4 ms·

I used Opera from ~2000, way back when it was still ad-supported. It always amazed me that they managed to provide a top-notch web browser, a passable BitTorren

by nly 11y ago

I used Opera from ~2000, way back when it was still ad-supported. It always amazed me that they managed to provide a top-notch web browser, a passable BitTorrent client, newsgroup client, FTP client, IRC client, and email client... all inside one 4 MiB installer package. I stopped using it the moment they switched to Chromium and blew away all the features that made it unique. Vivaldi aside, hopefully any remaining talent that still works at Opera will now finally be free to go create more kickass software.

agumonkey 11y ago
I was just running a win98 box with 64MB of ram. Office would run nicely. Also that disk had (the maddeningly fast) Turbo Pascal IDE clocking around 600KB. I like v8 prowess and everything but I miss those days.
cm3 11y ago
Which is a testament to the industry's ability to fill any and all hardware improvement with more overhead unfortunately. If you compare what 1990s demo mags did on floppy disks vs the resources it takes to render a 2016 web page, it's hard not to feel like we're failing as software developers. All the dynamic features and scriptability can be had with a system that fits on a floppy disk if only we valued it but we don't. These things do and did exist but didn't have the marketing department like, say, Sun Java. And one of Niklaus Wirth's peers made a Java (with applet plugin) alternative in the 90s as a direct competitor that was a huge improvement and got no traction. Instead of using faster internet connections for richer content we fill it up with different (i.e. less efficient) ways of doing the same thing. When I see that the most trivial mobile app package is larger than 50MB, it's impossible to respect what the industry as a whole views to be good software. Take Qt5's 30MB base memory overhead for a simplest of simple Qt windows. How is that acceptable?
- deleted 11y ago
  [deleted]
- bwat48 11y ago
  Web Pages themselves are far heavier and more complex than they were in the 90's
  - cm3 11y ago
    Isn't it a failure of HTML+CSS+WebFoo when the supporting assets are 10 or 20 times larger than the content to be consumed? Pages loading megabytes of JavaScript, fonts, and large images and videos just on the landing page. I think we lost it completely when we started to fetch JSON and render it locally via JavaScript. The whole concept of HTTP GET was nullified that way.
    - digi_owl 11y ago
      CSS basically turned the whole thing into a crappy apps UI, though the appification of the web honestly started back when Microsoft and Netscape was battling for control over the intranet (and likely why anything and everything is layered on top of TCP/IP these days, for better or worse). In a way we have come full circle. The personal computer came to be because accountants was fed up begging sysadmins for time on the mainframes. And with CSS and JS "powered" web sites we have returned to the era of the graphical terminal.
      - cm3 11y ago
        It's even worse than TCP/IP only, it's mostly HTTP only these days. Things like SCTP got pushed into niche use and we're reinventing SCTP on top of HTPP(2) on top of TCP on top of IP. I'm hopeful to see the trend go back though, if it's really a circle :).
        digi_owl 11y ago
        Yeah i know. We seem to have turned HTTP into TCP, and use it to carry various ad-hoc "protocols" encoded in JSON. Part of that i think we can blame firewalls, as most often they block everything but HTTP(S) by default.
  - ketralnis 11y ago

by nly 11y ago

agumonkey 11y ago

I was just running a win98 box with 64MB of ram. Office would run nicely. Also that disk had (the maddeningly fast) Turbo Pascal IDE clocking around 600KB. I like v8 prowess and everything but I miss those days.

cm3 11y ago

Which is a testament to the industry's ability to fill any and all hardware improvement with more overhead unfortunately. If you compare what 1990s demo mags did on floppy disks vs the resources it takes to render a 2016 web page, it's hard not to feel like we're failing as software developers. All the dynamic features and scriptability can be had with a system that fits on a floppy disk if only we valued it but we don't. These things do and did exist but didn't have the marketing department like, say, Sun Java. And one of Niklaus Wirth's peers made a Java (with applet plugin) alternative in the 90s as a direct competitor that was a huge improvement and got no traction. Instead of using faster internet connections for richer content we fill it up with different (i.e. less efficient) ways of doing the same thing. When I see that the most trivial mobile app package is larger than 50MB, it's impossible to respect what the industry as a whole views to be good software. Take Qt5's 30MB base memory overhead for a simplest of simple Qt windows. How is that acceptable?

deleted 11y ago
[deleted]
bwat48 11y ago
Web Pages themselves are far heavier and more complex than they were in the 90's
- cm3 11y ago
  Isn't it a failure of HTML+CSS+WebFoo when the supporting assets are 10 or 20 times larger than the content to be consumed? Pages loading megabytes of JavaScript, fonts, and large images and videos just on the landing page. I think we lost it completely when we started to fetch JSON and render it locally via JavaScript. The whole concept of HTTP GET was nullified that way.
  - digi_owl 11y ago
    CSS basically turned the whole thing into a crappy apps UI, though the appification of the web honestly started back when Microsoft and Netscape was battling for control over the intranet (and likely why anything and everything is layered on top of TCP/IP these days, for better or worse). In a way we have come full circle. The personal computer came to be because accountants was fed up begging sysadmins for time on the mainframes. And with CSS and JS "powered" web sites we have returned to the era of the graphical terminal.
    - cm3 11y ago
      It's even worse than TCP/IP only, it's mostly HTTP only these days. Things like SCTP got pushed into niche use and we're reinventing SCTP on top of HTPP(2) on top of TCP on top of IP. I'm hopeful to see the trend go back though, if it's really a circle :).
      - digi_owl 11y ago
        Yeah i know. We seem to have turned HTTP into TCP, and use it to carry various ad-hoc "protocols" encoded in JSON. Part of that i think we can blame firewalls, as most often they block everything but HTTP(S) by default.
- ketralnis 11y ago