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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.'"
Those were the days....when it took 30 minutes to load a porn site
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.
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...
And the worms ate into his brain.
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.
-- IANAL, this isn't legal advice, and definitely isn't legal advice for you. Also, Squee!
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?
You mean you don't know how to use the three seashells?
That's OK. This is Slashdot. You'll be modded up to +5, Informative, anyway.
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.
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.
Capabilities have increased by a factor of a thousand or more in several areas.
What Intel giveth, Microsoft taketh away.
The creatures outside looked from Alt-Right to Antifa; but already it was impossible to say which was which.
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.
SJW n. One who posts facts.
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.
Carol vs. Ghost
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.
+1 IDisagreeSoHeMustBeATrollOrAnAstroturferOrAShill
... and now they don't even know how to right!
Guns don't kill people; Physics kills people! - John Lithgow as Dick Solomon on Third Rock From The Sun