6 ms·

If you're comparing old vs. new consider this: In early 90s SunOS ran comfortably in 16 MB RAM. It was a powerful BSD-Unix system, with strong network functiona

If you're comparing old vs. new consider this: In early 90s SunOS ran comfortably in 16 MB RAM. It was a powerful BSD-Unix system, with strong network functionality including Network File System, powerful PostScript-based 2D graphics [1], and SunView windowing system that arguably works better than today's UIs [2]. Does anything work in 16 MB RAM today? Some jpegs take up more memory than that! Today's systems need 1000x more memory, but are you getting 1000x more functionality? Hardly. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NeWS https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NeWS [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NeWS#/media/File:The_NeWS_Toolkit_screen_snapshot.gif https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NeWS#/media/File:The_NeWS_Tool...

solardev 3y ago
Pfft. But did it have a transparent taskbar and four different screens for the same settings? Ads in its search functionality? New Solitaire modes? That's what I call progress, baby.
- ugjka 3y ago
  Or running a separate chrome browser for each "app"
  - Aachen 3y ago
    Which is essentially an OS with its own application sandbox and task manager
- amluto 3y ago
  My theory is that old systems were too limited for modern BS like this. BIOS had to fit in a couple hundred kB. There was no room for nonsense like UEFI has. Other than POST, it booted pretty quickly because even a slow CPU can do anything that credibly fits in 200kB pretty quickly. (O(n^2) algorithms were pretty unlikely at boot time.) Having three or four different control panels each controlling part of, say, the network configuration takes developer time, compile time, and distribution space. When everything needs to fit on one CD or, better yet, a few floppies and the companies were new and very small and scrappy by modern standards, this would be utterly impractical. There was one control panel because it was cheaper and less code! Want one developer and zero professional designers to make a dialog box? You use one well-designed widget set (from the OS vendor!) and you just do it. Everything is easy to use because the resources needed to make pretty-but-undiscoverable UIs weren’t available. (We see this today writ small in the embedded space. For example, Secure Boot is an abomination that, as implemented in essentially all cases, requires truly bizarre CPU resources and complexity. So embedded systems use vastly simpler chain-of-trust systems.)
- FooBarBizBazz 3y ago
  > New Solitaire modes? Joke's on them. When they killed classic solitaire, they also destroyed the last reason to keep my older family members on Windows. If everything is going to be unfamiliar anyway, it might as well just be a Chromebook.
matthewmacleod 3y ago
Today's systems need 1000x more memory, but are you getting 1000x more functionality? Hardly. Maybe though. There's some pretty sci-fi stuff on my 16GB machine. Just photos alone – it stores tens of thousands of high-resolution photos, reads all the text in them, recognises people's faces and objects, and lets me search and browse the entire database instantly just by typing in a single word from someone's t-shirt in a picture I took two decades ago. And it's all completely transparently synchronised across multiple devices and with globally-available cloud storage. I think sometimes people underestimate the pretty amazing capabilities of modern software and hardware. That's not to say that there isn't a lot of waste in many ways, and that many modern apps can be sluggish. But I think this stance is often pretty dismissive.
kayodelycaon 3y ago
I think having Wikipedia on my phone is 1000x more functionality. Always having a map on me which has almost every business on it? Immediately finding where something is and getting turn-by-turn directions? Always being in contact with friends across nations. Discord servers! Computers have permanently altered society. Yeah, your desktop is slower and more aggravating to use, but we're living in a world only science fiction could have dreamed of. :D
- yetihehe 3y ago
  > Always having a map on me which has almost every business on it? Immediately finding where something is and getting turn-by-turn directions? This was already possible with Win CE, I had a palmtop with gps and voice navigation, maps for whole Europe were stressing that compact flash card space, but it was almost as good as current maps. Lot's of POI's too. > Always being in contact with friends across nations. Discord servers! Yeah, we had irc and email and ICQ too (working effortlessly on 100mHz pentium). > Yeah, your desktop is slower and more aggravating to use, but we're living in a world only science fiction could have dreamed of. :D It's just that average user doesn't care that much about speed, so UI's are tweaked for look until they are barely usable on prev-gen devices, but good enough on latest shiny ones. On the other hand - all those need for more hardware speed gave us truly new possibilities, but somehow apart from better graphics I can't remember anything I could only dream of (maybe discovering plants or birds from photo, which was deemed "too hard" by XKCD[0] in 2014). [0] https://xkcd.com/1425/ https://xkcd.com/1425/
- Arrath 3y ago
  > Computers have permanently altered society. Yeah, your desktop is slower and more aggravating to use, but we're living in a world only science fiction could have dreamed of. :D In this world where my pocket supercomputer keeps having slot machine apps and candy crush pushed onto it by the service provider, I wish I had the more utilitarian and less brand friendly version of technology dreamed up in science fiction.
  - pixl97 3y ago
    Heh, guess you never watched enough cyberpunk to know the dystopia corpos would make.
anthk 3y ago
Confortability, not much. FVWM+Rxvt, OTOH, flew.
giantrobot 3y ago
If you were running early 90s workloads today you could probably get away on a 16MB system with the right WM and stuff. Linux runs on a number of embedded devices with such little RAM. If you need to interact with the modern web that calculus will change rapidly. If you could run something like Dillo (or lynx) on a non-JavaScript site and never need to access the public web you might be ok. The moment you need to open a modern browser you'd be boned.
toyg 3y ago
> Does anything work in 16 MB RAM today? Relevant: https://youtu.be/IagZIM9MtLo https://youtu.be/IagZIM9MtLo Hey Hey 16k, what does that give you today? You need more than that for a letter, old-school RAM packs were much better
rogerbinns 3y ago
I'll see your profligate 16MB of RAM for an HP system we had running HP/UX with a full gui desktop, and also running as a DNS and NNTP server. It had 4MB of RAM. Admittedly they did cheat on the gui side a bit by linking all programs into one multi-call binary which saved a considerable amount of memory.
asjfka 3y ago
Most text editors (not all, some are still lightning fast) choke on GB-sized files and I have yet to find a graphical file manager that can handle >1000 elements in a directory (terminal-based unix tools are fine). Maybe the authors of those softwares assume infinite RAM, infinite CPU cycles and puny workload or maybe they think the time of devs has more value than the time of their users.
rabf 3y ago
1968 was peak computing: https://youtu.be/iwVu2BWLZqA https://youtu.be/iwVu2BWLZqA
vel0city 3y ago
> are you getting 1000x more functionality? Without a doubt. I couldn't play any of the VR games I enjoy in 16MB of RAM. I wouldn't be able to edit the photos from my nice camera in 16MB of RAM. I wouldn't be able to videocall my family in 16MB of RAM. I wouldn't be able to reasonably decode and playback streaming HD video content with 16MB of RAM. The vast majority of the things I do with my computer I genuinely wouldn't be able to reasonably do in 16MB of RAM, so yeah, my computer is practically infinitely more useful. Not 1000x, not 10,000x, not 100,000,000,000x. Even more than that.
- anthk 3y ago
  >Edit the photos... We did with 256MB of RAM >Videocall Kopete, Ekiga. Less resolution, maybe, but much more features. No, not 1e10x. Maybe, 1e3x. A tiny step over the huge step from 1990 to 2000.
  - vel0city 3y ago
    > We did with 256MB of RAM 256 != 16MB. We're already 16x past the original claim, and it's still not as useful as my current machine. And were those photos the same resolution and bit depth? Would you say the experience is really similar? Back when I had 256MB of RAM, editing even a couple megapixel photo from my Nikon Coolpix 2000 was usually pretty slow. There's no way it would reasonably process a 20MP photo and have an acceptable experience. Still no VR gaming. And yeah, sure, I did video calls at 256MB RAM. It was a pretty crappy experience, like 320x240 at like 10fps, nowhere near comparable to having multiple participants in HD and reasonable frame rates. I did maybe a handful of calls a month, now I have several calls a day. However, I never did video calls on a machine with 16MB of RAM. The person I was replying to was talking about a 16MB desktop, not a 256MB desktop. And like, yeah, if you scale back the expectations to the other stuff we had when desktops had 256MB of RAM on average, and you squint real hard, it kind of looks the same. But that 2MP photo isn't the same as a 20MP RAW, they're not really comparable. A laggy, pixelated, single video call really isn't the same as multi person HD calls. The expansion in features makes these things a lot more viable in actually using them day to day. Like, I didn't bother video calling many people because the experience in 256MB RAM was miserable. Now I do it all the time, because the experience is way better because our computers are just so much more powerful. If the experience of doing it is so bad from it's limitations that you practically never use it, it's utility value is practically zero.
marcosdumay 3y ago
> but are you getting 1000x more functionality? Well, Linux runs quite well in 1GB. And for me the killer app that requires that 1GB just for Linux is package dependency resolution on apt. Outside from that, I've run it quite well in 500MB. (Does it have 30x more functionality than a 90's SunOS? Well, without any doubt, just by replacing that stuff with GNU tools is already a great gain; and the DE doesn't even compare.) Now, I use several applications that require many GB of RAM. One of those is a Windows VM :)... But also, compilers and IDEs. Firefox by itself needs close to 1 GB. Those last 3 do absolutely have a lot of features that justify the extra memory. But funny thing is that LibreOffice stopped at near 1GB too. It doesn't do much more than when it used 300MB, but it's not such a huge difference as it is in MS Office. And neither require anything as much memory as Teams...

solardev 3y ago

Pfft. But did it have a transparent taskbar and four different screens for the same settings? Ads in its search functionality? New Solitaire modes? That's what I call progress, baby.

ugjka 3y ago
Or running a separate chrome browser for each "app"
- Aachen 3y ago
  Which is essentially an OS with its own application sandbox and task manager
amluto 3y ago
My theory is that old systems were too limited for modern BS like this. BIOS had to fit in a couple hundred kB. There was no room for nonsense like UEFI has. Other than POST, it booted pretty quickly because even a slow CPU can do anything that credibly fits in 200kB pretty quickly. (O(n^2) algorithms were pretty unlikely at boot time.) Having three or four different control panels each controlling part of, say, the network configuration takes developer time, compile time, and distribution space. When everything needs to fit on one CD or, better yet, a few floppies and the companies were new and very small and scrappy by modern standards, this would be utterly impractical. There was one control panel because it was cheaper and less code! Want one developer and zero professional designers to make a dialog box? You use one well-designed widget set (from the OS vendor!) and you just do it. Everything is easy to use because the resources needed to make pretty-but-undiscoverable UIs weren’t available. (We see this today writ small in the embedded space. For example, Secure Boot is an abomination that, as implemented in essentially all cases, requires truly bizarre CPU resources and complexity. So embedded systems use vastly simpler chain-of-trust systems.)
FooBarBizBazz 3y ago
> New Solitaire modes? Joke's on them. When they killed classic solitaire, they also destroyed the last reason to keep my older family members on Windows. If everything is going to be unfamiliar anyway, it might as well just be a Chromebook.

matthewmacleod 3y ago

Today's systems need 1000x more memory, but are you getting 1000x more functionality? Hardly. Maybe though. There's some pretty sci-fi stuff on my 16GB machine. Just photos alone – it stores tens of thousands of high-resolution photos, reads all the text in them, recognises people's faces and objects, and lets me search and browse the entire database instantly just by typing in a single word from someone's t-shirt in a picture I took two decades ago. And it's all completely transparently synchronised across multiple devices and with globally-available cloud storage. I think sometimes people underestimate the pretty amazing capabilities of modern software and hardware. That's not to say that there isn't a lot of waste in many ways, and that many modern apps can be sluggish. But I think this stance is often pretty dismissive.

kayodelycaon 3y ago

I think having Wikipedia on my phone is 1000x more functionality. Always having a map on me which has almost every business on it? Immediately finding where something is and getting turn-by-turn directions? Always being in contact with friends across nations. Discord servers! Computers have permanently altered society. Yeah, your desktop is slower and more aggravating to use, but we're living in a world only science fiction could have dreamed of. :D

yetihehe 3y ago
> Always having a map on me which has almost every business on it? Immediately finding where something is and getting turn-by-turn directions? This was already possible with Win CE, I had a palmtop with gps and voice navigation, maps for whole Europe were stressing that compact flash card space, but it was almost as good as current maps. Lot's of POI's too. > Always being in contact with friends across nations. Discord servers! Yeah, we had irc and email and ICQ too (working effortlessly on 100mHz pentium). > Yeah, your desktop is slower and more aggravating to use, but we're living in a world only science fiction could have dreamed of. :D It's just that average user doesn't care that much about speed, so UI's are tweaked for look until they are barely usable on prev-gen devices, but good enough on latest shiny ones. On the other hand - all those need for more hardware speed gave us truly new possibilities, but somehow apart from better graphics I can't remember anything I could only dream of (maybe discovering plants or birds from photo, which was deemed "too hard" by XKCD[0] in 2014). [0] https://xkcd.com/1425/ https://xkcd.com/1425/
Arrath 3y ago
> Computers have permanently altered society. Yeah, your desktop is slower and more aggravating to use, but we're living in a world only science fiction could have dreamed of. :D In this world where my pocket supercomputer keeps having slot machine apps and candy crush pushed onto it by the service provider, I wish I had the more utilitarian and less brand friendly version of technology dreamed up in science fiction.
- pixl97 3y ago
  Heh, guess you never watched enough cyberpunk to know the dystopia corpos would make.

anthk 3y ago

Confortability, not much. FVWM+Rxvt, OTOH, flew.

giantrobot 3y ago

If you were running early 90s workloads today you could probably get away on a 16MB system with the right WM and stuff. Linux runs on a number of embedded devices with such little RAM. If you need to interact with the modern web that calculus will change rapidly. If you could run something like Dillo (or lynx) on a non-JavaScript site and never need to access the public web you might be ok. The moment you need to open a modern browser you'd be boned.

toyg 3y ago

> Does anything work in 16 MB RAM today? Relevant: https://youtu.be/IagZIM9MtLo https://youtu.be/IagZIM9MtLo Hey Hey 16k, what does that give you today? You need more than that for a letter, old-school RAM packs were much better

rogerbinns 3y ago

I'll see your profligate 16MB of RAM for an HP system we had running HP/UX with a full gui desktop, and also running as a DNS and NNTP server. It had 4MB of RAM. Admittedly they did cheat on the gui side a bit by linking all programs into one multi-call binary which saved a considerable amount of memory.

asjfka 3y ago

Most text editors (not all, some are still lightning fast) choke on GB-sized files and I have yet to find a graphical file manager that can handle >1000 elements in a directory (terminal-based unix tools are fine). Maybe the authors of those softwares assume infinite RAM, infinite CPU cycles and puny workload or maybe they think the time of devs has more value than the time of their users.

rabf 3y ago

1968 was peak computing: https://youtu.be/iwVu2BWLZqA https://youtu.be/iwVu2BWLZqA

vel0city 3y ago

> are you getting 1000x more functionality? Without a doubt. I couldn't play any of the VR games I enjoy in 16MB of RAM. I wouldn't be able to edit the photos from my nice camera in 16MB of RAM. I wouldn't be able to videocall my family in 16MB of RAM. I wouldn't be able to reasonably decode and playback streaming HD video content with 16MB of RAM. The vast majority of the things I do with my computer I genuinely wouldn't be able to reasonably do in 16MB of RAM, so yeah, my computer is practically infinitely more useful. Not 1000x, not 10,000x, not 100,000,000,000x. Even more than that.

anthk 3y ago
>Edit the photos... We did with 256MB of RAM >Videocall Kopete, Ekiga. Less resolution, maybe, but much more features. No, not 1e10x. Maybe, 1e3x. A tiny step over the huge step from 1990 to 2000.
- vel0city 3y ago
  > We did with 256MB of RAM 256 != 16MB. We're already 16x past the original claim, and it's still not as useful as my current machine. And were those photos the same resolution and bit depth? Would you say the experience is really similar? Back when I had 256MB of RAM, editing even a couple megapixel photo from my Nikon Coolpix 2000 was usually pretty slow. There's no way it would reasonably process a 20MP photo and have an acceptable experience. Still no VR gaming. And yeah, sure, I did video calls at 256MB RAM. It was a pretty crappy experience, like 320x240 at like 10fps, nowhere near comparable to having multiple participants in HD and reasonable frame rates. I did maybe a handful of calls a month, now I have several calls a day. However, I never did video calls on a machine with 16MB of RAM. The person I was replying to was talking about a 16MB desktop, not a 256MB desktop. And like, yeah, if you scale back the expectations to the other stuff we had when desktops had 256MB of RAM on average, and you squint real hard, it kind of looks the same. But that 2MP photo isn't the same as a 20MP RAW, they're not really comparable. A laggy, pixelated, single video call really isn't the same as multi person HD calls. The expansion in features makes these things a lot more viable in actually using them day to day. Like, I didn't bother video calling many people because the experience in 256MB RAM was miserable. Now I do it all the time, because the experience is way better because our computers are just so much more powerful. If the experience of doing it is so bad from it's limitations that you practically never use it, it's utility value is practically zero.

marcosdumay 3y ago

> but are you getting 1000x more functionality? Well, Linux runs quite well in 1GB. And for me the killer app that requires that 1GB just for Linux is package dependency resolution on apt. Outside from that, I've run it quite well in 500MB. (Does it have 30x more functionality than a 90's SunOS? Well, without any doubt, just by replacing that stuff with GNU tools is already a great gain; and the DE doesn't even compare.) Now, I use several applications that require many GB of RAM. One of those is a Windows VM :)... But also, compilers and IDEs. Firefox by itself needs close to 1 GB. Those last 3 do absolutely have a lot of features that justify the extra memory. But funny thing is that LibreOffice stopped at near 1GB too. It doesn't do much more than when it used 300MB, but it's not such a huge difference as it is in MS Office. And neither require anything as much memory as Teams...