17 ms·
Lots of focus on the hardware here but its form factor still exists in niches. What has vanished, is our ability to do general-purpose computing at ~8MHz. Cons
by oliwarner 3y ago
Lots of focus on the hardware here but its form factor still exists in niches.
What has vanished, is our ability to do general-purpose computing at ~8MHz. Consider the computers you had in the 90s. Windows 3.11 and Office ran on a 286 but I sit here with 12 cores at ~4Ghz just to post this crumby comment.
We are spoilt. It really makes me yearn to do more with less.
- stavros 3y agoI think that looking at it from a MHz standpoint is a red herring. How many things can you do per watt now, than you could per watt then?
- oliwarner 3y agoAnd power consumption is a —among other things— a function of transistor size and process. A lot has changed in 30 years, but our methods of programming these things has veered towards incredible wastefulness.
- mysterydip 3y agoTo put it another way, how much longer battery life would that same psion get if the CPU/board was made with modern transistor sizes.
- cptaj 3y agoBut demand for software has also grown a lot in that period. If we trained software engineers and demanded quality to the same standards, we would not be able to meet demand. Those standards were also set by the limitations of hardware, not because people had the will to do better back then.
- coldtea 3y agoBetter ask, how many things you could do per watt now, if software had that era's leanness?
- londons_explore 3y agoI occasionally fire up Windows 95 in a VM and marvel at how fast it is. Sometimes I use it for actual tasks, although it is hard to find things Windows 95 is useful for nowadays. My copy has office 97 installed, and I use that for some spreadsheety tasks. I really like being able to click anything and know I won't see a loading spinner.
- samstave 3y agoGosh windows 95 was great - especially the ability to navigate the OS from the keyboard alone - At one point I knew W95 so well I could literally navigate the OS by hand without a screen. An aquaintance at one point changed all the graphics settings to black - so ever screen, menu, text etc was black and you couldnt see anything. I was able to help her by using just the keyboard to navigate to settings and restore defaults. I did it from memory and key-clicks. Also, it was a fun OS to fuck with people in the nascient realm of virus' of the time, there was setting the desktop as an image and hiding whatever was actually on the desktop so nobody could click on things... remote access BSODs etc. I'm on an HP flagship gaming laptop now and it consumes probably 1,000 times more power (watts) and Compute to just display this single text entry form on HackerNews than any W95 machine back in the day... In ~1997 or so I had to shutdown a branch office in San Diego and when I did so, we had a number of plastic sealed boxes of brand-new W95 on 3.5" floppies... I kept them for over a decade and then sold them on Ebay as collectors items for $75 each... and wrote a tale about how they were computing history. But I had a PDA in 1993 which was by CASIO - and it had a little spreadsheet app on it, and I made a Gematria translator app in it - so I could type in any words and its formulae would spit out all the Gematria numbers for a name (the Celestine Prophecy was a famous book of the time) That PDA was similar to this one, but less sophisticated - and I had that thing for ~25 years... but unlike OP I didnt take out the battery and it ruind the device.
- secondcoming 3y agoBack when phones had physical keypad buttons and T9 text, I could send a message without taking the phone out of my pocket. It looked suspicious though
- tivert 3y ago> I think that looking at it from a MHz standpoint is a red herring. How many things can you do per watt now, than you could per watt then? Obviously a lot more. The OP said the thing could run in two AAs for a month. Nowadays, almost nothing can last a month on one charge/set of batteries. The only thing I can think of that might pass is a Kindle, due to the trick where it's literally shut down almost all the time.
- stavros 3y agoI have a ton of devices that would disagree with you. If you run the Psion software on modern hardware, it'll run for two months.
- ekianjo 3y agoOf course not, because no device can run at super low wattage with such an hypothetical OS.
- stavros 3y agoIt's not a hypothetical OS, it's what the Psion runs, and why not?
- ekianjo 3y agoI did not know that the Psion OS is available for modern SOCs.
- lproven 3y agoIt isn't. The Psion 3, 3A, 3C and 3MX ran EPOC, a proprietary 8086 OS with preemptive multitasking and a full keyboard-only GUI. But their successors, the Psion 5, 5MX and netBook, ran a rewrite called EPOC32. That was written in C++, is native to ARM, and ran well in 4MB and very well in 8MB. Full preemptive multitasking, touchscreen GUI, networking, IPv4 and more, FAT32 and networking support. That later was rebranded as Symbian and was the first mass-market smartphone OS. It was the only smartphone OS that could run the GSM comms stack on the same CPU as the user facing GUI OS -- its realtime support was that good. iOS, Android, WinCE, all need a separate CPU with its own RTOS for that. Symbian is now 100% FOSS. https://github.com/SymbianSource https://github.com/SymbianSource It's a crime and a tragedy that nobody's picked it up and ported it to any modern SOC. It is much richer and more complete than any other modern C++ OS such as Genode or Serenity OS.
- ekianjo 3y agoThat's pointless since you need to recharge your device all the time. It's not progress if you have a lighter that needs gas every 2 minutes to work.
- stavros 3y agoExcept the lighter nowadays is a flamethrower. You can get a lighter that needs gas every month, or a flamethrower that needs gas every two minutes, but complaining that the flamethrower needs much more gas than the lighter is silly.
- rebolek 3y agoThe problem is there are only flamethrowers now and no lighters.
- stavros 3y agoI'm fairly sure you can still boy dumb phones that last a week+ though.
- manicennui 3y agoI think the argument is that we mostly want to accomplish the same sorts of things, but now we have to use a flamethrower.
- stavros 3y agoBut we don't, even the fact that we browse the Web and watch videos would have been impossible on a Nokia 3210.
- manicennui 3y agoWe have been doing all of this since the 90s at least on desktop computers. Smartphones today are far more powerful than desktop computers from that era.
- rr808 3y agoProbably the memory is more relevant. 1 or 2 MB!
- pydry 3y agoIve looked for a 5mx form factor in the form of a phone and not been able to find it.
- afandian 3y agoDid you find the Gemini PDA and friends? It's very very similar.
- mysterydip 3y agoWish I had heard about these before getting my GPD Win2. Looks much closer to what I wanted but didn't know was still an option.
- rwl4 3y agoI've got the GPD Win 2 and it really would be the perfect little computer if it had HP 100LX style calculator keys. I know people disagree with me on this, but it's the one style of tiny keyboard that I have been able to achieve a relatively fast typing speed with.
- mysterydip 3y agoI like the form factor. There's a couple quirks with the screen and some apps/games but I can work around those. The real thing that keeps me from using it more is the heat/fan noise. I can't use it anywhere quiet because of the whizzing sound it generates even just at idle, let alone when I do something. With games on the go it's not a problem, but any kind of productivity work like editing code isn't possible. I saw there were some mods for cooling but I don't believe they're available anymore. Best I've been able to do is under-volt it to lower CPU performance, but that only gets me so far. I'm open to suggestions, though!
- zokier 3y agoPlanet Computers? https://www.www3.planetcom.co.uk/ https://www.www3.planetcom.co.uk/
- zozbot234 3y ago> What has vanished, is our ability to do general-purpose computing at ~8MHz. ahem https://xkcd.com/768/ https://xkcd.com/768/
- rebolek 3y agoI know there's XKCD for everything but I wonder if there should be.
- nazgulsenpai 3y agoConsidering how "on the nose" this one is, I'm not sure what point you're trying to make.
- tomcam 3y agoNo. I bet you could make a slightly better one and increase diversity in the online humor world. https://xkcd.com/927/ https://xkcd.com/927/
- fragmede 3y agoIt's in the name of efficiency. Instead of repeating the same conversation about, say, standards, you can just say 927 (which is 900, Yoda's age, plus 27 which is memorable because of the 27-club. Or also 3 squared = 9 and 3 cubed = 27), and everyone will know what you're talking about and you can skip that bit of conversation.
- tengwar2 3y agoAnd in small memory. I once had to prepare a church address list on a Psion 3 or 3a with 256kB of memory. That was total memory, used for both execution and battery backed RAM disk. I entered the addresses in to a database, exported to a spreadsheet for sorting and putting the columns in the right order, then exported to word processor document for formatting, and printed over IRDA. No third party sw required. And the thing was so stable even with third party sw that it was quite likely that it was never rebooted before it was replaced years later.
- bayindirh 3y agoThis is why I use previous generation Raspberry Pis and low end SBCs like OrangePi Zeros. Doing things in a constrained environment is fun and rewarding. Being able to run a full-fledged server with 512MB or less RAM is a great exercise and very enlightening to see what's possible. When one can able to run code on these systems fast, it runs fast everywhere. Running with razor thin free space makes you prevent all memory leaks, and reduce temporary variables to save that space. Doing great things with today's hardware is still possible, but laziness, "We needed this yesterday, I don't care about its efficiency, hardware is cheap anyway" mindset is killing things fast.
- thorncorona 3y ago> Doing great things with today's hardware is still possible, but laziness, "We needed this yesterday, I don't care about its efficiency, hardware is cheap anyway" mindset is killing things fast. It is, but realistically features will increase business long before efficiency starts to hamper it.
- toyg 3y ago"let's MAKE MONEY now, fuck the energy we waste and the planet we kill, goddammit"
- bayindirh 3y agoNo, no. It’s not money. It’s value. Value for our customers, our employees, and most importantly, our shareholders.
- thorncorona 3y agoMoot point when computing is incredibly efficient when compared to heavy industry.
- toyg 3y agoActually a very valid point when computing is incredibly hypocritical about their footprint when compared to heavy industry.
- hinkley 3y agoI keep wanting to fiddle with kubernetes on rPi class hardware. Even the minimalist versions want half a gigabyte per node. Admin software does not need half a gigabyte of memory.
- jowdones 3y agoZX-Spectrum clone (8 bit, 4 Mhz CPU) running Art Studio (an early Paint) loaded from floppy drive: https://imgur.com/a/VcaBnmP https://imgur.com/a/VcaBnmP
- hedgehog 3y agoSo sort of, but let's not look at the past too wistfully. I also remember when moderately long text had to be split across files (even multiple floppies if you were writing a book). I remember having to choose what languages my OS installation was going to be able to display. Farther back I remember not having the spare cash for the expansion card necessary to have lower case letters and typing in program listings out of books because that's how some software was distributed (Apple II). Our current generation of PCs is probably within a factor of two of the minimum spec necessary for robust machine translation and natural language interfaces. I enjoy using the old hardware but it really doesn't do most of the jobs we have now.
- fluoridation 3y agoIn every example you listed the limiting factor is memory or storage size, not computing speed.
- turbobooster 3y ago[dead]
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- amluto 3y ago> I remember having to choose what languages my OS installation was going to be able to display. What changed? Modern Windows still requires language packs, but you can apparently switch your primary language without a reinstall. Adobe products still corrupt already-correct Arabic text unless you have the correct edition or add-on or something. It was indeed annoying to transfer files at least until the Internet and flash drives were widely available, but that’s been more than 20 years.
- oliwarner 3y agoThese limits of old hardware are exactly what makes the software so amazing. Look what was achieved despite those limits. We've basically had the same desktop and productivity software for 30 years. Look at games like Doom or Tyrian, or what was happening on consoles and think about how crappy that hardware was. Modern software is embarrassingly slow by comparison. I've been around long enough to know that's always been the way. Newer software drives new hardware sales and we're on yesteryear's supercomputers but why?
- lynx23 3y agoOn a positive note, HN is one of the very few sites left which is still simple enough to be used with older browsers. I am writing this comment in the text console (no X11) of a Raspberry Pi 3 with a braille display (no monitor connected) as the output device. Using lynx as a pretty reliable browser. It is the exception, I know, I am a freak by nature of my disability, but I am also proud to know this niche still exists and it is actually possible to do some interesting things online with very little resources.
- bombcar 3y agoIt’s annoying because so much content SHOULd be perfectly accessible as described, but frameworks and browsers just fight it at every step. Too bad Apache didn’t have a Gopher server built in by default.
- oliwarner 3y agoThat surprises me. I'm a webdev and I've long considered HN to be a bit of an atrocity in terms of markup and a11y. Nested tables, no sr text to explain the thread structure, JS-only links scattered around. It works but only by the mercy of many text-based browsers being started in the 90s, so they're used to this pre-semantics rubbish. I can't tell if it's hubris but if I were king for a day, I'd like to think I'd leave HN in a better state. At the very least, I'd clean up the cruft.
- ezconnect 3y agoWow, I never knew HN layout was using tables. That was surprising, all this years and I never checked.
- bbkane 3y agoHN loads large amounts of comments really quickly on my phone's browser and there's no jank or lag when navigating it, and no popups. I love it, especially compared to the pain of using Reddit's mobile site for similar comment-browsing tasks
- lynx23 3y agoThe table layout on the main page is more of a problem for a modern web bgrowser then it is actually for Lynx. Modern browsers will announce the table, and your position in it, which is totally irrelevant on the main page. That is definitely the wrong semantic tag for the job at hand. It should be a ordered-list, because that is what it is. However, most markup things tends to get rendered quite nicely in Lynx. The only thing I notice which I somethimes wish would work differently is the lack of the ability to know who is replying to whom...