6 ms·

Amazing how little has changed. Higher res screens with more colours. Where do all the other processor cycles go?

• petepete 6y ago
  And then brand new tools like VisiData appear and everything feels like it's gone full circle. https://www.visidata.org/ https://www.visidata.org/
• retrac 6y ago
  Don't underestimate just how many cycles ended up sucked into higher resolution screens with more colours. There might well be more integer calculations going on to render a single screen of text from vector fonts onto a 4K display, than from an hour of VisiCalc running away on an 8086.
• TimTheTinker 6y ago
  Convenience and usability, mostly — for the user as well as the developer. Both as users and developers, we’re able to do so much more with less effort on the computers of today. If you don’t believe me, I challenge you to try to get a little work done on an old 286 sometime.
  • bernardv 6y ago
    It’s all relative though. Back in the early/mid ‘80s, the ability to produce a single computer-generated chart out of a table of numbers was mind-blowing! Being able to print it on your new sleek dot-matrix printer was the icing on the cake! I.e. expectations were very different back in the land of the 286.
• dehrmann 6y ago
  Massively larger spreadsheets, higher-precision values, but for the most part, I'd bet it's not cycles that are so interesting--modern Excel is probably surprisingly happy at 12 MHz 99% of the time. Memory and binary size is where the real bloat is.