5 ms·

It feels like the article merely repeats some of what I read in the Unix haters handbook years ago. LISP machines were extraordinarily expensive for a single-u

It feels like the article merely repeats some of what I read in the Unix haters handbook years ago. LISP machines were extraordinarily expensive for a single-user machine, much of which was due to the heavyweight hardware (like 32-bit processors, 32MB of RAM and fast high-capacity disks in the 1980s). If I recall correctly, your basic Symbolics LISP machine, with software, cost about $50,000 in 1986. According to an online inflation calculator, that's $96,500 in today's money. I can guarantee that the resulting 64-core 128GB machine with 1TB of SSDs in RAID-10 configuration would beat the pants off of the Symbolics workstation, use less power and make much less noise and you'd have money left over. All that said, interface responsiveness is part of the user experience. If your application/OS/device crosses that threshold were the user has to wait, it's a failure. People only stick with Word for Windows (surely the unnamed word processor referenced) because they don't know better or have a choice.

asciilifeform 16y ago
> I can guarantee that the resulting 64-core 128GB machine with 1TB of SSDs in RAID-10 configuration would beat the pants off of the Symbolics workstation Running MS junk, web 2.0 crapware, or open-source masterpieces of infinite bloat such as Firefox? Don't be so sure.
- deleted 16y ago
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  - asciilifeform 16y ago
    > you don't need to run MS office, right? Tell that to my employer, one of the world's largest bureaucracies. My home computers are 100% MS-free and suffer the same basic problem. The difference is in degree, not kind. Run OpenOffice lately? > Ubuntu linux + chrome + emacs = no lag. Lag enough to make me retch. > I don't think... any computer is immune to the problems of network latencies. The post was not about individual computers, but about computer systems. That the whole world is on a lunatic lemming-march back to the days of timesharing does not excuse the results. Network latency should have no bearing on the performance of a word processor. That we have built ones where it routinely does is idiocy of the purest sort.

asciilifeform 16y ago

> I can guarantee that the resulting 64-core 128GB machine with 1TB of SSDs in RAID-10 configuration would beat the pants off of the Symbolics workstation Running MS junk, web 2.0 crapware, or open-source masterpieces of infinite bloat such as Firefox? Don't be so sure.

deleted 16y ago
[deleted]
- asciilifeform 16y ago
  > you don't need to run MS office, right? Tell that to my employer, one of the world's largest bureaucracies. My home computers are 100% MS-free and suffer the same basic problem. The difference is in degree, not kind. Run OpenOffice lately? > Ubuntu linux + chrome + emacs = no lag. Lag enough to make me retch. > I don't think... any computer is immune to the problems of network latencies. The post was not about individual computers, but about computer systems. That the whole world is on a lunatic lemming-march back to the days of timesharing does not excuse the results. Network latency should have no bearing on the performance of a word processor. That we have built ones where it routinely does is idiocy of the purest sort.