still useful for ripping Netflix/Redbox movies.

Re:Still using a CD/DVD player?

[flimflammer]

I use one on a daily basis. Sure some people have phased them out or use them little, but I would never own a machine without one form of optical media.

Re:Still using a CD/DVD player?

[Anonymous Coward]

I use one on a daily basis. Sure some people have phased them out or use them little, but I would never own a machine without one form of optical media.

..... never?

Re:Still using a CD/DVD player?

[Anonymous Coward]

Yes, CD/DVD/BluRay is normal. It wasn't until a year or so ago that writable BluRay drives were available for a relatively inexpensive price for desktops. I use them to backup pictures, downloaded songs, personal files, etc. for offsite storage at my sister's place. I also back these up to an external hard-drive. Yes, I could use a cloud service such as Carbonite, but I just don't trust them to keep my data safe from hackers, etc.

US and Canada has a lower penetration of mobile phone usage because it is expensive to extend coverage into low population density areas due to how vast the countries are. Thus, coverage is very good along both coasts of the US, but hit and miss in between. Europe has a much higher cell phone use due to a much larger density of population throughout much smaller countries. I'm willing to bet that you can go just about anywhere in Europe and get a cell signal. However, I can't get a signal in my apartment, in the Boston area, unless I am next to my patio door.

Re:Still using a CD/DVD player?

[Anonymous Coward]

For a desktop computer, an optical drive is normal. Usually a DVD, instead of a BluRay drive; DVD drives can be had, retail, for under $20. It doesn't cost much to put one in the system, and anyone who actually goes into a store and buys software is going to need an optical drive to install it. A lot of laptops still have optical drives, too.

I still burn CDs and DVDs - my car, and my parents' car, will both play CDs of MP3s. I find it irritating they won't handle DVDs of MP3s, but hey. These are base-model stereos in reasonably new cars. I burn DVDs because frankly, if I want to watch a video file on the big TV it's easier to burn a video DVD than try to figure out what formats the Xbox 360 can play and how to get it onto a drive it can read, since for some dumb reason the 360 can't read NTFS, so no big movie files. (I don't have networking in the living room.)

And while I certainly don't back up my entire hard drive to optical disc, I do burn periodic backups of the actual important stuff - emails, documents, stuff I can't just redownload or reinstall. Yes, I have an automated backup to a network storage, but that's still on-site. My sister and I mail each other backup discs to store for each other, so if we lose ALL our crapola we can still get important data back.

Re:Still using a CD/DVD player?

[flimflammer]

...when they're still relevant, no.

Re:Still using a CD/DVD player?

[thegarbz]

I noted the article still thinks a CD/DVD/BluRay player is normal. Aren't they obsolete already?

Obsolete implies useless or completely not needed. While I myself haven't used a CD/DVD in my computer for a while I guarantee last time I formatted the thing there was a Windows CD in there. Sure there are alternatives out there. The ability to put the install of Windows or Linux on a USB stick doesn't change the fact that the number one distribution method for an OS is still on optical media.

Also I only just bought a Bluray player to stick in my media centre.

Rarely used perhaps, but for the most part many people are still dependant on it. Even if you buy certain common laptops these days the first thing it asks you to do when you power it on is insert some blank media so it can make a recovery image.

This hardly can be considered "obsolete".

Re:Still using a CD/DVD player?

[wvmarle]

Basically you have to include a CD burner for the one time you have to make a recovery disk.

Something that, for most laptops, should indeed be just that one time. Or maybe one or two times more just to restore your OS. A bit expensive, don't you think? And all that extra weight you have to lug around...

I'm still wondering what it is about Windows that it still can not use a USB thumb drive for that, like all Linux distributions do. Or why that software is still not sold over the Internet (and then I mean as download - not as mail order).

Re:Still using a CD/DVD player?

[rhook]

My Thinkpad gives you the option to put the recovery image onto a bootable USB drive. But still, having the option to put it onto a physical disc that is not likely to get over-written (and is a fraction of the cost) is a nice option to have. I can put the recovery discs into the box the laptop shipped in and store it in the closet. I also replaced the optical drive with the untrabay drive caddy, stuck the stock hard drive in there and stuck an SSD into the drive bay.

Re:Still using a CD/DVD player?

[RogueyWon]

I have a BD-RW drive and a DVD-RW drive in my current PC (the latter because I prefer to use a cheaper drive for "everyday" tasks). I don't actually use either of them all that much (Steam saw to that), but I'm not quite ready to go without them yet. I still have a few old games on CD/DVD that I revisit from time to time. Plus the BD-RW drive is a pretty convenient means of quickly backing up low-priority stuff - 20 minutes to shift 24 gigs of data to something that goes in a little slot in a CD wallet. Pity about the media prices, though.

Re:Still using a CD/DVD player?

[thegarbz]

Yep, I never said it had to make sense, just that the drives aren't obsolete due to the retarded single use scenarios we have for them.

Honestly other than the bluray in my media centre as an example we have 1 dvd drive shared between 5 computers. It gets put in any computer which desperately needs it. It probably gets used about once every 3 months.

Re:Still using a CD/DVD player?

[petermgreen]

I noted the article still thinks a CD/DVD/BluRay player is normal. Aren't they obsolete already?

Not really. They are still the primary way to install most commercial software (including windows itself) and they are still the cheapest option if you want to hand someone some data without any hope of getting your media back.

The only off the shelf machines i've seen without an optical drive are ultraportable laptops and some ultra-small form factor desktops.

Re:Still using a CD/DVD player?

[Anonymous Coward]

I had a small Thinkpad without optical drive, and originally worried about this. But after getting a portable USB optical drive, I found that I very rarely take it off the shelf to use it. However, it has allowed me to get all future machines without optical drives, since I had the security of knowing I could use this USB drive if I needed it.

The only exception was my most recent Thinkpad, which seemed impossible to order without an optical drive, and for which the "travel blank" (a cover to fill an empty optical drive bay) no longer seems readily available. I wish I had the travel blank, so I could remove the internal optical drive.

Re:Still using a CD/DVD player?

[blahplusplus]

"Aren't they obsolete already?"

Optical discs are still widely used for backups. Hard drives aren't perfect and if you do any serious work you want multiple copies on varied media.

Re:Still using a CD/DVD player?

[toddestan]

Optical drives are still useful for watching movies, which I do use it for as my computer monitors are better than my TV. Also useful for ripping said movies, and ripping CDs. Also used for burning CDs to listen to in my car has a CD player. Sometimes used for booting live CDs to do things like imaging hard drives and installing OSes. I don't use it a lot in my desktop, but I would miss it if it was gone. At $20 for a DVD burner, why not have one? I don't plan on buying Blu-ray though - a waste of money as far as I'm concerned. My laptop has an optical drive, thought in that case I'm kind of indifferent as to whether or not its eventual replacement will have an optical drive.

DOS startup menus

[MrEricSir]

Doom was a lot easier to run than games that used earlier DOS extenders.

Remember Zone 66? Just to run Zone 66's crazy DOS extender I had to use a config.sys menu to boot into a separate configuration that only loaded my sound driver but not the memory manager. Total pain to set up.

Re:DOS startup menus

[Nimey]

I do remember Zone 66! It was technically amazing for its day - fast and written entirely in 386 assembly, but finicky: if you didn't have the machine set up just so it'd crash.

Re:DOS startup menus

[Anonymous Coward]

Pharr Lapp was the man! I remember the first time I got to use that memory manager, it was like using a different computer.

1995 computers were worse for real flight sims

[Anonymous Coward]

As someone who deals with a FRASCA flight simulator from the mid 90s, a brand new Alsim and a bunch of others, I can confidently say the computer running the FRASCA from mid nineties is the biggest piece of shit I've ever seen.

Linux and Virtualization on a Mac 18 years ago

[monzie]

I was 14 years old in 1994
I had a Macintosh LC 475 back then. It had a 25 Mhz Motorola 68040 CPU and had come pre-installed with Microsoft Virtual PC for the Mac which emulated x86 architecture on the Motorola 68040.
A magazine called PCQuest ( It was a geek-focussed magazine then; it's a CIO-focussed magazine now ) came out with Slackware on the CD. ( I cannot remember the version)
I managed to installed Linux as a VM on my Mac 18 years ago using this. ( That's a link to my blog post with more details as to how I did it )
Of course I did not know what Virtualization was. I did not have an internet connection even!
It took me a year to get X running - just by reading the man pages and configuring modelines and hsync and vsync values
My proudest moment was when I wrote my own man page using nroff ( IIRC ) and it showed me bold fonts in a terminal. I did not know even know what a terminal was, except that Jeff Goldblum destroyed the Aliens by uploading a computer virus through it ( Movie: Independence Day ) I am nostalgic

Re:Linux and Virtualization on a Mac 18 years ago

[SpooForBrains]

Thats LJ post was a good read. It's nostalgic for me because in 95 my family moved out to India and although we left most of our western gadgets behind (no CD player, TV, VCR etc for us) we DID take my Macintosh LCIII. To have that computer when everyone else had what I'm guessing were 386 or 486 PCs (and most didn't have a PC at all) was pretty awesome.

Of course, we never got a phone line, not wanting to go through the whole find-the-right-person-to-bribe, pay-lots-and-lots-of-money process required to get one, so I never got to go on the internet. I just had to settle for copies of MacFormat and the cover disks that came with, sent out from the UK, and what software I'd been able to pirate before I left.

You do seem to have got your memories a bit confused, though, since your LJ posts states that it wasn't the LC475 that came with VirtualPC, it was the PowerMac you bought later.

Re:Linux and Virtualization on a Mac 18 years ago

[soupforare]

I loved the *hardware* co-processing that was available. There were radius rocket boards that could operate as either a straight upgrade or you could run multiple OSes, on multiple cards, on the same machine. The IIe card was a fully expanded IIe on a board that could use II family disks and peripherals. I seem to recall both Apple branded and third party (OrangePC?) x86 SBCs to allow for running PC stuff too. Neat stuff.

Re:Linux and Virtualization on a Mac 18 years ago

[Anonymous Coward]

No way was that Connectix (now Microsoft) VirtualPC for Mac (now Windows only.) It probably would have been SoftPC, which was even slower and made by some company (not Connectix) I can't remember. SoftPC became SoftWindows and competed with VirtualPC for a while before dying out.

Re:Linux and Virtualization on a Mac 18 years ago

[Billly Gates]

It was not a virtualization and Virtual PC did not exist for another 10 years. You maybe thinking about Softwindows which was coming of age. A PowerPC which would be 3x as powerfull emulating DOS at 80 mhz ran at the speed of a 386sx 25 mhz. Windows 3.11 was SLLOOWW and most people used it for DOS apps. I would not use that for daily work as it was 20x slower compared to native apps as they were emulated interpretted line by line and not virtualized like today

Re:Linux and Virtualization on a Mac 18 years ago

[Anonymous Coward]

in 1994 [...] a Macintosh LC 475 [...] had come pre-installed with Microsoft Virtual PC for the Mac

Microsoft bought Virtual PC from Connectix. According to Wikipedia, that happened in 2003. In fact, according to the same Wikipedia page, Connectix did not release its first version of Virtual PC until June 1997.

Perhaps you mean SoftPC?

Re:Linux and Virtualization on a Mac 18 years ago

[hendrikboom]

Did something change? The link that's supposed to go to your blog post seems to point right back to this article on slashdot instead.

Re:Linux and Virtualization on a Mac 18 years ago

[monzie]

Link Update: this is correct entry to the blog post

Re:Linux and Virtualization on a Mac 18 years ago

[monzie]

my bad - this is the correct link

Re:Linux and Virtualization on a Mac 18 years ago

[hendrikboom]

Thanks. Good memoir. Now I wonder how the *other* commentators here found the link before you clued us in.

Cute article, but a little bit inaccurate.

[BeShaMo]

33 mhz would have been low end back then, 66 mhz or 120 probably more likely in a new computer (in Late 1995 I got a pretty beefy 150mhz Pentium). While 4ghz is probably very high end by today's standard (people tend to get more cores rather than more hz). Soundcard, not many people get a high end soundcard like the one listed, the real equivalent to the SB 16 is probably the onboard sound cards. A highend Adlib soundcanvas or Roland could probably stand up to today's highend cards in terms of sound quality, although pricewise, highend cards are more affordable today.

Re:Cute article, but a little bit inaccurate.

[jampola]

You're spot on about today's Sound Cards. I still have a plethora of sound cards some 10 or 12 years old that leave today's sound cards for dead. My digidesign 001 interface which I got in 2000 (best excuse for a personal loan EVER!) still leaves pretty much any consumer grade sound card from today for dead, at least in terms of snr.

Re:Cute article, but a little bit inaccurate.

[Billly Gates]

People still used 386s mostly. Sure NEW ones on sale maybe but my 486 DX2 in late 1994 was FAST and top of the line. Most desktops sold then were 486 SX 25 mhz because they were cheaper and more in line with people's budgets. I got a 166 mhz pentium for a graduation present in june 1996 and it was the fast thing out there at the time. It was workstation grade to run NT 4

It did, it just followed too closely.

[tlambert]

Software followed hardware closely enough to soak up all the advances in compute power, and sometimes and then some.

Kirk McKusick likes to say "the number of MIPS delivered to the keyboard has remained constant since 1978".

The other one I like is "An elephant is a mouse with an operating system", which is a paraphrase of Robert Heinlein putting words into the mouth of his character Lazarus Long.

-- Terry

I'm too young

[Anonymous Coward]

Maybe I'm just too young, but I didn't own my first computer until after 2000(born in 1991). My cousins use to have an Apple II and some Windows 95 computer with "The Oregon Trail". (with one of those weird printers where you had the holes on the sides). I was more curious about the Apple II at the time than the PC though. The green text called to me. This was probably about 1998 or 1997. Oddly enough, they ended up giving the Apple II to me years later (2010), after I had already been programming in C for years. I think I would've been a lot better at programming if they would've given me the Apple II a lot earlier in my life (they never used it anyway because "it was old")

Anyway, first computer was a Gateway. 40G harddrive, 48X CD-ROM. Windows 2000 Profressional. Pentium 3 1.3Ghz. 4 USB 1.0 ports. onboard sound and video. Two COM ports and a parallel port. 2 PCI ports for expansion, and a whopping 256Mb of RAM. I still have it, though it now runs OpenBSD and the original harddrive even still works, though I've lost track of which machine it's in. And also, most intuitive case design I've ever seen in a non-self-built computer. All you had to do to install a harddrive is open the case(they provided a spring loaded lever mechanism for easy opening), slide the harddrive into the case(no need to unplug anything as the slots are facing out to where the case opens), and push down a lever to lock it in place, and finally plug it in. I've been searching for years for a similar case design where the harddrives don't need special rails or screws installed... still haven't found one

Re:I'm too young

[Anonymous Coward]

Tractor feed printer. Still the best way to handle logging of system errors for systems that you really really need to know what's happening on :)

I've still got one in my room, but haven't gotten around to buying a new cartridge for it in 10+ years. Man those things were noisy, but did they ever work well :)

Re:I'm too young

[Urban Garlic]

> Tractor feed printer. Still the best way to handle logging of system errors for systems that you really really need to know what's happening on :)

OT, I suppose, but I have to disagree with part of this. Not the principle, console logging on a separate device is enormously valuable, but the console log recorder should not be a printer.

What you really want is to record the unbuffered serial console output to a file on a separate device. You can use a small but durable secondary computer with a serial port (or USB/serial adapter) running "minicom" in recording mode, or you can buy expensive enterprise gear for this -- we used to have "Cyclades" embedded terminal servers for this, but I don't think they make those anymore.

The reason you want this is that the console output can be quite voluminous -- either because it's done routine operations for a long time, or because it's being DDOS-ed. It's important for the console log to be searchable, and it's nice if it's fast enough to keep up when the server is having a panic attack and dumping kernel-oops stack-traces several times per second.

The major advantage of the printer is that the output is "tamper-evident", and there's a single authoritative master copy -- this is valuable for forensics, but, at least for me, doesn't beat speed and searchability.

When i think back, i am deeply diaspplointed.

[drolli]

When i think back to 1995 i expected a machine/os, which has/uses *lots of cores and bandwidth to ram*, where everything is reasonably multi threaded and where programs can exchange data in a reasonable, transparent way.

Nothing came true. Application still freeze when waiting for sth, a massive CPU still has to be running to do simple background operations, we still exclude Bitmaps is text documents because nothing else works, and my CPU is still waiting for the RAM, even longer than before.

Web applications take the thing to the next level. Some of the Web document processors are less responsive and have less features than Word/Amipro/Describe/Wordperfect in 1995. (not to say its not possible to write good web application, there are some)

Re:When i think back, i am deeply diaspplointed.

[Anonymous Coward]

Many of these challenges would go away if you got rid of Windows. Memory management and scheduling IO wait are light years better on virtually every operating system.

Honestly, computing today is night and day to 1995. The concept of waiting on things to load, on modern systems (4-8GB memory) with SSD drives and OS' that don't lock up during heavy IO... Night and day.

Re:When i think back, i am deeply diaspplointed.

[Billly Gates]

Dude leave XP! XP was made in the 1990s right after the 1995 era and it can lock itself while waiting on one app even though technically it has a premptive multitasking kernel. It is almost in the same era as a 15 year old computer as people did still run Windows 95 when it came out.

  I have not had these issues with Windows 7. You can get a AMD Llano desktop/notebook for $399 with a built in GPU and 8 gigs of ram. Nothing will freeze on that for regular work.

Or you have malware. Probably a real nasty one if it acts this way and you do have a recent computer and a reasonably up to date OS. Download malware bytes and run it in safe mode?

Re:When i think back, i am deeply diaspplointed.

[Anonymous Coward]

Win32.Windows detected!

Delete, quarantine, ignore?

Re:When i think back, i am deeply diaspplointed.

[drolli]

I was more talking about Linux than about windows. and i was talking more about the applications than about the OS. I personally find that XP runs fine, at least if i forget about the limitations on the number GUI objects.

I would hope to run a computer from a battery. And "take the fucking fastest machine and it will be fine" is exactly the approach i expect from perl monkeys.

(To be clear: windows has never been my primary desktop os)

Lessee, 1995

[Greyfox]

I was probably still using a 386 SX/16 with 4mb of RAM. Installed OS/2 on it and it actually worked reasonably well. After a while I installed Linux on it. Early slakware. That also worked reasonably well except it didn't have enough graphics prowess to actually run X11 in VGA. I just used terminal mode. It was fine. Ran slirp for PPP off Florida's gate.net and did a lot of MUDDing.

I eventually upgraded from that system to a dual 486/66 with 16 MB of RAM and an S3 video card. That thing was a beast. Ran X11 great in 1280x1024. Played a lot of Quake on that machine. My phone has now has more processing power than that system did.

Can you imagine if the same happened for cars?

[Anonymous Coward]

If today we had 30000 MPG per gallon cars, now we would look back at the days when they only did 30 MPG.
Of course that is against the laws of physics, but it is mind boggling to compare the progress of computer with other ordinary machines.

Re:Can you imagine if the same happened for cars?

[izomiac]

IMHO, it's more like if we had 30 MPG cars with 20 gallon fuel tanks back then, and now we had 20,000 gallon fuel tanks and cars ran at 0.04 MPG. Efficiency has gone way down as hardware has gotten about three orders of magnitude faster. Sure, in this hypothetical example range is a little better, and engineers wouldn't need to spend as much time tweaking for performance, but... wow...

Comparing todays computer to last weeks

[Anonymous Coward]

This one has more porn on it

Only 24-bit in 1995? We've come a long way.

[danpbrowning]

I love the column on video, where the 1995 columns says "24-bit", and the 2012 column...oh wait, we're still 24-bit. Everything else has advanced by several orders of magnitude, but we're still limited to just 8 bits per color channel (RGB = 24 bits in total) going out over the DVI cable (and the display itself). Sure, now you can drop a few G's on a 10-bit (30 total) monitor (if your software can even make use of it), but it's kind of sad that progress has been so slow.

Re:Only 24-bit in 1995? We've come a long way.

[Lehk228]

More than 8 bits per channel is simply not important for output, internal memory support for HDR matters but there just isn't a need for higher color, especially since things like color tempurature of the display mean no image looks the same unless on a fully calibrated system

Re:Only 24-bit in 1995? We've come a long way.

[deoxyribonucleose]

I love the column on video, where the 1995 columns says "24-bit", and the 2012 column...oh wait, we're still 24-bit. Everything else has advanced by several orders of magnitude, but we're still limited to just 8 bits per color channel (RGB = 24 bits in total) going out over the DVI cable (and the display itself). Sure, now you can drop a few G's on a 10-bit (30 total) monitor (if your software can even make use of it), but it's kind of sad that progress has been so slow.

What's worse, human vision is still limited to about 10 million nuances and can't even take advantage of 24 bits. Time for an upgrade!

Re:Only 24-bit in 1995? We've come a long way.

[Intropy]

You could just pretend it's 128 bit instead. Under normal conditions your eyes can't tell the difference.

Re:Only 24-bit in 1995? We've come a long way.

[Anonymous Coward]

Well, in 1995 using the 24-bit mode meant that you got rid of colour artifacts, but in exchange the system was more sluggish and ate up memory for bitmaps.

The other difference is that in 1995 you could see 24-bit colour on a CRT, but in 2012 most people use a cheap TN panel that only shows 6-bit colour.

Re:Only 24-bit in 1995? We've come a long way.

[wfstanle]

We are still using 24 bits / 32 bits because more would be simply overkill. You see, there is still an old element in the equation, it is the eye! Even an accomplished artist cant see more than 2^24 ( 16,777,216 )colors. The 2^32 ( 4,294,967,296 ) are there simply for the convenience of the graphics card designers. Actually, we probably could get decent graphics using only 2^16 ( 65536 colors )! Until someone updates the our eyes to version 2.0, it simply is not necessary to go over 2^24 colors.

Re:Only 24-bit in 1995? We've come a long way.

[danpbrowning]

What's worse, human vision is still limited to about 10 million nuances and can't even take advantage of 24 bits. Time for an upgrade!

I disagree. Do you really believe that human vision is limited to seeing just a paltry 256 values for the entire range of light to dark? Not even close.

Re:Only 24-bit in 1995? We've come a long way.

[deoxyribonucleose]

What's worse, human vision is still limited to about 10 million nuances and can't even take advantage of 24 bits. Time for an upgrade!

I disagree. Do you really believe that human vision is limited to seeing just a paltry 256 values for the entire range of light to dark? Not even close.

That's not how RGB works. It's rather far from an accurate model of human visual perception, though, so it's not really the bit depth per se you should be bemoaning, but rather the colour model itself. Our visual colour bandwidth remains constrained to a smidgen below 24 bits, nonetheless. And let's not even start to discuss the horrible lack of resolution outside the yellow spot which forces our eyes to saccade constantly -- what a kludge!

Re:Only 24-bit in 1995? We've come a long way.

[danpbrowning]

We are still using 24 bits / 32 bits because more would be simply overkill. You see, there is still an old element in the equation, it is the eye! Even an accomplished artist cant see more than 2^24 ( 16,777,216 )colors.

That's all fine and well as far as colors go, but what about *range*? Even the layman can easily distinguish more than the paltry 256 levels provided by 24-bit video. It's very difficult to compress 12-14 stops of dynamic range (a typical DSLR raw file or film negative) into 256 levels. You can spread the levels out so that each doubling of intensity has about 18 levels to it, but it looks terrible ("low contrast"). Of you can compress a huge number of stops into just a few levels, so that you preserve the lion's share of the levels for midtones to have an attractive image ("high contrast", "pop", etc.). Or you can just cut the head and feet off the image until it's down to just 7 or 8 stops, which is easier to fit inside the 8-bit range limitation.

Re:Only 24-bit in 1995? We've come a long way.

[danpbrowning]

That's not how RGB works.

Actually, it is. On a 10-bit-per-channel display (with 10-bit software, 10-bit O.S., and 10-bit cable), you can display 1024 distinct values, each increasing value brighter than the next. If you display the exact same image on an 8-bit-per-channel display, there will only be 256 levels. There are a variety of techniques for compressing them with the smallest amount of image degradation (such as dithering to avoid artifacts from quantization error), but no matter what technique is used, the human eye can *definitely* see the difference.

Re:Only 24-bit in 1995? We've come a long way.

[Anonymous Coward]

Buddy, You are not making any sense!

Re:Only 24-bit in 1995? We've come a long way.

[danpbrowning]

Sorry, I'm not trying to be obtuse. Maybe I can put it more simply. In 24-bit color (8-bit per channel), there is a maximum of 256 levels of brightness (for any and all colors): 0 is the darkest, 255 is the lightest. That is nowhere near the number of distinct brightness levels we can see with our eye. Hope that helps.

Re:Only 24-bit in 1995? We've come a long way.

[toddestan]

Actually, it's worse than that. Many cheap LCD screens are 18-bit, and use dithering to fake the displaying of 24-bit color. At least your analog CRT from 1995 can do the full 24-bit color, even if the computer couldn't drive it at that color depth.

Faster, bigger. Better?

[hcs_$reboot]

Of course computers have N times the speed and memory. Regarding computer science concepts and algorithms, where is the real progress in that field? Most of the concepts used today were designed before 1995 - and a lot of them even before the modern computers ever existed.
CPU and memory is a confortable progress - but is not a revolution. Still to come.

Re:Faster, bigger. Better?

[Anonymous Coward]

There have been significant gains in those areas also. It's just that they are usually hidden from most people. The square-root algorithm developed by John Carmack (*patent wars notwithstanding) for Doom was probably on the cusp of 1995, but the encoding/compression used in just about all video and audio( and probably most still-graphic formats) at the moment has been developed since then. I'm not an expert in the area, but I expect a number of problems in just-in-time compiling (and probably general compiling and optimisation) have occurred, but none of this would be visible to the end user (except that "Java is faster" now, etc.). New digital signal processing techniques and related stuff for graphics processing - but it's all in the drivers and hardware. Encryption algorithms. Parallel processing algorithms.

And malware writers continue to push the envelope, of course.

Re:Faster, bigger. Better?

[FrootLoops]

I was going to bring up Shor's algorithm (oh look I did anyway!), but it was formulated in 1994. (It breaks RSA given a quantum computer of sufficient power.) Let's see... ooh, the AKS primality test was published in 2002, leading to the utterly mind-blowing and deeply revolutionary result that testing if a number is prime can be done in polynomial time! Yeah, nope, there hasn't been anything you'd call "real progress" in computer science concepts and algorithms--just a lot of the usual steady improvement.

Of course, revolutions typically come from questioning long-held beliefs (examples: non-Euclidean geometries in the 1800's questioned the parallel postulate; relativity and quantum mechanics in the 1900's questioned Newton's view of the universe; civil rights in the 20th and 21st centuries question the traditional role of gender, ethnicity, and sexuality). What long-held beliefs are left to question in computer science? The Church-Turing Thesis, maybe? Von Neumann architecture (and friends)? The importance and definition of complexity classes? The usefulness of abstraction or mainstream interface design? Certainly these have all been investigated, but apparently nothing important has come up so far. It's hard to revolutionize something.

Re:Faster, bigger. Better?

[ducman]

Did you read about the revolutionary new idea Facebook had, recently? They're going to split the RAM and storage off from the CPU to make it easier to upgrade each, independently. Wonder if they're going to start calling the disk DASD, and add a DAT box to help the CPU address the real memory?

My first computer

[ghostdoc]

might as well have another one of these threads, it's been a few years since the last one I think...

Acorn Atom circa 1980 ish. 12KB of RAM with the expansion pack. No storage at all (you could link to a tape recorder to very slowly store and recall data). No display (it plugged via a PAL lead into a TV). BASIC language and operating system fitted into a 2K ROM module if I remember correctly. I still have it on my shelf but haven't been able to plug it into a power source or TV for years.

Re:My first computer

[jcupitt65]

That was my first one as well. It came with 1kb of RAM, but the system took 512 bytes of that so you just had 512 bytes for typing in your BASIC. I upgraded to the high-end model with 12 kb of ram, but I wanted more. I saved and saved and got a 16 kb add-on. It took half the case and cost hundreds of pounds.

(boast) In 1992 I had a Sun workstation by my desk. A Sun 4/330 with 64MB of RAM, a 25 MHz processor and two 1 GB hard drives (from memory). Woah, I was living in the future!

Something else

[no-body]

Comparing one of today's desktop boxes with a mainframe from way back, IBM 360

30 M disk packs a room filling 1 M core memory rack and - 8" floppies

Performance data compare would be interesting.

Printers

[AmiMoJo]

Printers are still just as bad. Lame ink-jets that are prone to clogging, waste 50% of the cartridge on overspill and cleaning cycles, chew through expensive paper...

Re:Printers

[peppepz]

But they cost less; back then I paid something like 300 $ for a 300 DPI ink-jet printer, which took minutes to print a single page, and required the user to replace its print head to switch between colour and B&W printing. Oh, and it included a mechanical ink pump to clear its nozzles.

Now I can buy an inkjet multifunction with a much higher print quality for less than half that price. Or I can buy a laser colour printer for 120 $: this would have been unimaginable in the 90s.

Re:Printers

[PRMan]

Printers are WORSE. Back then, my HP InkJet 500 did none of those things.

Re:Printers

[Anonymous Coward]

Go dot matrix if you want reliable. They're not sold at a loss with all that implies.

Re:Printers

[Anonymous Coward]

Sure, but the last printer I bought (an HP 1525nw LaserJet) has more RAM and a faster processor (less disk space though) than the computer I used then.

Re:Printers

[csnydermvpsoft]

That's because you bought a shitty printer. A good color laser suffers from none of those problems. In fact, many inkjets are better than that - I have a portable HP inkjet that I use infrequently (it's used to print receipts when I'm selling products at conventions) and the original printhead and ink cartridge are still good, two years after I purchased the printer. The last time I used it, the first few pages showed evidence of a clogged nozzle, but then it was fine.

Also, why are you using expensive paper? Unless you're printing photos, there's no reason to use anything but regular paper. This is a welcome change from the 90's, when inkjets had difficulty printing anything - even text - on regular paper.

Re:Printers

[AmiMoJo]

Sure, and I actually have a colour laser myself. But back in the 90s the promise was of home photo printing, which lasers still are not quite capable of. Colour lasers are also a lot more expensive than inkjets, unless you get a special deal like I managed to after about a year of waiting.

I just get all my photos done online or at a shop. Much cheaper than running an inkjet.

Re:Printers

[CharlyFoxtrot]

As far as I can tell dot matrix printers are now employed mostly in the production of popular music.

What about games?

[Anonymous Coward]

What surprises me is that most of the older games from around this era have yet to be rivalled even today. Nevermind the fact that games back then didn't have EULAs, DRM restrictions, or DLC. You got what you paid for, and that came in a full sized box adorned with awesome artwork- and on the inside, you got a CD in a jewel case and a manual as thick as your thumb.

We had gems like Descent, Descent II, Command and Conquer, Warcraft 1, Warcraft 2, Tyrian, Raptor: Call of the Shadows, Duke Nukem 3D, Crusader: No Remorse and Crusader: No Regret, Mass Destruction, Wipeout (the original Psygnosis game was a MS-DOS release- it ran straight off the CD and had an absolutely awesome soundtrack from Cold Storage), Star Wars: Dark Forces, X-Com, SimCity 2000, etc.

Just after that era we got gems like C&C: Red Alert, Total Annihilation, and Starcraft.

Not a single game had any kind of grinding wankery in the form of "achievements" or "trophies". You bought a game, you got 10 to 20 hours of entertainment in a box. It was that simple.

Today, you're lucky if: A) $69.99 gets you something even remotely worth playing (since demos and shareware are long forgotten), and B) maybe 2 hours of actual entertainment wrapped in 20 hours of fucking around in a giant sandbox to boost some stupid number so you can proceed with the main quests/missions. Oh, and you don't actually "own" games anymore. You're licensing them, they only work 5 times (if you're lucky), and the disks often come in paper envelopes publishers have gotten so goddam cheap.

But hey, EA's releasing the next big version of MW or CoD! So whoopie! Nevermind the fact that they've driven Westwood Studios and Origin into the ground, and now they've done the same to Maxis and have focused their attention on Bioware. CRANK THAT FRANCHISE WHORING FACTORY TO FULL THROTTLE BOYS, WE HAVE CONSUMERS TO EXPLOIT!

-AC

Re:What about games?

[peppepz]

What surprises me is that most of the older games from around this era have yet to be rivalled even today.

Warning: finding yourself saying "in my time, things were better" is the first symptom of getting old ;-) .

That said, games were obviously better back then.

Re:What about games?

[lexa1979]

I would mod you up if I could...

Re:What about games?

[Nemyst]

Please dig further. The problem is that you're stopping at the superficial layer of pop-corn games. Back in the 90s, gaming wasn't mainstream, so there was no such layer, but now there is.

Ignore the Modern Warfares and Battlefield 3s of this world and you'll find that things haven't changed that much. To your Descent, I raise FS2Open or EVE, to your Command and Conquer I raise Company of Heroes, to your Warcraft I raise Starcraft II, to your Duke Nukem 3D I raise Serious Sam 3: BFE, to your X-Com I raise.. XCOM... Sure, some genres have come and gone, but others have risen. Super Meat Boy, Minecraft, Deus Ex: Human Revolution, Skyrim, Terraria, SpaceChem, League of Legends, The Witcher, Dungeons of Dredmor, Dwarf Fortress, Braid, Bastion, Portal...

You only need to look further than the mass-marketed drivel that console kiddies eat up to find gems.

Re:What about games?

[CharlyFoxtrot]

Yeah I remember Frontier: Elite 2 came with a manual, star chart poster and a booklet of short stories set in the Elite universe. Good times.

Re:What about games?

[blahplusplus]

"What surprises me is that most of the older games from around this era have yet to be rivalled even today."

Game development costs made developing games a pain. Team sizes got too big (so you lose vision/focus), graphics became a serious drain on developers limited financial resources and many publishers and developers realized they could release garbage games and just rely on graphics, voice acting and story to sell games. Most modern games are 'cinematic experiences' with a little bit of watered down gameplay on the side. Compare any modern shooter to UT2004 and you see gameplay is frozen in time.

Re:What about games?

[Tastecicles]

I agree here, the C&C franchise went to pot when EA acquired Westwood Studios.

The last decent (IMHO) game that EA released was Need For Speed Underground. I bought Underground 2, played it like, twice(?) and it's been sat in its box in a very dark cupboard ever since. NFS World is an OK game, problem is it's online only and I'm glad I got it for free because I frankly wouldn't *pay* to play it.

Vim users would feel at home...

[Anonymous Coward]

In those days you could say "Emacs stands for `Eight Megs And Continually Swapping`" and people would actually laugh.

1080p?

[Anonymous Coward]

Ok for tv....

4GB

[Anonymous Coward]

4GB is not 4000MB, dumbass.

Re:4GB

[ledow]

Tell that to the hard drive manufacturers.

Re:4GB

[petteyg359]

Yes it is, .

4GiB is not 4000MB, though.

Re:4GB

[CharlyFoxtrot]

It is on OSX.

I can do it in two minutes

[Anonymous Coward]

If I fire up a SparcStation 20 (kept to run legacy software), which was not the best thing available by a long shot at the time, I can see how depressingly little the desktop environment has changed. Win 7 may be ahead of MSDOS but it's not so far ahead of CDE.

How do you define better?

[Viol8]

If I wanted to type a 10,000 word document or play a complex RPG I'd take that 1995 PC over a smartphone anyday. Sure , the smartphone has much better hardware but from a usability point of view it leaves a lot to be desired compared to PC or any era.

Re:How do you define better?

[webheaded]

Bluetooth keyboard. Problem solved.

Re:How do you define better?

[Viol8]

Bluetooth 17 inch screen? I don't think so.

Re:How do you define better?

[webheaded]

HDMI outputs. :p Seriously, a lot of phones have them now.

Re:How do you define better?

[JoeMerchant]

If I wanted to type a 10,000 word document or play a complex RPG I'd take that 1995 PC over a smartphone anyday. Sure , the smartphone has much better hardware but from a usability point of view it leaves a lot to be desired compared to PC or any era.

Those usability features from 1995 were compensating for lack of processing power ;-) Oh, and real keyboards cost real money.

Re:How do you define better?

[Billly Gates]

And if I wanted to watch youtube, communicate over the internet messaging with 3G, or play Angry Birds, I will take my Andriod over my 486dx2 anyday

Re:How do you define better?

[jedidiah]

Considering the actual level of sophistication represented by Angry Birds, a 486 would have no problem at all coping.

X-Plane destroyed them all

[xtal]

http://www.x-plane.com/desktop/landing/

Seriously. You don't need anything else if you want a serious flight sim.

iRacing is basically the end-all in car racing.

YMMV.

Re:X-Plane destroyed them all

[phoenix_rizzen]

Not everyone wants a flight SIMULATOR. Some of us want flight GAMES. I don't want to worry about the position of the aelerons, or how many Gs the plane can withstand while turning. I just want to fly around, shoot things, and make big explosions.

Same with racing. All the latest racing "games" are actually driving simulators. Rub the wall once on a turn, blow a tire, game over. Where's the fun in that?

Compare $ value

[Anonymous Coward]

Not only has performance doubled every 18 months but prices has dropped to the point that you get an effective doubling of performance per dollar every year. With that being the case, a $400 laptop today would have have cost $54M back in 1995 and I bet it wouldn't have been very portable. Other than that, not much has changed.

Re:What about games? Consoles...

[David89]

We are victims of the console gaming age.. Most computer games are being held back because of this (game developing studios won't write 2 separate versions, one for consoles and one for computers). Notice how a 2 year old graphics card is able to play recently released games? Remember when you had to buy a graphics card every six months in order to keep up with the latest game releases?

Ooooohhhhh YESSS!!!!

[Anonymous Coward]

I remember her!

Printed out on plain paper and coloured in with pastel blocks, she looked quite presentable.....

Ahem!!!

Same software

[spectrokid]

And my word processor ? The only fundamental difference is I get wiggly lines under my words in real time now. If there are any other differences, I don't use them. And nobady improved on WordPerfects "reveal codes". Excel? Idem. Powerpoint? well, it can draw 3D shadows around my text boxes now. No the only real difference is media: we went from Text to Pictures to Video.

24 bits is enough for human vision

[Viol8]

Your eye can't resolve much more than that. You might as well ask why we can't have sound chips that can output 100Khz. Well what would be the point unless you're writing a game for bats?

Re:24 bits is enough for human vision

[Anonymous Coward]

Your eye can't resolve much more than that. You might as well ask why we can't have sound chips that can output 100Khz. Well what would be the point unless you're writing a game for bats?

Create an image that displays Red (or Green or Blue) values 0-255 in a band across the screen. Notice that you can easily see where they shift from one value to the next.

So apparently your eyes *can* resolve issues like that.

irony

[mevets]

he typed it on his cell phone...

Re:irony

[Anonymous Coward]

Yeah, who would've thought that voice-recognition would now be this feeble? Back then we had to use babelfish to translate into another language and back to English to be able to get such mangled sentences!

"Siri, find the quickest way home." ...
"Found the slickest gay dome!"

Optical drives useful for installing a new OS

[Viol8]

Trying to install most OS's from a USB stick even today is a PITA. However a CD/DVD install is usually pretty painless.

We've been here before. Back in 1995...

[Viol8]

... we were all getting nostalgic about 1980s 8 bit machines , cursing the huge power of the 95 era PC and how it had ruined the imagination of games designers who only cared about 3D and no gameplay etc etc and how OS's were just sucking up power and not using it:

"Hey , just look what CPM could do on a 3Mhz Z80 and now look - it takes a 66Mhz 486 for Win95 to do the same thing! Ha ha! Lame!"

Etc.

Plus ca change.

Now get of my lawn!

As a game developer

[Anonymous Coward]

Who loves old games....

No, they were not. Sierra Graphical Adventures and SCUMM games were beyond awesome, but besides that, we've come a long way and for a reason.

Ever tried GTAIV? I get giddy every time I imagine going back in time and giving my young 15 year old self a console with a copy of GTAIV or Dead Rising glued shut in the disc tray.

Every single digital fantasy I ever had is now pretty much covered in one way or another.... but it took until 2004-2008 to do that.

I give you that there is a lot of crap nowadays (and back then too, you just don't seem to remember it), but the best of the best today is WAY better than the best of 199X

Except for Shenmue.

Re:As a game developer

[peppepz]

Ever tried GTAIV?

The one where you have to take your cousin to the billiards continuously or he'll get offended? Geeze, I'd get bored to death by having to do it in real life, let alone inside a videogame! Pursuit of realism is OK as long as games keep being funny.

Re:As a game developer

[slyrat]

Ever tried GTAIV? I get giddy every time I imagine going back in time and giving my young 15 year old self a console with a copy of GTAIV or Dead Rising glued shut in the disc tray.

Well in 1997 GTA the original top down one came out. That and 2 were great! I loved the multiplayer you could do with it, though that may have been 2. At least they brought an updated version of those with the psp version not too long ago.

get the unity of measure right

[biancmb]

4 gigabytes are NOT 4,000 megabytes... that is why your disk is a big fraud

Things stay the same.

[Z00L00K]

Just replace the memory requirements so it says gigabyte instead of megabyte and you are good for what you need today.

In a way it's also kind of depressing to realize that even though we can process a much larger amount of data today compared to then - some things still takes the same amount of time.

Just alike

[Anonymous Coward]

What we have here is that the computers in 95 a just alike the computers that we have today, only more memory and faster!

I bought almost everything used for my first PC.

[Anonymous Coward]

I remember buying RAM used for $33 a MEG, and hard drives used for about $120 for 40 MEGS. At the time, these things seemed amazing to me, having just given up my 8-bit Atari system with its 128KB of RAM and 5 1/4" floppy disk storage. My first PC was a 386/16SX, and it was the first time I went online...with AOL 2.0. I later bought a co-processor for my system, allowing me to install Windows 95. Now, I could practically emulate that entire system with my phone. I can't wait for the future!

Thanks Slashdot

[AbbyNormal]

For reminding me how old I am! Ugh, you young wiper snappers. Back in my day we had to mess with bootup scripts call the autoexec.bat and config.sys just to get the mouse to work along with our soundcards. We had a few Megabytes of ram and we liked it. We had a few Megabytes of storage and we were fine with it!

I disagree with alot of what people have said about the computers not changing as much though. The architecture may have not changed that much, but our experience in using them has. I could live without my Samsung Galaxy 2 in my daily life going to customer sites and/or driving without getting lost. My regular computer runs several OS's at the same-time using Vmware, without having to dual-boot. Browsing the Internet takes seconds as does compiling most of my development software. I think we've come a long ways.

30 years later, they're colorized!

[Anonymous Coward]

Wow!

http://www.asciipr0n.com/pr0n/pinups/pinup22.txt

Depending on how subpixel rendering is configured to work on your LCD, web browser, and OS, if you shrink the font size a few times with Ctrl+/-, some of them appear in full color (at smallest, and third-smallest, font size, the narrow characters appear in red on my monitor, which gives us a surprisingly flesh-toned effect out of red, black, and white) Also #23, #25, #26...

Screen resolution and programming hasn't changed

[Anonymous Coward]

The only thing which hasn't changed a lot is the scree resolution and the programming language: We still run screen resolutions below 2048 pixels (1024x768 / 1280x1024 versus 1920x1080 / 1920x1200) and we still program in C.

And yet...

[epp_b]

Windows 95 was snappier and more immediately responsive than Windows 7 is today. No useless sidebar, no Fisher-Price GUI, no hour glass just to load a file list, it was just there.

Turing's famous paper: it's all more of the same

[epine]

Eh. There's not much of a difference. We're still using the same hardware and architecture as 1995.

Now it finally comes out: the real reason Turing bit the poisoned apple. Only he would have said 1945.

If anything, I'm amazed at how little computers have changed in the past 18 years.

That's because you've never tried to debug a bathtub full of DNA or a DWave Prospectus.

For perspective, look at the pyramids. Way overbuilt. All they really needed was a hot fire and a couple of tiny Mason jars. Khufu was a man of progress. Eighteen years in, he commented "I'm amazed at how this pile of slabs now approaches a point." Then he spotted the goldsmith. "Oh, look, you've fashioned a perfect likeness as a tiny brooch pin. Let me try one on. Ouch! Oh well, fresh metal, touch wood. Hey, anyone got any wood?"

World's tallest mason jut for 3800 years. Don't let the door hit you on the way in.

since it consists of an estimated 2.3 million blocks, completing the building in 20 years would involve moving an average of more than 12 of the blocks into place each hour, day and night

You'd have to work a lot faster than that to build it out of Lego bricks. But it would basically be the same thing. Just counting for area reduction since the 4004 reduces a Giza block to roughly a Lego brick:

(2000 kg) / (((10 micrometers) / (22 nm))^2) = 9.68 grams

Every transistor on the 4004 would have made a Pharaoh proud.

Instant messaging

[slyrat]

In 1995 I remember it was around when the AIM/ICQ switchover was happening. I remember that more than any website stuff or specific computer specs around then.

BBSs - KBBS

[mrflash818]

I remember using "Computer Shopper" to find BBSs local to me, using my US Robotics 14.4k modem. 386DX Zeos with 8Mb of RAM, and a 387 Cyrix math coprocessor. 100Mb or so harddrive. DOS 5ish or 6ish? and Win 3.1

It was KBBS that I used for the Los Angeles area, back in the day. Free account = 30 minutes/day, then disconnect. ...And attending their monthly pizza munches.

I hate nostalgia

[Quiet_Desperation]

Comparing today's mobile devices to a bit further in the past:

Now: iPhone 4s with dual core A5 processor, voice recognition and 8MP camera

Then: A rock

Multiplayer! (with one other on a 2400 baud modem)

[DarthVain]

I was busy playing Doom 2 and Warcraft: Orcs VS Humans over a 2400 baud modem in a college dorm. Good times. 1996 was when shit got real though (Warcraft 2, Duke Nukem 3D, Quake, etc...), not surprisingly my worst year academically.

Not certain, but I think I was running a 486DX 100Mhz at the time, likely 4MB of ram... Though it may have been a P120, or maybe I got that the next year...

Young whipper snappers

[bokmann]

When I started, I had 4K and saved programs I typed to cassette tape! The differences between then and 1995 are orders of magnitude greater than 1995 to now.

I clearly recall the last three jaw-dropping moments:

circa 2001, Seeing AMD beat intel to the market with a 1GHz processor
circa 1997, being able to download a music file in less time than it took to play.
circa 1991, seeing a postage-stamp video of the moon launch on Quicktime from the Apple Developer CD they distributed monthly.

Other than that, its all more of the same, or far enough back in history as to be a blur.

-db

When computers were expensive!

[morgauxo]

Ahh.. when a new computer easily cost $1500, probably more. And when most people weren't on the net yet but were interested. I miss that! I had parts sources. (Actually I had a good friend with sources but that just makes him my source right?) I could assemble a whole computer (even the monitor and sometimes a printer) for under $50. Once I got lucky with parts and did the whole thing for $8! My computers were relatively slow but they ran Win95, Netscape, ICQ/AIM and a very old (even then) but perfectly usable version of MSWord for Windows. It was everything one really needed to get on the internet and to write papers for school.

Assembling these things was a fun challenge. I started with old PCs (mostly 286s) that I used for the case, floppy drive and occasionaly could get a video card or NIC out of them. I had a source for 486-33 w/ 4MB RAM and 66Mhz 8MB boards. It would usually take some case hacking to get the board in. I salvaged hard drives from old computers too which meant they were small even for the time and I usually needed 2 to fit everything. That often meant more case hacking to make a spot to mount them. The same source I got the 286s from often had old IBM-PS/2 monitors. They were just small 13" VGAs. I don't think the people selling the monitors realized they were VGA they just assumed they were some sort of proprietary IBM thing. Each 286 was $1 as were the monitors. The motherboards were $25 or $35 depending if I went with the faster or slower one. The toughest things for me to get were soundcards and modems. I especially liked the combo cards because they made good computerized answering machines (plus they were fun for use with a prank-call program I had called CatCall).

First I hooked up friends and family and then I was about to start trying to sell them for profit... That's when suddenly the new hardware's speeds started shooting up while the price was shooting down. There was no more niche for my old junk.

In 1995

[Nimey]

I think I was still rocking a 486DX2-50, 4MB of RAM, and a 420MB IDE hard drive - the CPU and hard drive were upgrades from a 25 MHz 486SX and a 106MB drive. Onboard WD Paradise graphics with 512KB and VBE 1.01 compatibility, Sound Blaster 16 Basic (also an upgrade), 1x LMS CD-ROM drive on a proprietary bus, 14.4 Kbps external modem (this was a mistake; the computer had 16450 UARTs on its serial ports which couldn't keep up & kept causing CRC errors; should have gotten an internal), MS-DOS 6.20 and Windows 3.11 (not Workgroups).

Now I have a 3.4 GHz Core i5-2500K, 8GB of RAM, 1.5 TB SATA hard drive, Radeon 4850/512MB, Xonar DX sound, 10 Mbps Internet connection, don't bother with optical drives, and dual-boot Win7 x64 and Kubuntu 11.10 x64. My Model M keyboard is from 1988.

I don't really miss the old days, you know?

It's the Network

[cthlptlk]

In 1995, most consumers buying hardware wouldn't think twice about buying a box without an ethernet card. Home computers were for games, and maybe a checkbook-balancing application or office-style apps. And even if you had networking gear on your computer, residential broadband was practically unheard of. Nowadays, most consumers buy the computer *for* the network stuff.

The great thing about modern boxes is that they make the web browser as platform possible. Yeah, it's just the same stuff on a bigger scale, but genuinely portable applications couldn't have happened without browsers that can spare the memory, cpu and threads to run the app. (There were other problems, too...in 1995 Netscape and Microsoft were releasing alphas of their web browsers as fast as they could compile them, and the css and javascript implementations changed with every release.)

Take Blue-Ray out of the picture

[Shompol]

600 MB CD-ROM then, 45 GB BluRay now (only two orders)

Not a fair comparison. CD-ROM was just breaking the ground back then. BlueRay is on the way out today. I am probably being a little subjective, but look at the highest high end consumer desktop. Do you see BlueRay? It was first shipped in mid-June 2006 and still has very limited adoption due to being laden with DRM so badly, even Apple refused to install them, and for Linux devices it is simply not an option. This is what marketing would call a "flopped" product.

Also, there is a rapidly decreasing need to purchase software/entertainment on a physical media, as online streaming is so much faster and cheaper. Just put a 32 Gb flash drive in your comparison and call it a day.

Oops, hit submit instead of preview...

[mcgrew]

If cars had progressed as fast as computers, we'd have had flying electric cars in 1950. Today's CPUs are 1000 times as fast as 1994's CPUs. Hard drive and memory speeds have likewise increased.

Here's a journal entry I made a couple of days ago (not its entirety), it was a rerun from 2002:

I was home sick last Friday, and when my wife came home from school she had a new hard drive she picked up at Circuit City, a 40mb Maxtor.
                I couldn't get the damned thing to work!
                My old 400mz machine still plays all the new games, and with a little more memory would play them in XP (assuming I wanted to throw away another hundred dollars on a new OS I don't need). Plus, Becky's laptop is the first whole computer I've bought since I purchased a used IBM XT in 1987; I've built from spare parts since.
                I didn't know that older (in this case "older" means about three years) BIOSs couldn't handle drive sizes larger than 30gb. I had run across the same problem years ago while trying to install a huge (for the time) half gigabyte drive in a 386; then, the limit was 512mb. The Seagate I had bought then had come with software to overcome the limitation, and it had worked flawlessly.
                I can't say the same about the new Maxtor!
                I fought with that thing all weekend; its workarounds wouldn't work around. This on top of a defective installation floppy!
                It made Windows freeze at the desktop; then after a Windows reinstall, it was still hosed. Nowhere in the printed documentation was it mentioned, but I finally found a workaround deep inside one of the installation/test programs that involved lying to the BIOS.
                Bingo! It booted into Windows with no problem!
                But the drive wouldn't work. So I rebooted into DOS and did a high level format; the software was supposed to have done it but didn't.
                It booted into Windows and the drive worked!
                I rebooted; it still worked. I copied a half dozen gigabytes of data from the laptop to the new hard drive in the old PC, which it read with no problem. I rebooted again.
                All the data were garbage (and all your base are belong to us).
                I wrote over the garbaged-up data several times and low level formatted the drive one last time, then boxed it up for Becky to return. The new 30gb Western Digital is supposed to get here from JDR Monday afternoon.

380Meg of ram.

[darkonc]

I worked for the Computer Graphics lab at the University of British Columbia in 1992, and we had one machine we called Brutus. It had about 4 boards of memory (each larger than a desktop morherboard) in it for a total of 380Megabytes of ram. When I mentioned that I worked with a machine with 380Meg of memory, most people would go "ooooh, that's a really big hard drive!".
Nevermind..

(( The PC with 4Meg of ram, running OS/2 was considered a toy even though it was more than most normal people had on their desktop. ))

my lawn

[bobbutts]

When the alternative is dunce AI, any online interaction is welcome. My first online experiences were provided by my father, who created a student acct for me at the university he worked for in the early 80's. Our computer was a thin terminal, so it was online via phone/suction cups or nothing. I fondly recall competing against the college students for Rogue high scores. Later in the late 80's I got invited to join by some neighborhood kid riding around on a bike giving out accounts for his basement bbs. More fond memories of flying asci spaceships and trading. By the time the gui based internet of the 90's came around it felt quite robust and mature.

8 megabytes of RAM?

[wfstanle]

"'Memory (RAM): We seem to have convinced most manufacturers to adopt eight megabytes as standard, compared with four megabytes in 1994. "

Did I read the summary correctly? It clearly says the new standard is 8 megabytes! Hell, no modern operating will even load with only 8 megabytes of RAM! Right now I am writing this reply on a computer that has 8 Gigabytes of RAM. Surely they meant 8 gigabytes and not 8 megabytes.

That's the system I am using you insensitive clod!

[Latent Heat]

OK, I have 512 M RAM with a 1.2 GHz PIII running XP. It is indeed "perfectly adequate" for everything from Web surfing to programming (I mainly use Eclipse) to dynamical simulations used in engineering research. The one thing I don't try to run on it are solid modeling packages such as SolidWorks or NX, for which I use the computer lab that is kept up to date with the latest and greatest.

It is not quite 1995 vintage; it was assembled from parts and I am thinking more Millenium vintage. From what I remember of dynamical simulation benchmarks, the latest-and-greatest is maybe a factor of 6 faster. Since the turn of the Millenium, speed increases seem to have stalled compared to the decade of the 90's when they were just roaring.

Keyboard

[Brian Kendig]

Everything is better about PCs these days ... except the keyboard.

I missed the IBM Model M until I bought a USB version from "http://pckeyboard.com/". So much better to type on than the modern things that use the same membrane rubber-dome technology as you find in a DVD remote control.

rattle the kids by talking about punch card days

[peter303]

Sometimes we geezers like brag about the days "when I walked ten miles barefoot in the snow to use the school's teletype terminal". Computers still evolve so fast that is bored people to talk about platforms from five years ago (pre-smartphone) much less 30 or 40 years ago.

Hey KID !

[Anonymous Coward]

how about 1981 with 64Kb of RAM ....... and an audio tape drive ....... ;) yes i'm an old IT fart

don't forget COST!

[schlachter]

Can we also consider cost? In 1995 an average laptop cost $3,000 and a good one was touching on $5,000. It might have had a 12 inch passive matrix color screen if you splurged.

Now you can get a Netbook for $250 which is hundreds of times more capable.

Left unsaid by most

[Lawrence_Bird]

is the abuse of these additional resources. What was the base size of win 3.1? win 95? Linux kernel? System 7.X? Distro size? And what are they today for Win 7 (or soon 8)? Linux? OS X? Don't say you've never sat there and said 'why does this pos run like a dog?' eventhough you have the Ubersystem? The idea of programming for speed or efficiency is frowned upon today because of the perception that hardware performance will always improve just a little faster than the slothful use of resources will slow things down. Sure memory is faster and more plentiful, for example, but when you are needing to move in and out so much more code and data isn't it a wash?

FTFS: RAM recommendation?

[Tastecicles]

Swap "megabyte" for "Gigabyte", and the room takes on an echo.

I remember way back (1993!) when a £1500 Pentium 60MHz gaming rig had a 4GB hard disk, 4x CDROM(!) an entire 16MB RAM and 4MB graphics memory, and the fastest internal modems had 50667bit throughput (6.something KB/sec download!), monitors were still CRT and a 15" FST (still only 13" viewable) was considered the dog's bits.

These days, I'm on a laptop with dual core 64-bit 1.6GHz with on-die HD graphics, DVD multi burner, 6GB RAM with up to 3GB dedicated graphics memory shared (312MB squirreled away somewhere for the graphics base memory), 15.6" of the fastest LED backlit panel I have ever come across, HDMI output, networking via USB (cellular), enhanced Bluetooth, Gigabit ethernet, wireless-n, 500GB hard drive and local server quota of over 20TB. Still isn't enough for decent performance on UT2004. Oh, and the cost for the laptop was change out of £400.

Re:Commodore 64 w/ 1541

[DocSavage64109]

Have fun loading your Geos operating system from 170K 1541 disk drive for some 3 minutes.

and software?

[Anonymous Coward]

computers are spectacularly more powerful today (even though if its still the same song from 1994, just on steroids and crazy amplified speakers), shame software hasnt improved by the same measure.

AOL circa 95-98

[Anonymous Coward]

Anyone remember programming in VB making "AOL Progs"?

RAM Wars - Ah, the Good Ol' Days

[Tablizer]

The difference in performance between an eight megabyte [RAM] machine and a four-megabyte machine can be dramatic.

Man, I remember those days and the diff between 4 and 8 was indeed night and day. It was like a Yugo versus a Chevy sedan and people fought like mad to get more RAM.

My coworker was setting up a new PC for some PHB and noticed it had 12 megs of RAM, which was a hell of a lot for those days. He secretly pulled 4 out and gave it to me so that I could have 8 instead of 4 because he saw how slow certain apps of mine were under 4 (MS-Access, FoxPro, etc.) "The PHB wouldn't know the difference between 8 and 12", he said, which is probably true. He was truly a PHB.

I felt a bit guilty, but when I saw how apps could start up without a bathroom break in between, I stopped feeling guilty. 12 was kiss-up-based allocation anyhow, not based on actual needs. The PHB mostly just used Word and email all day.

you don't remember monitor prices

[schlachter]

Got my first 15" LCD monitor in the mid-to-late 90s. It was around $1,200 w/ 1024x768 res.
Now you can pick one up for $100

Resource waste

[nurb432]

Notice how with all the 'advancements' we have had over the years we really are not that much better off, due to sloppy programming and crappy hardware.

First PC in 1983

[Anonymous Coward]

I had a PC XT in 1983:
    4.77MHz
    192K
    10MB MFM
    text-only monochrome display on a 12" monitor
    no optical storage
    no comms

I had a number of machines between then and 1995, but in 1995:
    60MHz Pentium
    16MB
    1GB SCSI-2
    VGA with "16bit colour" at 1024 x 768 on a 17" CRT
    triple or quad CD-ROM on SCSI-2
    dial-up - not sure what speed

My latest build (December 2011)
    3.3GHz six core core i7 3960X
    16GB
    240GB SATA-3 SSD (but with 10TB of storage in NAS)
    2560x1600 32bit colour (GTX-580) on a 30" LED-backlit LCD
    12x Bluray writer on SATA-2
    ADSL-2

Those who claim there's no difference have no idea what they are talking about.

My current CPU will happily overclock to 4.77GHz, 1000 times the speed of my first PC, plus it has far more computational power and six cores / 12 threads. I hesitate to put a number to the ratio.

My current RAM is roughly 100 000 times that of my first PC, and it's considerably faster and wider (not to mention the architectural differences of DDR 4 vs old-fashioned DRAM).

My current disk storage? Actually in the PC I "only" have 24 000 times the space (but much much faster), but I have 1 000 000 times the storage available at higher speed over my LAN.

On "loading a huge library"... apk

[Anonymous Coward]

"...loading a huge library that will bring everything to a halt, just so that you can call HeapSort to sort 20 elements" - by excelsior_gr (969383) on Friday February 24, @02:05PM (#39150861)

When one loads a DLL/Lib, the calling program does NOT "load the entire body of the DLL called on, 'all-or-nothing'" but, instead, calling programs only load the function portions it requires to do the work into said calling programs' memory space!

(This is basically the modern implementation of oldschool overlays in essence & as efficiently as is possible - & in combination with virtual memory usage, which is SORT of another part of why overlay programming existed - memory conservation, not just loading added functions (and since apps "page back to themselves", which is WHY you still can see paging taking place even when you don't have a pagefile.sys in place on Windows for example...)).

---

"... Neither good APIs nor fast CPUs are a replacement for common sense." - by excelsior_gr (969383) on Friday February 24, @02:05PM (#39150861)

I'll agree with that... THAT, & actually knowing how things actually DO work. I've seen it in work I am doing recently (porting 32-bit apps I wrote into 64-bit in Delphi XE2). Misconceptions can lead one down a NOT "merry garden path"...

---

"Still, even an own implementation of the crappy BubbleSort can, in some cases, be a better choice" - " - by excelsior_gr (969383) on Friday February 24, @02:05PM (#39150861)

Heh - Funny/Ironic that you mention BUBBLESORT - because, I saw JUST such a thing, literally, in those apps I am porting & posted in response to the same poster you did, noting that VERY thing, here:

http://tech.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=2689483&cid=39147709

(Bubblesort tends to lend itself WELL to largely non-duplicated datasets when sorting them's why! Yes, it's generally considered a poke of a sort, but not in that case/instance... far from it - it outperformed a quicksort for me in fact!)

APK

P.S.=> Anyhow/anyways, I hope that point on HOW libs/dlls actually load do help you out in the future - because that IS, how it really IS... apk

SMALL "correction" on my part (why mod down?)

[Anonymous Coward]

"MOST of the data is not repeated (thus, not candidates for removal because they're unique entries), so, what sort works really well on that type of dataset? Believe-it-or-not, BUBBLESORT (typically considered a shitty/slow sort by many in fact)." - by Anonymous Coward on Friday February 24, @10:25AM (#39147709)

BUBBLESORT's superior to QUICKSORT on datasets that are MOSTLY sorted and bear little deduplication (not many duplicated entries by % of the whole).

Which in the case of my program operating on custom HOSTS files, is that way! I basically have 1 HUGE block completely sorted, & another far small imported block of data that's sorted too - the "merge" is the timeconsumer & even quicksort doesn't handle THAT kind of situation well (BUBBLESORT does).

E.G./I.E. -> I have 1.76++ million SORTED entries in my existing HOSTS file, and I import in around 500,000++ each day from other custom HOSTS file makers - this subset for import also gets sorted, & then appended to the existing custom HOSTS files' data, + lastly alphabetized/sorted, deduplicated, & filtered (from sites that IF You block them, you cannot get into the site itself)).

* I had to 'correct' that point & 'nitpick myself'... I haven't been expressing myself well all week, but, I don't leaving ANY "stones unturned" (better to correct MYSELF, lol, than have a /. 'nitpicker' troll do it).

APK

P.S.=> Why the "mod down" folks? I was only expressing a KNOWN truth, and WITH A CURRENT EXAMPLE in coding I just faced down & beat by the means noted (profiling & using datastructures coursework on SORTATION where it was needed + worked excellently!)...

... apk

iphone v. Banjo and the d/l videos of 1990

[Anonymous Coward]

Actually there *were* downloadable videos -- of a sort -- and a lot earlier (at least 1990) than 1995. They were very simple animations -- little more than what today is accomplished in an animated GIF file showing a few seconds (10?) of video in an endless fascinating loop.

> > HD screens, surround sound, its just nuts how much we all have now.

> With a social disaster, and a failed government brewing all around us. Progress

Yep. With less reality about energy than during Jimmy Carter's reign, and a lot more science denial. Acupuncture, climate-change denial, homeopathy being a billion dollar business, and lots more pure quackery streaming gloriously at 4G. Maybe returning to singing around the banjo, as energy decline will eventually cause, will be an improvement. Enjoy your mega made in China floating operations per second while ye can.