7 ms·

This demonstrates how small most computing requirements are. Bigger faster systems to do what? Store an address book? Calculate taxes? Print invoices? Most

This demonstrates how small most computing requirements are. Bigger faster systems to do what? Store an address book? Calculate taxes? Print invoices? Most of our computing needs could be performed by a small embedded computer no greater than a raspberry pi.

Keyframe 10y ago
Even Raspberry Pi is an overkill. Look at with what we did tasks in 90's and we had it all good. Now look at RPi3 specs for example.
- khedoros 10y ago
  I see people complain about the low power of the Pi3...then I think about how I went through college with a slower computer than that, and how the people over the previous 30 years had even slower machines to use (if they had their own personal machine at all). What you can do with a couple MHz and a few hundred KB of memory is great, given a little ingenuity. Of course, you aren't going to do real-time face recognition on something like that, but 99% of what we need to do is just fine with 0.1% of the performance.
  - pjmlp 10y ago
    Or the Arduino versus what we had with our 8-bit computers.
- tombert 10y ago
  At the very least, the Raspberry Pi has a much lower power footprint, so even it's overkill, it's still probably better than a C64, at least in this one particular case. That said, I think the C64 thing is pretty neat, so I can't really knock it.
- pjmlp 10y ago
  I came to realize that Raspberry Pi would be a "supercomputer" to run Xerox PARC, ETHZ and DEC research OSes. So if we are still playing catch up with those environments, is just because the industry at large lacks the political agenda to push forward such technologies, and nothing to do with technical capabilities.
  - Grishnakh 10y ago
    I wonder what would happen if we could build a time machine and send a bunch of RPis back in time to Silicon Valley in the 1970s, along with all the specs for how to build more of them (though this would be a lot of information since it requires fairly modern semiconductor manufacturing processes).
Narishma 10y ago
I wouldn't be surprised if a micro-controller, if it had enough RAM, would be good enough for a ton of tasks we use desktop computers for.
- Florin_Andrei 10y ago
  > I wouldn't be surprised if a micro-controller, if it had enough RAM, would be good enough for a ton of tasks we use desktop computers for. I remember - way, way back - using a graphics editor app on a computer with the following specs: 3.5 MHz, 8 bit, 48 kB RAM. It was not more complex than Microsoft Paint, but it worked. So, yeah, microcontrollers nowadays were considered computers at some point in the past.
  - Grishnakh 10y ago
    Not really. The CPU part of a microcontroller, sure. But a microcontroller is more than just a computer: it's specifically designed for controlling things, and as such ahs a lot of extra parts added on which you would not normally find on a general-purpose computer or CPU/microprocessor. Things like comparators, timers, GPIO (general-purpose input/output) pins, A/D and D/A converters are common on uCs, and these days they frequently have industrial data buses added in too, like CAN (usually used in cars). These of course could all be added to a general-purpose computer, but in a uC, they're all built right onto the chip, and are accessible right at the register level instead of having to communicate over a general-purpose bus to some external module. But if you meant to say that a modern microcontroller is as powerful as a full-fledged "computer" from the 80s, that's definitely true, and really a big understatement as many modern microcontrollers have rather powerful ARM or PowerPC CPU cores and are far more powerful than your typical 1980s microcomputer. uCs these days span an incredible range, from tiny PICs with a few hundred words of flash and a few dozen words of RAM, running at 1MHz, up to very powerful 64-bit SoCs (systems-on-chip) running at well over 1GHz.
mbrock 10y ago
I hear some people still use these things: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HP_95LX https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HP_95LX I played around with one recently and it's a pretty cool little device.
drzaiusapelord 10y ago
The modern version of this is something with a big dumb GUI that is trivial to train on. A CLI or text only approach is going to take longer to learn and be comfortable with. I get TCP/IP with modern stuff which allows me monitoring, remote access, remote upgrades, etc. We also get standardization. Windows/Linux and USB aren't going anywhere anytime soon and even if they do we can emulate x86 systems in a hypervisor. If your ancient non-x86 system dies you either get lucky on ebay or you don't. I also can't casually send the customer a text telling them their car is ready or have my supervisor look at my metrics on what I'm doing with the machine. Or a million other things on these old systems. Or you can, sorta, by shoehorning in garbage like analog modems and swapping out floppies all the time, but who wants to do that? I think young people tend to fetishize old tech because they weren't there when it was used. Floppy failures were common, IRQ issues, programs taking down the entire OS, no real security, and "the computer" was something the specialist at your shop took days of training to learn how to use and when he wasn't there "the computer" was useless. Now its been vastly democratized and has higher levels of ease of use. That comes at the cost of complexity.
- mrob 10y ago
  >A CLI or text only approach is going to take longer to learn and be comfortable with I disagree. I once worked on a telephone switchboard, using a old text based interface and a specially designed keyboard with dedicated buttons for all the functions. It took a few minutes to learn what the buttons did. Everything was fast and responsive, and there were no distractions on screen. I later worked there again after they had "upgraded" to a modern Windows based system. This was far more difficult and slower to use and it did nothing the old system couldn't. Training somebody to push a dedicated button is easier than training somebody to use a GUI. Look at the interfaces people use at fast food restaurants. There's a huge array of dedicated buttons, and it takes very little skill to operate. The only advantage of GUIs over dedicated hardware UIs is lower cost.
  - drzaiusapelord 10y ago
    Well, the real advantage is the button can change or you can add more buttons trivially. Compare the on-screen dialer and keyboard of the iPhone to the old school 9-digit keypad. The former is superior for most use cases. Also you can abstract away your GUI interface with a hardware button if preferred. I'm using a hardware keyboard to type this for example, even though this computer has a touch screen. I have this flexibility and customization options that the old school approach didn't really have.

Keyframe 10y ago

Even Raspberry Pi is an overkill. Look at with what we did tasks in 90's and we had it all good. Now look at RPi3 specs for example.

khedoros 10y ago
I see people complain about the low power of the Pi3...then I think about how I went through college with a slower computer than that, and how the people over the previous 30 years had even slower machines to use (if they had their own personal machine at all). What you can do with a couple MHz and a few hundred KB of memory is great, given a little ingenuity. Of course, you aren't going to do real-time face recognition on something like that, but 99% of what we need to do is just fine with 0.1% of the performance.
- pjmlp 10y ago
  Or the Arduino versus what we had with our 8-bit computers.
tombert 10y ago
At the very least, the Raspberry Pi has a much lower power footprint, so even it's overkill, it's still probably better than a C64, at least in this one particular case. That said, I think the C64 thing is pretty neat, so I can't really knock it.
pjmlp 10y ago
I came to realize that Raspberry Pi would be a "supercomputer" to run Xerox PARC, ETHZ and DEC research OSes. So if we are still playing catch up with those environments, is just because the industry at large lacks the political agenda to push forward such technologies, and nothing to do with technical capabilities.
- Grishnakh 10y ago
  I wonder what would happen if we could build a time machine and send a bunch of RPis back in time to Silicon Valley in the 1970s, along with all the specs for how to build more of them (though this would be a lot of information since it requires fairly modern semiconductor manufacturing processes).

Narishma 10y ago

I wouldn't be surprised if a micro-controller, if it had enough RAM, would be good enough for a ton of tasks we use desktop computers for.

Florin_Andrei 10y ago
> I wouldn't be surprised if a micro-controller, if it had enough RAM, would be good enough for a ton of tasks we use desktop computers for. I remember - way, way back - using a graphics editor app on a computer with the following specs: 3.5 MHz, 8 bit, 48 kB RAM. It was not more complex than Microsoft Paint, but it worked. So, yeah, microcontrollers nowadays were considered computers at some point in the past.
- Grishnakh 10y ago
  Not really. The CPU part of a microcontroller, sure. But a microcontroller is more than just a computer: it's specifically designed for controlling things, and as such ahs a lot of extra parts added on which you would not normally find on a general-purpose computer or CPU/microprocessor. Things like comparators, timers, GPIO (general-purpose input/output) pins, A/D and D/A converters are common on uCs, and these days they frequently have industrial data buses added in too, like CAN (usually used in cars). These of course could all be added to a general-purpose computer, but in a uC, they're all built right onto the chip, and are accessible right at the register level instead of having to communicate over a general-purpose bus to some external module. But if you meant to say that a modern microcontroller is as powerful as a full-fledged "computer" from the 80s, that's definitely true, and really a big understatement as many modern microcontrollers have rather powerful ARM or PowerPC CPU cores and are far more powerful than your typical 1980s microcomputer. uCs these days span an incredible range, from tiny PICs with a few hundred words of flash and a few dozen words of RAM, running at 1MHz, up to very powerful 64-bit SoCs (systems-on-chip) running at well over 1GHz.

mbrock 10y ago

I hear some people still use these things: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HP_95LX https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HP_95LX I played around with one recently and it's a pretty cool little device.

drzaiusapelord 10y ago

The modern version of this is something with a big dumb GUI that is trivial to train on. A CLI or text only approach is going to take longer to learn and be comfortable with. I get TCP/IP with modern stuff which allows me monitoring, remote access, remote upgrades, etc. We also get standardization. Windows/Linux and USB aren't going anywhere anytime soon and even if they do we can emulate x86 systems in a hypervisor. If your ancient non-x86 system dies you either get lucky on ebay or you don't. I also can't casually send the customer a text telling them their car is ready or have my supervisor look at my metrics on what I'm doing with the machine. Or a million other things on these old systems. Or you can, sorta, by shoehorning in garbage like analog modems and swapping out floppies all the time, but who wants to do that? I think young people tend to fetishize old tech because they weren't there when it was used. Floppy failures were common, IRQ issues, programs taking down the entire OS, no real security, and "the computer" was something the specialist at your shop took days of training to learn how to use and when he wasn't there "the computer" was useless. Now its been vastly democratized and has higher levels of ease of use. That comes at the cost of complexity.

mrob 10y ago
>A CLI or text only approach is going to take longer to learn and be comfortable with I disagree. I once worked on a telephone switchboard, using a old text based interface and a specially designed keyboard with dedicated buttons for all the functions. It took a few minutes to learn what the buttons did. Everything was fast and responsive, and there were no distractions on screen. I later worked there again after they had "upgraded" to a modern Windows based system. This was far more difficult and slower to use and it did nothing the old system couldn't. Training somebody to push a dedicated button is easier than training somebody to use a GUI. Look at the interfaces people use at fast food restaurants. There's a huge array of dedicated buttons, and it takes very little skill to operate. The only advantage of GUIs over dedicated hardware UIs is lower cost.
- drzaiusapelord 10y ago
  Well, the real advantage is the button can change or you can add more buttons trivially. Compare the on-screen dialer and keyboard of the iPhone to the old school 9-digit keypad. The former is superior for most use cases. Also you can abstract away your GUI interface with a hardware button if preferred. I'm using a hardware keyboard to type this for example, even though this computer has a touch screen. I have this flexibility and customization options that the old school approach didn't really have.