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> That explains your inaccurate perspective. Yep, you really succeeded at empathy, there. /s > reasonable price range The word “reasonable” is doing a lot of

by Decade 6y ago

> That explains your inaccurate perspective. Yep, you really succeeded at empathy, there. /s > reasonable price range The word “reasonable” is doing a lot of work, here. Most Pentium II systems were not running Windows NT. They were running Windows 95 or 98, which had arbitrarily severe limitations and lacked memory protections. So, while it was technically possible to run lots of applications simultaneously on 256 MB of RAM, for most people it was a fun adventure in whether some buggy program has destabilized the system into needing to reboot to run properly again. Or whether it’s still usable with degraded functionality. In my case, that’s without using the cleaning, protection, RAM expander programs. And even on professional operating systems, web browsers crashed a lot, and any other program that had to deal with untrusted input, which is basically anything that can open files or connect to the network, has gradually bloated as they learn security or add features.

acqq 6y ago
> Most Pentium II systems were not running Windows NT. They were running Windows 95 or 98 Once again: only somebody using a computer not selected for serious development used Windows 95 and 98. No developer who knew what he was doing was using Windows 95 and 98 as his primary development machine. So if you complain about that, you used the wrong tool for your work. Like I've said, it was easy to install Windows NT, and I don't know any computer which wasn't able to run it, if it had reasonably enough RAM. > on 256 MB of RAM To illustrate "reasonably" once again, that changed at these times: I remember buying an AMD-based notebook in 2002 with 256 MB and running absolutely without problems Windows 2000 on it for a few years, before upgrading to 512 MB, which was the maximum for that notebook. And that was the time of Pentium III and IV, not Pentium II, and like I've said, I've run Windows NT on 8 MB computers, all with compilers, resource editors, debuggers and even IDE. And even before, I've run Windows 3.11 on 2 MB computer and used that for development too (the development tools being in text mode, of course). > some buggy program has destabilized the system into needing to reboot to run properly again Only on non-NT systems, and surely not developer tools. I used Windows 3.x and Windows 9x, and never had to reboot due to the developer tools "making system unstable." Not even on a 4 MB or a 16 MB machine. > web browsers crashed a lot I've used both Mosaic and Netscape, and before 2000 my main problem was surely not them crashing. Surfing mostly worked (only the pages loaded slowly, there were no CDNs then). Again, on a NT system.
- Decade 6y ago
  I think we’re losing the plot. The ggp post was about doing all sorts of Internet programs at the same time on Pentium II era computers, and now you’re talking about developer tools on a Pentium 4. Maybe it’s simultaneously true, that you could run many developer tools at the same time on Windows NT with hundreds of dollars of RAM, and attempting to run a bunch of consumer network programs at the same time (especially on consumer Windows) was asking for trouble. I remember one of the attractions of IE 5 back in the day was how each newly launched window was its own process (not windows opened by the open link in new window menu option), so unlike Mosaic and Netscape, a crash in one copy of IE did not necessarily bring down all the other windows. Multiple windows being useful because surfing with a modem was slow regardless of CDN. Remember when Yahoo was scandalous, because banner ads took so much bandwidth?
  - acqq 6y ago
    > on Pentium II > and now you’re talking about developer tools on a Pentium 4. It's to illustrate that arguments are wrong: it's Decade who uses "256 MB" as an argument which is not "small memory" for Pentium II, and I illustrate that it was common in 2002 for notebooks, the time when Pentium IV was common for developer machines. > The ggp post was about doing all sorts of Internet programs at the same time on Pentium II era computers Let me check again: "For example, IM, video/audio calls, and working with email shouldn't take hundreds of MB of RAM, a GHz-level many-core processor, and GBs of disk space. All of that was comfortably possible --- simultaneously --- with 256MB of RAM and a single-core 400MHz Pentium II." OK. That is also obviously a bit off. 256 MB with Pentium II is quite a lot, as I showed 256 MB was normal even in 2002 for notebooks, as Pentium III was already common on notebooks and IV on desktops. Working with email -- at that time e-mail clients, if they used html at all, were limited to html formats of that time so "using email" completely worked, no crashes of system on NT (Outlook did have a limit of single PST having to be less than N GB, I remember that). IM too just worked, and also without crashes on NT. That leaves "video/audio calls". Video calls were surely not common at that time, and I personally also haven't used audio calls. But the "stability" problems you claim to have been common definitely didn't exist the way you claimed, as soon as one used NT, that is, since around 1994, or later on Windows 2000 or even later on XP or Server 2003, all NT-based. And as I've said, it was not that "too much" RAM was needed, as I've run NT on 8 MB with no problem. So I still don't understand why you continue to stick to the narration that was simply not true. No, it was not that bad like you claim. Computers were quite stable even then for those who knew what they were doing. On NT, almost nothing crashed the system, except for failed hardware. Like I've said, it was that some apps were indeed less stable, like Word crashing or saving the invalid DOC file. But Excel, for example, while being in the same "suite" I don't remember to have ever crashed. I also don't remember browsers actually crashing, just the pages downloading very, very slowly.

by Decade 6y ago

acqq 6y ago

> Most Pentium II systems were not running Windows NT. They were running Windows 95 or 98 Once again: only somebody using a computer not selected for serious development used Windows 95 and 98. No developer who knew what he was doing was using Windows 95 and 98 as his primary development machine. So if you complain about that, you used the wrong tool for your work. Like I've said, it was easy to install Windows NT, and I don't know any computer which wasn't able to run it, if it had reasonably enough RAM. > on 256 MB of RAM To illustrate "reasonably" once again, that changed at these times: I remember buying an AMD-based notebook in 2002 with 256 MB and running absolutely without problems Windows 2000 on it for a few years, before upgrading to 512 MB, which was the maximum for that notebook. And that was the time of Pentium III and IV, not Pentium II, and like I've said, I've run Windows NT on 8 MB computers, all with compilers, resource editors, debuggers and even IDE. And even before, I've run Windows 3.11 on 2 MB computer and used that for development too (the development tools being in text mode, of course). > some buggy program has destabilized the system into needing to reboot to run properly again Only on non-NT systems, and surely not developer tools. I used Windows 3.x and Windows 9x, and never had to reboot due to the developer tools "making system unstable." Not even on a 4 MB or a 16 MB machine. > web browsers crashed a lot I've used both Mosaic and Netscape, and before 2000 my main problem was surely not them crashing. Surfing mostly worked (only the pages loaded slowly, there were no CDNs then). Again, on a NT system.

Decade 6y ago
I think we’re losing the plot. The ggp post was about doing all sorts of Internet programs at the same time on Pentium II era computers, and now you’re talking about developer tools on a Pentium 4. Maybe it’s simultaneously true, that you could run many developer tools at the same time on Windows NT with hundreds of dollars of RAM, and attempting to run a bunch of consumer network programs at the same time (especially on consumer Windows) was asking for trouble. I remember one of the attractions of IE 5 back in the day was how each newly launched window was its own process (not windows opened by the open link in new window menu option), so unlike Mosaic and Netscape, a crash in one copy of IE did not necessarily bring down all the other windows. Multiple windows being useful because surfing with a modem was slow regardless of CDN. Remember when Yahoo was scandalous, because banner ads took so much bandwidth?
- acqq 6y ago
  > on Pentium II > and now you’re talking about developer tools on a Pentium 4. It's to illustrate that arguments are wrong: it's Decade who uses "256 MB" as an argument which is not "small memory" for Pentium II, and I illustrate that it was common in 2002 for notebooks, the time when Pentium IV was common for developer machines. > The ggp post was about doing all sorts of Internet programs at the same time on Pentium II era computers Let me check again: "For example, IM, video/audio calls, and working with email shouldn't take hundreds of MB of RAM, a GHz-level many-core processor, and GBs of disk space. All of that was comfortably possible --- simultaneously --- with 256MB of RAM and a single-core 400MHz Pentium II." OK. That is also obviously a bit off. 256 MB with Pentium II is quite a lot, as I showed 256 MB was normal even in 2002 for notebooks, as Pentium III was already common on notebooks and IV on desktops. Working with email -- at that time e-mail clients, if they used html at all, were limited to html formats of that time so "using email" completely worked, no crashes of system on NT (Outlook did have a limit of single PST having to be less than N GB, I remember that). IM too just worked, and also without crashes on NT. That leaves "video/audio calls". Video calls were surely not common at that time, and I personally also haven't used audio calls. But the "stability" problems you claim to have been common definitely didn't exist the way you claimed, as soon as one used NT, that is, since around 1994, or later on Windows 2000 or even later on XP or Server 2003, all NT-based. And as I've said, it was not that "too much" RAM was needed, as I've run NT on 8 MB with no problem. So I still don't understand why you continue to stick to the narration that was simply not true. No, it was not that bad like you claim. Computers were quite stable even then for those who knew what they were doing. On NT, almost nothing crashed the system, except for failed hardware. Like I've said, it was that some apps were indeed less stable, like Word crashing or saving the invalid DOC file. But Excel, for example, while being in the same "suite" I don't remember to have ever crashed. I also don't remember browsers actually crashing, just the pages downloading very, very slowly.