4 ms·

I’ve been thinking several years now practically nothing I do at work on a computer can’t be done on a computer from 1995. The tools have been improved a bit an

I’ve been thinking several years now practically nothing I do at work on a computer can’t be done on a computer from 1995. The tools have been improved a bit and made worse in other places but the basic work if you’re not in a compute heavy field is pretty much the same.

dddddaviddddd 8y ago
Lack of support for modern ciphers and secure protocols becomes a deal-breaker pretty quickly if you need to access the internet much (including third-party email servers).
- boomlinde 8y ago
  I wouldn' be surprised if you run NetBSD or even OpenBSD on a 1995 computer. There's your modern ciphers and secure protocols.
  - vidarh 8y ago
    NetBSD can run on most Amiga's with a MMU and 24MB or better [1]. That's either an A3000 (1990) with memory expansion or pretty much any model with a 68020 + MMU + RAM accelerator board. I don't know if you could get it to run on an Amiga 1000, but certainly on a 500 or 2000. So a 1987 computer... Though most of the accelerator boards that are easy to obtain today are newly manufactured FPGA based ones... (NetBSD will probably run on older hardware than that too - it's just I remember people running it on Amiga's, so it's the one I'm aware of) [1] https://wiki.netbsd.org/ports/amiga/ https://wiki.netbsd.org/ports/amiga/
    - boomlinde 8y ago
      I've always wanted to try NetBSD on Amiga but I sold my MMU-equipped accelerator long ago. It'd be symbolically nice: a Unix clone running on the Amiga and Workbench clone running on the PPC Mac...
      - vidarh 8y ago
        There are completely new accelerator boards being brought out for Amiga regularly, so you still can... Of course at this point most of them replace more and more of the original hardware, so there's not much left of the original that'll still be in use.
nostrademons 8y ago
That was sorta what fueled the smartphone revolution - everything useful could be done on a computer from 1995, and then a computer from 1995 could fit in your pocket. Then they kept on increasing in power, such that smartphones today are good enough (modulo screen space) to compete with PCs from c. 2013. Now we're just waiting the newest form factor that you can shrink 1995-era processing power into. Brain implants?
- deleted 8y ago
  [deleted]
- paulirwin 8y ago
  Microcontrollers are already there, at least in terms of processing power, and they open up all kinds of possible form factors. The Cortex M0-based Arduinos can be made extremely tiny (see the Adafruit Trinket M0) and run at 48MHz. RISC vs CISC means it might not be as fast as a 33MHz Intel from 1995, but the new M4-based Arduinos are coming out running at 120MHz with the ATSAMD51 chips. When you have a 32-bit microcontroller at 120MHz in just 49mm^2 and 65µA/MHz power draw [1], all kinds of form factors are possible at speeds meeting or exceeding your average 1995 PC. [1]: https://www.microchip.com/wwwproducts/en/ATSAMD51J19A https://www.microchip.com/wwwproducts/en/ATSAMD51J19A
AnIdiotOnTheNet 8y ago
It's something I gripe about a lot. Why is Windows 10 on modern hardware so much less responsive than Windows 95 on a system that has an order of magnitude fewer resources to work with? Sure, it can't play half the games the modern machine will, but for most other tasks Windows 10 isn't providing me much, if any, extra functionality and it is taking a hell of a lot longer to do it. Why? Are software developers just that much more terrible? Have we put too many abstraction layers in the way? Put too much extra code in place in the name of nebulously effective security? Why must we put up with this?
- jackvalentine 8y ago
  I don’t know but I completely agree with your gripes. Fire up Windows NT4 in a vm with office 95... it’s shockingly fast. Apart from NT4 being a security mess we’ve gained what exactly? I went “all in” on MS with a surface and office 365 but it’s only pushed me to some kind of Librem laptop next time around.
  - AnIdiotOnTheNet 8y ago
    Sadly the situation isn't much better in the OSS desktop world. Aside from my personal opinion that those OSs are designed in such a way as to be fundamentally unsuitable as a desktop, they suffer a lot of the same bloat. Example: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7kvT40umKL8 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7kvT40umKL8

dddddaviddddd 8y ago

Lack of support for modern ciphers and secure protocols becomes a deal-breaker pretty quickly if you need to access the internet much (including third-party email servers).

boomlinde 8y ago
I wouldn' be surprised if you run NetBSD or even OpenBSD on a 1995 computer. There's your modern ciphers and secure protocols.
- vidarh 8y ago
  NetBSD can run on most Amiga's with a MMU and 24MB or better [1]. That's either an A3000 (1990) with memory expansion or pretty much any model with a 68020 + MMU + RAM accelerator board. I don't know if you could get it to run on an Amiga 1000, but certainly on a 500 or 2000. So a 1987 computer... Though most of the accelerator boards that are easy to obtain today are newly manufactured FPGA based ones... (NetBSD will probably run on older hardware than that too - it's just I remember people running it on Amiga's, so it's the one I'm aware of) [1] https://wiki.netbsd.org/ports/amiga/ https://wiki.netbsd.org/ports/amiga/
  - boomlinde 8y ago
    I've always wanted to try NetBSD on Amiga but I sold my MMU-equipped accelerator long ago. It'd be symbolically nice: a Unix clone running on the Amiga and Workbench clone running on the PPC Mac...
    - vidarh 8y ago
      There are completely new accelerator boards being brought out for Amiga regularly, so you still can... Of course at this point most of them replace more and more of the original hardware, so there's not much left of the original that'll still be in use.

nostrademons 8y ago

That was sorta what fueled the smartphone revolution - everything useful could be done on a computer from 1995, and then a computer from 1995 could fit in your pocket. Then they kept on increasing in power, such that smartphones today are good enough (modulo screen space) to compete with PCs from c. 2013. Now we're just waiting the newest form factor that you can shrink 1995-era processing power into. Brain implants?

deleted 8y ago
[deleted]
paulirwin 8y ago
Microcontrollers are already there, at least in terms of processing power, and they open up all kinds of possible form factors. The Cortex M0-based Arduinos can be made extremely tiny (see the Adafruit Trinket M0) and run at 48MHz. RISC vs CISC means it might not be as fast as a 33MHz Intel from 1995, but the new M4-based Arduinos are coming out running at 120MHz with the ATSAMD51 chips. When you have a 32-bit microcontroller at 120MHz in just 49mm^2 and 65µA/MHz power draw [1], all kinds of form factors are possible at speeds meeting or exceeding your average 1995 PC. [1]: https://www.microchip.com/wwwproducts/en/ATSAMD51J19A https://www.microchip.com/wwwproducts/en/ATSAMD51J19A

AnIdiotOnTheNet 8y ago

It's something I gripe about a lot. Why is Windows 10 on modern hardware so much less responsive than Windows 95 on a system that has an order of magnitude fewer resources to work with? Sure, it can't play half the games the modern machine will, but for most other tasks Windows 10 isn't providing me much, if any, extra functionality and it is taking a hell of a lot longer to do it. Why? Are software developers just that much more terrible? Have we put too many abstraction layers in the way? Put too much extra code in place in the name of nebulously effective security? Why must we put up with this?

jackvalentine 8y ago
I don’t know but I completely agree with your gripes. Fire up Windows NT4 in a vm with office 95... it’s shockingly fast. Apart from NT4 being a security mess we’ve gained what exactly? I went “all in” on MS with a surface and office 365 but it’s only pushed me to some kind of Librem laptop next time around.
- AnIdiotOnTheNet 8y ago
  Sadly the situation isn't much better in the OSS desktop world. Aside from my personal opinion that those OSs are designed in such a way as to be fundamentally unsuitable as a desktop, they suffer a lot of the same bloat. Example: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7kvT40umKL8 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7kvT40umKL8