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I miss 90s complexity! Sparc, MIPS, and Alpha were still alive. Assembly was a thing. Mobile telephones for mortals were a marvel and technological breakthrou
by craigsmansion 7y ago
I miss 90s complexity!
Sparc, MIPS, and Alpha were still alive. Assembly was a thing.
Mobile telephones for mortals were a marvel and technological breakthrough that could let you communicate everywhere.
3D graphics could run in software, and Abrash' Black Book was a black book, and even more, wizards had managed to capture things in hardware for the PC with some sort of voodoo.
Now we have 1.5 dominant boring architecture where performance is bumped by "Meh, just double the cores and crank it to 11" and no one cares because everything is ecmascript anyway, mobile telephones, or "telephones", are devices that mildly entertain you as you wait for death, and graphics are a matter of dumping the right shaders through the right libraries.
The future just looked a little more interesting. The 90s for me is where the great tragedy of simplification began.
The present is still pretty okay though, I just would have liked it a little "rougher" computing wise :)
- klingonopera 7y ago> Meh, just double the cores and crank it to 11 Too true. I'm flabbergasted everytime I think about Chris Sawyer having written everything in TTD, then TTDLX and finally RCT with Assembly (!), and yes, that also includes the window GUI system that was built into the game. [1]: https://www.eurogamer.net/articles/2016-03-03-a-big-interview-with-chris-sawyer-the-creator-of-rollercoaster-tycoon https://www.eurogamer.net/articles/2016-03-03-a-big-intervie... [2]: https://www.reddit.com/r/programming/comments/92zyo/chris_sawyer_on_creating_roller_coaster_tycoon/ https://www.reddit.com/r/programming/comments/92zyo/chris_sa... [3]: http://www.chrissawyergames.com/faq3.htm http://www.chrissawyergames.com/faq3.htm
- ddingus 7y agoI think we are headed back that direction. Custom hardware is coming again. It's coming because we've hit walls on sequential compute. Multi-core parallel and concurrent models are building nicely, but software lags behind, and those problems are hard. Some problems do not benefit from either of those things too. Enter custom silicon. The combination of software and well realized custom silicon to enhance performance, and that's peak performance. Always is.
- snvzz 7y agoAmiga still teaching lessons, after almost 35 years.
- ddingus 7y agoAlso SGI A 250Mhz R5K O2 could map live video onto a changing surface in real time. Among lots of other spiffy, hardware enhanced things.
- iamnothere 7y agoAlso specialization into specific niches, with cool accessories, like the SBCs are doing. It's pretty exciting. I mean, Python on a chip is pretty amazing.
- ddingus 7y agoTotally. Smaller scale computing is a lot of fun right now.