3 ms·

It's sort of funny, if you can find an old HP PA-RISC 712, or Sun SS20 you can throw NeXTstep (OS-X) on it and it'll keep up with modern machines just fine. Wor

It's sort of funny, if you can find an old HP PA-RISC 712, or Sun SS20 you can throw NeXTstep (OS-X) on it and it'll keep up with modern machines just fine. Wordprocessors will open up just as fast as your modern machine (without an ssd), mathematica keeps up with whatever you throw at it, and emacs is just fine. I'm still not entirely sure what happened to the last 15 years of performance gains. EDIT: I got through college in 2000 onwards using a nextstation turbo. mathematica and openwrite handled things just fine. I'm confident I could cope reasonable well with that setup again if I had to.

wisty 15y ago
Between 2000 and 2010, computers should have gotten about 100 times faster (assuming speed increases by 2^(10/1.5) - yeah I know that's not really Moore's law, but let's assume it's almost reasonable). Your server class SS20 was about 5 years ahead of commodity boxes. This was the days when servers (or workstations) were much faster than consumer boxes. A computer these days will spend most of it's time at 1-5%. That's with a heavyweight OS, multiple applications open, and modern applications (which are not built to be frugal). So, while your computer would be almost capable of running a modern workload. It would hang, now and then, if you tried compiling or running a badly written flash app, but otherwise would be fine. Most of the last 15 years of performance gains have allowed consumer computers to catch up with workstations, made occasional tasks (like importing documents, and compiling small programs) almost instantaneous (rather than annoyingly slow), and allowed programmers to fill up the screen with eye candy.
- arethuza 15y ago
  I'm pretty sure that the subjectively fastest machine I've ever used was a Sparcstation 4/330 with a monochrome screen about 1990 or so (I'm pretty sure it had a ridiculous amount of RAM for the time, 72MB or something). With SunOS and the vanilla X11R4 build it really was quite nippy.
bonaldi 15y ago
Ho, I knew there was a reason I kept the SS10 lurking under the bed. Somehow I didn't realise that OS3.3 would run on it. Now to find the 3.3 sparc disks, and copies of Improv and WriteNow. This looks like it might be tricky...
- deleted 15y ago
  [deleted]
- spitfire 15y ago
  Bittorrent has them. There's archives of old next software out there as well.

wisty 15y ago

Between 2000 and 2010, computers should have gotten about 100 times faster (assuming speed increases by 2^(10/1.5) - yeah I know that's not really Moore's law, but let's assume it's almost reasonable). Your server class SS20 was about 5 years ahead of commodity boxes. This was the days when servers (or workstations) were much faster than consumer boxes. A computer these days will spend most of it's time at 1-5%. That's with a heavyweight OS, multiple applications open, and modern applications (which are not built to be frugal). So, while your computer would be almost capable of running a modern workload. It would hang, now and then, if you tried compiling or running a badly written flash app, but otherwise would be fine. Most of the last 15 years of performance gains have allowed consumer computers to catch up with workstations, made occasional tasks (like importing documents, and compiling small programs) almost instantaneous (rather than annoyingly slow), and allowed programmers to fill up the screen with eye candy.

arethuza 15y ago
I'm pretty sure that the subjectively fastest machine I've ever used was a Sparcstation 4/330 with a monochrome screen about 1990 or so (I'm pretty sure it had a ridiculous amount of RAM for the time, 72MB or something). With SunOS and the vanilla X11R4 build it really was quite nippy.

bonaldi 15y ago

Ho, I knew there was a reason I kept the SS10 lurking under the bed. Somehow I didn't realise that OS3.3 would run on it. Now to find the 3.3 sparc disks, and copies of Improv and WriteNow. This looks like it might be tricky...

deleted 15y ago
[deleted]
spitfire 15y ago
Bittorrent has them. There's archives of old next software out there as well.