4 ms·

I always think back to when I had a 120MB hard disk in the early 90s. It contained multiple editors, raytracers, games, music editors + music, images, paint pro

I always think back to when I had a 120MB hard disk in the early 90s. It contained multiple editors, raytracers, games, music editors + music, images, paint programs, multiple programming languages and development kits, a multi-tasking operating system... and room to spare. 90s me would be absolutely floored by a text editor needing 438MB RAM. Wait, what am I saying? 2018 me is pretty flabbergasted by it, but perhaps less surprised (and more cynical) than 90s me.

paulryanrogers 9y ago
My rose-tinted glasses are cracked, so I don't want to go back. Software was a lot less capable back then. And APIs were often incredibly obtuse, bespoke, or both.
- pasta 9y ago
  "Software was a lot less capable back then" I think this is true-ish. But when I compare Blender (330MB) and 3ds Max (6GB) I got the feeling some software is just better constructed. Using a web browser as a text editor might not be the best solution...
  - mynewtb 9y ago
    3dsmax comes with lots of content though I guess?
  - whywhywhywhy 9y ago
    > some software is just better constructed Exactly, TextMate and Sublime Text are both around 35 meg and both are close to feature parity for with Atom. It's only this more recent breed of software that is so absurdly bloated.
  - ahtu123 9y ago
    Following the current trajectory, the next cool text editor will ship with a full hidden Linux VM.
- com2kid 9y ago
  > Software was a lot less capable back then. Some was. WinAmp came out in 1997, 2.x was released in 1998. Real time streaming media. Visual Studio 6 came out in 1998, had most of Intellisense up and running. The refactoring stuff wasn't there yet, but it could do remote debugging. The Windows APIs were obtuse, but incredibly well documented. It'd take a long time before a lot of things we take for granted got commoditized though. A streaming video player (+ server) was still an idea that a billion dollar company could be founded on. It wouldn't have been hard to write a Slack competitor then. It wouldn't have had streaming video, and the client would have been native, but you could have gotten 80% of the functionality in there, and watched as people still complained it was just a fancy wrapper around IRC. Web forums sucked though. Slashdot figured out the right idea, the entire conversation loaded at once, one big page, it took the rest of the web a lot time to catch up. 20 years later, I'm writing code, managing files, and have a chat app or two open. The monitor is higher res, and a lot larger. Hardware plug and play finally works, and printing is, on Windows at least, pretty much a solved problem. (Heck even Wi-Fi network printer works almost flawlessly!) The APIs for writing code have gotten easier to use, but it seems like everyone's documentation is now 5, small, steps above garbage. Also APIs break more often nowadays. My computer has dozens upon dozens of services running, most of which I don't know what they are. And individual websites take up more RAM than my entire OS used to. That last part isn't even a joke. To load a few paragraphs of text, hundreds of megabytes of RAM. It is cool that web browsers can natively play video. 99.9% of the time I don't want them to. I kinda just want that paragraph sitting in the <div id="content"> </div> tag.
  - nurettin 9y ago
    Delphi came out more than 20 years ago and was future tech. Multi-tiered applications and having absolute control on responsive form layouts just wasn't appreciated enough.
  - TeMPOraL 9y ago
    > WinAmp came out in 1997, 2.x was released in 1998. Real time streaming media. Related to GP's "Software was a lot less capable back then." - somehow, WinAmp 2.x seems to be peak capability of music players; I don't recall any player made later that would be comparable in features for playing local music (with maybe the exception of Foobar2000). My rose-tinted glasses have some scratches on them, but I still maintain that software of today didn't gain many meaningful features over the late 90s / early 2000s, and yet it grown tremendously in size and resource use.
- z3phyr 9y ago
  I think the bottleneck in the 90s was not software, but hardware. Most of the software was almost as capable and arguably more efficient than the software made _today_ The most efficient software today is still built with the lower level mindset of conserving memory and increasing runtime performance (Browsers, Compilers, Vector Graphics, Games etc)
  - ahtu123 9y ago
    It's still important to not create ridiculous software. The majority of devices have batteries and sloppy programming will kill the uptime. That's the main reason I delete things. One editor I can run for 8 hours on a full battery and another one for 2h.
- KozmoNau7 9y ago
  Sometimes the lack of capability was a good thing, meaning less distractions and more focus on the core functionality. The simplicity of Win3.11 and Win95 was great, and that isn't just rose tinted glasses speaking.
  - tluyben2 9y ago
    Simplicity yes, but as someone who worked in uni with both 3.11 and Solaris (SparcStation 5), stability wise 3.11 was one of the most frustrating experiences for a user that I ever went through.
    - KozmoNau7 9y ago
      Sure, and I would like to have the simplicity without the stability issues.
SyneRyder 9y ago
> I always think back to when I had a 120MB hard disk in the early 90s.... 90s me would be absolutely floored by a text editor needing 438MB RAM. That isn't RAM, that's 438MB of drive space. Even the compressed zip download for Atom is bigger than would have fit on that entire hard drive (Atom 1.24 is 123MB zip download). Though the RAM usage is pretty close, with no files loaded it was using 360MB RAM here.

paulryanrogers 9y ago

My rose-tinted glasses are cracked, so I don't want to go back. Software was a lot less capable back then. And APIs were often incredibly obtuse, bespoke, or both.

pasta 9y ago
"Software was a lot less capable back then" I think this is true-ish. But when I compare Blender (330MB) and 3ds Max (6GB) I got the feeling some software is just better constructed. Using a web browser as a text editor might not be the best solution...
- mynewtb 9y ago
  3dsmax comes with lots of content though I guess?
- whywhywhywhy 9y ago
  > some software is just better constructed Exactly, TextMate and Sublime Text are both around 35 meg and both are close to feature parity for with Atom. It's only this more recent breed of software that is so absurdly bloated.
- ahtu123 9y ago
  Following the current trajectory, the next cool text editor will ship with a full hidden Linux VM.
com2kid 9y ago
> Software was a lot less capable back then. Some was. WinAmp came out in 1997, 2.x was released in 1998. Real time streaming media. Visual Studio 6 came out in 1998, had most of Intellisense up and running. The refactoring stuff wasn't there yet, but it could do remote debugging. The Windows APIs were obtuse, but incredibly well documented. It'd take a long time before a lot of things we take for granted got commoditized though. A streaming video player (+ server) was still an idea that a billion dollar company could be founded on. It wouldn't have been hard to write a Slack competitor then. It wouldn't have had streaming video, and the client would have been native, but you could have gotten 80% of the functionality in there, and watched as people still complained it was just a fancy wrapper around IRC. Web forums sucked though. Slashdot figured out the right idea, the entire conversation loaded at once, one big page, it took the rest of the web a lot time to catch up. 20 years later, I'm writing code, managing files, and have a chat app or two open. The monitor is higher res, and a lot larger. Hardware plug and play finally works, and printing is, on Windows at least, pretty much a solved problem. (Heck even Wi-Fi network printer works almost flawlessly!) The APIs for writing code have gotten easier to use, but it seems like everyone's documentation is now 5, small, steps above garbage. Also APIs break more often nowadays. My computer has dozens upon dozens of services running, most of which I don't know what they are. And individual websites take up more RAM than my entire OS used to. That last part isn't even a joke. To load a few paragraphs of text, hundreds of megabytes of RAM. It is cool that web browsers can natively play video. 99.9% of the time I don't want them to. I kinda just want that paragraph sitting in the <div id="content"> </div> tag.
- nurettin 9y ago
  Delphi came out more than 20 years ago and was future tech. Multi-tiered applications and having absolute control on responsive form layouts just wasn't appreciated enough.
- TeMPOraL 9y ago
  > WinAmp came out in 1997, 2.x was released in 1998. Real time streaming media. Related to GP's "Software was a lot less capable back then." - somehow, WinAmp 2.x seems to be peak capability of music players; I don't recall any player made later that would be comparable in features for playing local music (with maybe the exception of Foobar2000). My rose-tinted glasses have some scratches on them, but I still maintain that software of today didn't gain many meaningful features over the late 90s / early 2000s, and yet it grown tremendously in size and resource use.
z3phyr 9y ago
I think the bottleneck in the 90s was not software, but hardware. Most of the software was almost as capable and arguably more efficient than the software made _today_ The most efficient software today is still built with the lower level mindset of conserving memory and increasing runtime performance (Browsers, Compilers, Vector Graphics, Games etc)
- ahtu123 9y ago
  It's still important to not create ridiculous software. The majority of devices have batteries and sloppy programming will kill the uptime. That's the main reason I delete things. One editor I can run for 8 hours on a full battery and another one for 2h.
KozmoNau7 9y ago
Sometimes the lack of capability was a good thing, meaning less distractions and more focus on the core functionality. The simplicity of Win3.11 and Win95 was great, and that isn't just rose tinted glasses speaking.
- tluyben2 9y ago
  Simplicity yes, but as someone who worked in uni with both 3.11 and Solaris (SparcStation 5), stability wise 3.11 was one of the most frustrating experiences for a user that I ever went through.
  - KozmoNau7 9y ago
    Sure, and I would like to have the simplicity without the stability issues.

SyneRyder 9y ago

> I always think back to when I had a 120MB hard disk in the early 90s.... 90s me would be absolutely floored by a text editor needing 438MB RAM. That isn't RAM, that's 438MB of drive space. Even the compressed zip download for Atom is bigger than would have fit on that entire hard drive (Atom 1.24 is 123MB zip download). Though the RAM usage is pretty close, with no files loaded it was using 360MB RAM here.