7 ms·

You are looking back at the past with rosy goggles. What I remember from the time was how you couldn’t run that many things simultaneously. Back when the Penti

by Decade 6y ago

You are looking back at the past with rosy goggles. What I remember from the time was how you couldn’t run that many things simultaneously. Back when the Pentium II was first released, I even had to close applications, not because the computer ran out of RAM, but because the TCP/IP stack that came with Windows 95 didn’t allow very many simultaneous connections. My web browser and my chat were causing each other to error out. AJAX was not around until late in the Pentium II lifecycle. Web pages were slow, with their need for full refreshes every time (fast static pages an anomaly then as now), and browsers’ network interaction was annoyingly limited. Google Maps was the application that showed us what AJAX really could do, years after the Pentium II was discontinued. Also, video really sucked back in the day. A Pentium II could barely process DVD-resolution MPEG-2 in realtime. Internet connections generally were not the several Mbit/s necessary to get DVD quality with an MPEG-2 codec. Increasing resolution increases the processing power geometrically. Being able to Zoom call and see up to 16 live video feeds simultaneously is an amazing advance in technology. I am also annoyed at the resource consumption, but not surprised. Even something “native” like Qt doesn’t seem to be using the actual OS-provided widgets, only imitating them. I figure it’s just the burden we have to pay for other conveniences. Like how efficient supply lines means consumer toilet paper shortages while the suppliers of office toilet sit on unsold inventory.

badsectoracula 6y ago
FWIW i do not remember having issues like that, i had mIRC practically always open, a web browser, email application, etc and i do not remember ever having networking issues. Internet was slow but that was largely because for the most part of the 90s i was stuck with a very slow 2400 baud modem - i got to appreciate the option that browsers had to not download images by default :-P. But in general i do not remember being unable to run multiple programs at the same time, even when i was using Windows 3.1 (though with Win3.1 things were a bit more unstable mainly due to the cooperative multitasking).
- cambalache 6y ago
  Me neither, I'm not going to lie and say that I had 40 applications opened, but I DID have 5-10 apps using the web with 0 issues (A browser+IRC App + Email Client+MICQ+MSN Messenger+Kazaam/Napster+Winamp in stream mode). Very very few of the web and desktop applications of today are as snappy and user-friendly as classic Winamp.
  - worthless-trash 6y ago
    It really whipped the llamas ass.
    - millzlane 6y ago
      It still does! https://www.winamp.com/ https://www.winamp.com/
  - marcus_holmes 6y ago
    And yet, people stopped using it. I used to use it all the time. Now I use Spotify instead. I'm not sure I want to go back to curating my own collection of mp3's again.
    - GauntletWizard 6y ago
      In a better world, you really wouldn't need to. Winamp was great - The weak point was always the playlist editor, but winamp's interface for simply playing music and seeing what was up next was wonderful. Spotify could provide you with a playlist plugin that simply gave a list of URLs, or let you download one that lasted X hours.
    - dep_b 6y ago
      Mobile phones happened. Tiny memories while always being connected.
    - mrweasel 6y ago
      Sure, but if you could have Spotify as is, or a light weight player, like WinAMP, both with equal access to the Spotify service, which would you pick? People aren't using Spotify because the player is fantastic, they use it because Spotify has a huge library, is reasonable price and the player is sort of okay.
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
- Decade 6y ago
  IRC, SMTP, IMAP are protocols from back when desktop operating systems didn’t even come with TCP/IP. They would use a single connection for unlimited messages. I was using a “modern” chat program, AOL Instant Messenger. Alright, the missing part of my story was that I was also using a proxy program to share a single connection with my brothers. NAT wasn’t widely available yet, and Winmodems were much easier to find than hardware modems. (And I hadn’t discovered Linux and the free Unixes yet.) So, every TCP connection that AIM made was 2 connections in the proxy program. We quickly discovered that AIM on more than one computer at a time made the entire Internet unusable. Every generation of developers decries the next generation for bloat, but Windows 95 had preemptive multitasking that made the computer so much snappier (plus other features), at the cost of multiple times more RAM needed than Windows 3.1. (16 MB was the unofficial minimum, and often painfully small. Microsoft’s official minimum was impractical back then.) Windows XP had protected memory that made it more feasible to run multiple applications, because they were much less likely to crash each other (plus other features, including a TCP/IP stack featuring NAT and a useful connection limit), at another several multiples more RAM needed. There have always been tradeoffs. Back in the day, programs were small and developers focused more on making sure they did not crash, because they didn’t have lots of RAM and crashing would often require the computer to reboot. That developer focus meant less focus on delivering features to users. (Also, security has often meant bloat.) Now, you barely need to know anything about computer science, and you can deliver applications to users, at the cost of ginormous runtime requirements.
userbinator 6y ago
A Pentium II could barely process DVD-resolution MPEG-2 in realtime. According to http://www.vogons.org/viewtopic.php?p=423016#p423016 http://www.vogons.org/viewtopic.php?p=423016#p423016 a 350MHz PII would've been enough for DVD, and that's 720x480@30fps; videoconferencing would more commonly use 320x240 or 352x288 which has 1/4 the pixels, and H261 or H263 instead as the codec. Being able to Zoom call and see up to 16 live video feeds simultaneously is an amazing advance in technology. I'm not familiar with Zoom as I don't use it, but it's very likely you're not actually receiving and decoding 16 separate video streams; instead a MCU or "mux box" is used to combine the streams from all the other participants into one stream, and they do it with dedicated hardware. That said, video is one of the cases where increased computing power has actually yielded proportional returns.
- isignal 6y ago
  Don’t think it can be an MCU box. You can select an individual stream from the grid to make it larger almost instantly. The individual feeds can display both as grid and a horizontal row. I’m assuming they send individual feeds and the client can ask for feeds at different predefined resolutions.
  - nv-vn 6y ago
    Without having used Zoom much I can't definitively say how it works, but I've used BlueJeans quite a bit and noticed compression artifacts in various parts of the UI (e.g. text underneath each video source). That means BlueJeans is definitely muxing video sources and it really does not have a noticeable delay when changing the view. Since each video is already so compressed I think they can get away with sending you really low bitrate streams during the transition and you'll barely notice.
  - jotm 6y ago
    Mixed plus whichever feed you request to enlarge sounds more reasonable.
- jcelerier 6y ago
  I have an iMac G4 from 2003 (the sunflower things) on which I installed Debian PPC and it is able to stream 720p content from my local network and play it back smoothly on VLC
anthk 6y ago
I could see Street View-like vistas under a Pentium3/Amd Athlon. On power, I did the same you can do today but with an Athlon XP and Kopete. On video, since BeOS and Mplayer I could multitask perfectly XVid movies good enough for its era.
nv-vn 6y ago
It may be true that people are partially looking back in rose-tinted glasses, but there's more than just an inkling of truth to their side. Casey Muratori (game developer for the Witness) has a really good rant [1] about bloat in Visual Studio specifically, where he demonstrates load times & the debugger UI updating today vs on an Pentium 4 running XP. Whether or not you attribute the performance difference to new features in Win10/VS, it's worth considering the fact that workflows are still being impacted so significantly on modern hardware. We were able to extract 100s of times more out of hardware and gave it up for ??? [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GC-0tCy4P1U https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GC-0tCy4P1U
- acqq 6y ago
  The Visual Studio 6 on Pentium 4 demonstration starts around 36th minute. I used Visual Studio 6 for years, and yes, I can confirm, it was really that fast. It's also not true that there were problems with more applications running etc as "Decade" claims. Or to be more precise, there were no problems if one used Windows NT, and I've used NT 3.51, NT 4 and 2000 for development, starting with Windows development even before they were available. And before that, Windows 3.x was indeed less stable, but it is the time before 1995. Note that the first useful web browser was made in 1993, internet as we know it today practically didn't exist. There were networks, but not web.
  - Decade 6y ago
    Maybe it’s possible for opposite things to be true if they happen to different people. I wasn’t a developer back then. Windows NT required a multiple more RAM to run than the consumer versions of Windows (oh no, bloat!), and was much more picky about what hardware it ran on. Starting with XP, the professional and consumer versions of Windows have merged. We are so lucky.
    - acqq 6y ago
      > I wasn’t a developer back then. That explains your inaccurate perspective. > Windows NT required a multiple more RAM to run than the consumer versions of Windows (oh no, bloat!), and was much more picky about what hardware it ran on. Allow me to claim that that is also not true, in the form you state it. Again, I've lived through all this, and I can tell you what that was about. The "pickiness" of NT was even at these times not about the motherboards and the chipsets. It was about the hardware consumer devices. Many things that probably don't even exist as the products today, like a black-and-white hand-scanner that scanned as you moved your hand over the paper and had only Windows 3.x drivers on the floppy with it. There was never a problem of having a developer machine running NT in any reasonable price range, with a reasonable graphic card, monitor, keyboard and mouse. And, at the start, a phone line modem transmitting some kilobytes per second! The RAM needs did exist, but again not such as they are made to be believed by later distortions. If I remember correctly (it changed relatively fast), at the time NT was published, Microsoft had to deliver it claiming that it will run on 4 MB, the OS and the programs and the graphics, all had to fit. Let me repeat, 4 MB. It run, but not comfortably for bigger programs. But the point is -- as soon as you at that time had 8 MB you haven't had a problem. A little later, for comfortable work, 16 MB were more than a good choice. It was a hundred, two or three of $ more than the cheapest possible offer (yes, that were the prices then), but that was it. RAM was the only thing you had to care about to have NT running. The point is, at that time there were enough those who didn't want to use Windows NT at all, clutching to 3.x and then 95 and these are those who promoted the horror stories about OS problems. But it was just their ignorance. 95 was also reasonably stable, unless you used, like many, some "utility" programs that were more malware than of real use (the "cleaning", "protection" or even "ram expander" snake oils were used by some even then -- no to mention that a lot of people believed they had to try any program that happens to access them). The good development tools were good and stable, especially command line (in GUI areas, there were some snake oils among them too). But Word did crash even under NT, and even during the first half of 2000-s decade, and that's completely different story, that was intentional at that time for these products.
harikb 6y ago
There were always idiots writing buggy code. The issues you mention are about “old software” on “old hardware”. GP is only talking about “old style of software development”. Granted Qt, X, Win API is unnecessarily complicated.
jotm 6y ago
Most of those have nothing to do with OP's point, which is that some software uses way too much processing power than it should. While on the topic, let's remember the speech recognition software available for Windows (and some for Android 2.x) that was completely offline and could be voice activated with, gasp, any command! Google with its massive data centers can only do "OK/Hey Google". Riiight. I can't believe there are actually apologists for this bs.
- innocenat 6y ago
  What was the software name, if I may ask? I remember speech recognition pre-CNN to be quite terrible.
  - jotm 6y ago
    Microsoft had speech recognition since WinXP. And also Dragon Naturally Speaking. Both needed a couple of hours of training, but worked really well, completely offline, it was amazing for me at the time. It did have a very high processor usage, but that was on freaking single core Athlon and Pentium. I'm not even a native English speaker, though dare I say my English is on par with any American.
- slightwinder 6y ago
  Do you mean Dragon Speech or how it was called? Anyway, old speech recognition software was quite horrible. Most did not even worked without prior training. And Google does have now offline-speech recognition too. But true, the ability to trigger with any desired phrase is something still missing.
  - rjmunro 6y ago
    The ability to trigger with any desired phrase is easy, but not done for privacy reasons, to reduce the chance of it accidentally listening to irrelevant conversations. The inability to change it from Hey google is done for marketing / usability reasons.
  - TrinaryWorksToo 6y ago
slightwinder 6y ago
To be fair, 10-20 years ago was the age of Windows XP and Windows 7, not Windows 95. There barely was anything good about Windows 95, and there are likely not many people missing it, but it was also a complete different era from the later "modern" desktops, hardware as also software-wise. If anything I would call that era the alpha-version, problems included.

by Decade 6y ago

badsectoracula 6y ago

FWIW i do not remember having issues like that, i had mIRC practically always open, a web browser, email application, etc and i do not remember ever having networking issues. Internet was slow but that was largely because for the most part of the 90s i was stuck with a very slow 2400 baud modem - i got to appreciate the option that browsers had to not download images by default :-P. But in general i do not remember being unable to run multiple programs at the same time, even when i was using Windows 3.1 (though with Win3.1 things were a bit more unstable mainly due to the cooperative multitasking).

cambalache 6y ago
Me neither, I'm not going to lie and say that I had 40 applications opened, but I DID have 5-10 apps using the web with 0 issues (A browser+IRC App + Email Client+MICQ+MSN Messenger+Kazaam/Napster+Winamp in stream mode). Very very few of the web and desktop applications of today are as snappy and user-friendly as classic Winamp.
- worthless-trash 6y ago
  It really whipped the llamas ass.
  - millzlane 6y ago
    It still does! https://www.winamp.com/ https://www.winamp.com/
- marcus_holmes 6y ago
  And yet, people stopped using it. I used to use it all the time. Now I use Spotify instead. I'm not sure I want to go back to curating my own collection of mp3's again.
  - GauntletWizard 6y ago
    In a better world, you really wouldn't need to. Winamp was great - The weak point was always the playlist editor, but winamp's interface for simply playing music and seeing what was up next was wonderful. Spotify could provide you with a playlist plugin that simply gave a list of URLs, or let you download one that lasted X hours.
  - dep_b 6y ago
    Mobile phones happened. Tiny memories while always being connected.
  - mrweasel 6y ago
    Sure, but if you could have Spotify as is, or a light weight player, like WinAMP, both with equal access to the Spotify service, which would you pick? People aren't using Spotify because the player is fantastic, they use it because Spotify has a huge library, is reasonable price and the player is sort of okay.
deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
Decade 6y ago
IRC, SMTP, IMAP are protocols from back when desktop operating systems didn’t even come with TCP/IP. They would use a single connection for unlimited messages. I was using a “modern” chat program, AOL Instant Messenger. Alright, the missing part of my story was that I was also using a proxy program to share a single connection with my brothers. NAT wasn’t widely available yet, and Winmodems were much easier to find than hardware modems. (And I hadn’t discovered Linux and the free Unixes yet.) So, every TCP connection that AIM made was 2 connections in the proxy program. We quickly discovered that AIM on more than one computer at a time made the entire Internet unusable. Every generation of developers decries the next generation for bloat, but Windows 95 had preemptive multitasking that made the computer so much snappier (plus other features), at the cost of multiple times more RAM needed than Windows 3.1. (16 MB was the unofficial minimum, and often painfully small. Microsoft’s official minimum was impractical back then.) Windows XP had protected memory that made it more feasible to run multiple applications, because they were much less likely to crash each other (plus other features, including a TCP/IP stack featuring NAT and a useful connection limit), at another several multiples more RAM needed. There have always been tradeoffs. Back in the day, programs were small and developers focused more on making sure they did not crash, because they didn’t have lots of RAM and crashing would often require the computer to reboot. That developer focus meant less focus on delivering features to users. (Also, security has often meant bloat.) Now, you barely need to know anything about computer science, and you can deliver applications to users, at the cost of ginormous runtime requirements.

userbinator 6y ago

A Pentium II could barely process DVD-resolution MPEG-2 in realtime. According to http://www.vogons.org/viewtopic.php?p=423016#p423016 http://www.vogons.org/viewtopic.php?p=423016#p423016 a 350MHz PII would've been enough for DVD, and that's 720x480@30fps; videoconferencing would more commonly use 320x240 or 352x288 which has 1/4 the pixels, and H261 or H263 instead as the codec. Being able to Zoom call and see up to 16 live video feeds simultaneously is an amazing advance in technology. I'm not familiar with Zoom as I don't use it, but it's very likely you're not actually receiving and decoding 16 separate video streams; instead a MCU or "mux box" is used to combine the streams from all the other participants into one stream, and they do it with dedicated hardware. That said, video is one of the cases where increased computing power has actually yielded proportional returns.

isignal 6y ago
Don’t think it can be an MCU box. You can select an individual stream from the grid to make it larger almost instantly. The individual feeds can display both as grid and a horizontal row. I’m assuming they send individual feeds and the client can ask for feeds at different predefined resolutions.
- nv-vn 6y ago
  Without having used Zoom much I can't definitively say how it works, but I've used BlueJeans quite a bit and noticed compression artifacts in various parts of the UI (e.g. text underneath each video source). That means BlueJeans is definitely muxing video sources and it really does not have a noticeable delay when changing the view. Since each video is already so compressed I think they can get away with sending you really low bitrate streams during the transition and you'll barely notice.
- jotm 6y ago
  Mixed plus whichever feed you request to enlarge sounds more reasonable.
jcelerier 6y ago
I have an iMac G4 from 2003 (the sunflower things) on which I installed Debian PPC and it is able to stream 720p content from my local network and play it back smoothly on VLC

anthk 6y ago

I could see Street View-like vistas under a Pentium3/Amd Athlon. On power, I did the same you can do today but with an Athlon XP and Kopete. On video, since BeOS and Mplayer I could multitask perfectly XVid movies good enough for its era.

nv-vn 6y ago

It may be true that people are partially looking back in rose-tinted glasses, but there's more than just an inkling of truth to their side. Casey Muratori (game developer for the Witness) has a really good rant [1] about bloat in Visual Studio specifically, where he demonstrates load times & the debugger UI updating today vs on an Pentium 4 running XP. Whether or not you attribute the performance difference to new features in Win10/VS, it's worth considering the fact that workflows are still being impacted so significantly on modern hardware. We were able to extract 100s of times more out of hardware and gave it up for ??? [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GC-0tCy4P1U https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GC-0tCy4P1U

acqq 6y ago
The Visual Studio 6 on Pentium 4 demonstration starts around 36th minute. I used Visual Studio 6 for years, and yes, I can confirm, it was really that fast. It's also not true that there were problems with more applications running etc as "Decade" claims. Or to be more precise, there were no problems if one used Windows NT, and I've used NT 3.51, NT 4 and 2000 for development, starting with Windows development even before they were available. And before that, Windows 3.x was indeed less stable, but it is the time before 1995. Note that the first useful web browser was made in 1993, internet as we know it today practically didn't exist. There were networks, but not web.
- Decade 6y ago
  Maybe it’s possible for opposite things to be true if they happen to different people. I wasn’t a developer back then. Windows NT required a multiple more RAM to run than the consumer versions of Windows (oh no, bloat!), and was much more picky about what hardware it ran on. Starting with XP, the professional and consumer versions of Windows have merged. We are so lucky.
  - acqq 6y ago
    > I wasn’t a developer back then. That explains your inaccurate perspective. > Windows NT required a multiple more RAM to run than the consumer versions of Windows (oh no, bloat!), and was much more picky about what hardware it ran on. Allow me to claim that that is also not true, in the form you state it. Again, I've lived through all this, and I can tell you what that was about. The "pickiness" of NT was even at these times not about the motherboards and the chipsets. It was about the hardware consumer devices. Many things that probably don't even exist as the products today, like a black-and-white hand-scanner that scanned as you moved your hand over the paper and had only Windows 3.x drivers on the floppy with it. There was never a problem of having a developer machine running NT in any reasonable price range, with a reasonable graphic card, monitor, keyboard and mouse. And, at the start, a phone line modem transmitting some kilobytes per second! The RAM needs did exist, but again not such as they are made to be believed by later distortions. If I remember correctly (it changed relatively fast), at the time NT was published, Microsoft had to deliver it claiming that it will run on 4 MB, the OS and the programs and the graphics, all had to fit. Let me repeat, 4 MB. It run, but not comfortably for bigger programs. But the point is -- as soon as you at that time had 8 MB you haven't had a problem. A little later, for comfortable work, 16 MB were more than a good choice. It was a hundred, two or three of $ more than the cheapest possible offer (yes, that were the prices then), but that was it. RAM was the only thing you had to care about to have NT running. The point is, at that time there were enough those who didn't want to use Windows NT at all, clutching to 3.x and then 95 and these are those who promoted the horror stories about OS problems. But it was just their ignorance. 95 was also reasonably stable, unless you used, like many, some "utility" programs that were more malware than of real use (the "cleaning", "protection" or even "ram expander" snake oils were used by some even then -- no to mention that a lot of people believed they had to try any program that happens to access them). The good development tools were good and stable, especially command line (in GUI areas, there were some snake oils among them too). But Word did crash even under NT, and even during the first half of 2000-s decade, and that's completely different story, that was intentional at that time for these products.

harikb 6y ago

There were always idiots writing buggy code. The issues you mention are about “old software” on “old hardware”. GP is only talking about “old style of software development”. Granted Qt, X, Win API is unnecessarily complicated.

jotm 6y ago

Most of those have nothing to do with OP's point, which is that some software uses way too much processing power than it should. While on the topic, let's remember the speech recognition software available for Windows (and some for Android 2.x) that was completely offline and could be voice activated with, gasp, any command! Google with its massive data centers can only do "OK/Hey Google". Riiight. I can't believe there are actually apologists for this bs.

innocenat 6y ago
What was the software name, if I may ask? I remember speech recognition pre-CNN to be quite terrible.
- jotm 6y ago
  Microsoft had speech recognition since WinXP. And also Dragon Naturally Speaking. Both needed a couple of hours of training, but worked really well, completely offline, it was amazing for me at the time. It did have a very high processor usage, but that was on freaking single core Athlon and Pentium. I'm not even a native English speaker, though dare I say my English is on par with any American.
slightwinder 6y ago
Do you mean Dragon Speech or how it was called? Anyway, old speech recognition software was quite horrible. Most did not even worked without prior training. And Google does have now offline-speech recognition too. But true, the ability to trigger with any desired phrase is something still missing.
- rjmunro 6y ago
  The ability to trigger with any desired phrase is easy, but not done for privacy reasons, to reduce the chance of it accidentally listening to irrelevant conversations. The inability to change it from Hey google is done for marketing / usability reasons.
- TrinaryWorksToo 6y ago

slightwinder 6y ago

To be fair, 10-20 years ago was the age of Windows XP and Windows 7, not Windows 95. There barely was anything good about Windows 95, and there are likely not many people missing it, but it was also a complete different era from the later "modern" desktops, hardware as also software-wise. If anything I would call that era the alpha-version, problems included.