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It's always shocking to me that in my lifetime (programming on a VIC-20 as a kid), computers have gone from something that you could understand at all levels to
by briHass 3y ago
It's always shocking to me that in my lifetime (programming on a VIC-20 as a kid), computers have gone from something that you could understand at all levels to a deep pile of abstractions that no one can honestly claim to understand without a lot of handwaving.
I think we also marvel at how much the early programmers/hardware guys were able to do with such limited resources. Useful applications could be written that take kilobytes of RAM, and the optimizations to get there are reasonably easy to understand.
- BirAdam 3y agoWell, when the hardware is simpler the OS environment is (usually) simpler, and the application software will likewise end up simpler. There is no reason that one couldn't write something like VisiCalc in AMD64 ASM, and I am sure that someone somewhere has done so. The main problem is that no one today would care to use that application. We've come to want and expect far more. As a result, software is a fluid that will always expand to fill its container.