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Expectations for what software should be able to do were quite a bit lower in the 80s too :) I started learning to code as a kid in the 80s on 8-bit machines.
by jcadam 6y ago
Expectations for what software should be able to do were quite a bit lower in the 80s too :)
I started learning to code as a kid in the 80s on 8-bit machines. Seemed like there was rapid progress in the availability of CPU power, RAM, etc., up until the early 2000s and then things seemed to... slow down.
Which is about the time everybody started to focus hard on horizontal scalability.
- rayiner 6y agoWere they? My recollection is that software back then had more features. Software today is neutered in comparison. (Compared Google Docs to Word Perfect from the early 1990s).
- xellisx 6y agoThink about Windows and how easily it was to change settings, you went to the control panel. Now in Windows 10 you have dig around to find things. It's like they are trying to hide stuff.
- dehrmann 6y agoNo, they're just maintaining two separate interfaces for everything.
- siberianbear 6y agoGoogle Docs isn't a great example. In WordPerfect's case, WordPerfect was the product and there was an incentive to make it great. Google Docs isn't the product. It's free. You're the product. And it only needs to be good enough to keep competitors from creating something so great that it removes their first-mover advantage. It's clear that Google has given up developing new features for it.
- dehrmann 6y agoA solid portion of Docs users are paid G Suite users.
- AlexCoventry 6y agoGrammar checking on Google docs had gotten wicked smart.
- Dylan16807 6y agoI can only remember a single time the bad grammar marker on google docs wasn't hilariously wrong, contorting a perfectly normal sentence into something weird. And that one time it was catching a doubled word.
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- ghaff 6y agoOne of the nice things about GSuite (for me) is that it implements a nice spectrum of features that many people need without a lot of other stuff. I certainly get that some people need that other stuff whether sophisticated revision tracking, pivot tables, etc. But for my regular but generally unsophisticated use of GSuite, it's better than anything I've used in years. [ADDED: And as other have mentioned while the collaborative editing of Google Docs doesn't scale all that well, it's a great remote collaboration tool. Never want to go back to sending docs around.] I actually never much cared for WordPerfect with all its formatting codes and so forth. I was actually a bigger fan of early DOS-based Microsoft Word at the time.
- krisoft 6y agoAre you sure about that Google Docs comparision? It can be edited at the same time by multiple people in a seamless way. Did Word Perfect do that?
- zozbot234 6y agoOf course it did. You just had multiple people sitting at the computer. :-P With a KVM-sharing switch if you wanted to be fancy about it.
- fragmede 6y agoThat's a smart alec answer, but there's a bit of truth to it - back in the 80's when WordPerfect had its heyday, there wasn't a better answer. The Internet was still barely out of research labs, computers were slow and memory was very limited. Video calling was still the realm of science fiction.
- dehrmann 6y agoBy the mid 2000s, they just started adding more cores. Machines kept getting more memory, albeit slower. SSDs have been a game changer, and they really only got big in the last 10 years. We never went past 64 bits because it's enough bits to address memory for the foreseeable future, and applications needing more are rare. It's mostly cryptography.
- nelgaard 6y agoThe situation was not so different back then. My first paid job was in the late 80's. I had to do something about a system that was basically a lot of menus written in Oracle Forms running in terminals on SCO Unix or maybe Xenix. I was unbearable slow. Users had to wait 5+ seconds every time they pressed a key. And it was a nightmare to try to optimize it. But then I scrapped it and rewrote the whole thing using plain C and curses and system() calls to do the actual work. Hard-coding the menu hierarchy structure which nobody was changing anyway. That made the system very fast. The company was very surprised that navigating menus could be so fast.
- sys_64738 6y agoThe original multitasking Amiga kernel was written in 13k. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Exec_(Amiga) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Exec_(Amiga)
- jcadam 6y agoYea, I had an amiga 500 and later a 1200 for a while. Moving to a PC running DOS/Windows felt like a step down.