4 ms·

> How did we get to the current state of software? Though playing mp3 was a heavy task consuming most of the CPU. It was hard to do anything while listening to

• hulitu 3y ago
  > Though playing mp3 was a heavy task consuming most of the CPU. It was hard to do anything while listening to music Cyrix MX166 PR200 with 32 MB of RAM was playing MP3 just fine while compiling the (linux) kernel and being snappy in the same time. The SW has just become more bloated. SW engineers those days are not constrained by resources and this leads to a lot of bad practice.
• qingcharles 3y ago
  I remember in the 90s having to actually expand my MP3s back into WAVs so my poor CPU could play them in realtime.
  • z500 3y ago
    In the 2000s once talked my mom into getting me an old Mac Centris 610 from eBay. I attempted some C programming, but I had the most success reencoding MP3s from the Final Fantasy 8 OST and copying them over to the Mac on floppies lol
• thwarted 3y ago
  Two comments in this thread (this one and a sibling) mention needing to save often due to programs crashing, as if reliability of the software is solved by showing ads and tracking activity, or is a function of the size of the program or the speed of the computers or software, the things FeistySkink had mentioned.
  • reisse 3y ago
    Not sure about the ads, but telemetry definitely increases reliability. It allows to debug very specific issues with a comprehensive information about user environment. Source: debugged proprietary app multiple times using telemetry information. Sometimes the issues discovered were not reproducible without recreating some very specific environments. Surely there are downsides to telemetry and tracking, but they can be useful for development.
    • hulitu 3y ago
      MS would like to dissagree. There are bugs which are not closed after years (mouse registered double clicks, blacked out parts of GUI, programms starting on inexisting screens).
• mepian 3y ago
  Windows NT 4.0 existed at the same time with the same UI and without the instability. Effortless MP3 playback was primarily made possible by hardware advances, not software ones.
  • reisse 3y ago
    From my memories NT branch was unstable until at least XP SP2. Not sure if it was because of the OS itself, or because most of the software and drivers were written for Windows 98, and required few years to catch up.
    • 2000UltraDeluxe 3y ago
      Windows 2000 was fairly solid as long as the device drivers weren't too exotic.
    • jaybeavers 3y ago
      Windows NT was rock solid until Windows XP was released, but GPU performance was meh and Windows games generally didn't work well unless they were written to target NT. As I recall, there was one commercial graphical strategy game for NT at the time. XP broke the subsystem isolation of NT in favor of enabling Windows non-NT types of drivers with higher levels of kernel/GPU efficiency due to less isolation. This also brought in the ability of the drivers to crash the kernel. And that, my friends, was the end of rock solid Windows NT stability. I was on the Windows team during the XP SP2 years. Stability was somewhat reachieved by an intense focus on defensive coding to detect rogue driver and the establishment of the WHQL, or Windows Hardware Quality Lab. WHQL was basically an investment in driver analysis tools and a moderately sized team inside MSFT who's sole job was to debug and fix other people's drivers. It's not a good replacement for isolation though, and it requires sustained continuous effort by both MSFT and the windows hardware partners, which imho hasn't continued.