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> Kinda weird to think that working, useful Windows applications ran on systems with that little memory. > Ugh I'm glad those days are gone. I'm quite the opp

> Kinda weird to think that working, useful Windows applications ran on systems with that little memory. > Ugh I'm glad those days are gone. I'm quite the opposite... i miss the times when applications could run in a few megs of ram.... nowaday just a browser showing a simple weather report wastes 2 gigs+ of ram.

andrewstuart 3y ago
I was there. They were perhaps not shit applications, but they were extremely basic. It’s a nostalgic fantasy to look back at that stuff imagining it’s in any way comparable to what users expect today. I don’t care about applications wasting RAM. Modern machines have plenty of cores and RAM and the software is unbelievably powerful today. I have some nostalgia for those days (I have a huge collection of vintage computers). But it wasn’t “the good old days”, in which software was done right and now it’s all sloppy and bloated and lazy. Not at all. I’m glad of modern software, operating systems and tools. Back then there was always something you wanted to do but couldn’t because the software to do it didn’t exist yet - very frustrating. Now almost anything you want to do, you can because someone has developed the stuff you need to do it. I’m super glad I was there for the early days but glad they’ve passed.
- Bluecobra 3y ago
  > I don’t care about applications wasting RAM. Modern machines have plenty of cores and RAM and the software is unbelievably powerful today. I do care when applications waste a lot of RAM and cores but application performance is still terrible. Looking at you, Microsoft Teams. I don't remember mIRC ever being a slouch, even on a Windows 95 PC with 8mb of RAM.
  - ajsnigrutin 3y ago
    Yep, skype is horrible too (hmm... could there be any connection, I wonder who bought skype a few years ago...), even if you use the same functionality as with irc clients (just text chat). Fucking slow to respond, replaces code snippets with emoticons and every time you send anyone an URL, it has microsoft servers open that url... "just in case"... even if it's a http://192.168.1.100/ http://192.168.1.100/ url, which is clearly on a private ip address, and there's no way microsoft servers will be able to connect to that, but you'll still have to wait for a timeout before the message gets through.
  - StuffMaster 3y ago
    I came here to make a similar comment. I've made the same Teams/mIRC comment before myself.
- ajsnigrutin 3y ago
  But you paid a shitton of money for those modern machines with modern amounts of ram and cpu cores, and threw away a bunch of still working hardware for that. And in a few years, your writing software (*office, word, whatever) won't gain any memorable new features, but the current 32gigs of ram suddenly won't be enough anymore, and you'll buy a new machine, say how you don't care if Word uses 40gigs of ram, because you have 256gigs installed and it doesn't matter... My firefox is currently using 7 gigs of ram, and i have 23 tabs open... al the information in all those 23 tabs is maybe 20 megabytes, and that includes the pictures in them. Look at mobile phones... you use your browser, chat programs, take and send photos and sometimes even call a person using one... and after a few years you're still doing the same, but the apps have grown so much in both size and ram usage, that you have to replace your phone, even though you still need and use the same functionality you used when you bought it. Yes, games got better and look nicer, but for most "old people", the only reason to waste money and create e-waste is bloat, because developers can't optimize anymore.
  - audunw 3y ago
    The idea that RAM requirements are going up so much all the time doesn’t seem to match reality if you ask me. The fact that I’m still getting by totally fine with an old 8GB on my old laptop is frankly speaking insane. It’s from 2015. Back in the 90s using an 8 year old machine for anything modern would have been unthinkable. OK, it can’t do the latest games or 8k video editing. There are some modern tasks it can’t do. But with everything else there’s no big difference with my newer machines. I can still get by with RAM that’s within an order of magnitude of my 2008 gaming computer. Even for games. Isn’t that crazy? With everything else the requirements (disk size and GPU transistors) have gone up like 2x orders of magnitude. There’s been some jumps in ram requirements over the years but often it has been for important things like browser sandboxing or HiDPI/retina displays. There is some validity to the frustration. The switch to MS teams at work was associated with a big jump in the RAM needed for a usable system. But I also get why.. the pace of development of MS teams has been extremely fast which would’ve been hard without electron. I don’t miss Skype for business. And now they’ve worked on a version that’s more optimised? If Teams is optimised I can get by with 8-16GB for a long time
- hulitu 3y ago
  > the software is unbelievably powerful today. yet still not able to draw a cursor or a scrollbar so i need to wait 2 seconds in word for the cursor to appear or 1 second, after i move the mouse to the side, for the scrollbar to appear.
  - fuzzfactor 3y ago
    Imagine what it would be like by now if all software had kept up the early ratio of what could be accomplished per kilobyte of memory and per megahertz of processor performance. Especially per kilobyte of code itself. Now it takes GB and GHz to accomplish the same office work as 30 years ago, and the UI responsiveness is slower by comparison. This should have only improved as more advanced hardware was deployed, so the root cause has got to be a defective software approach(s) over the long run. Not the promising brave new world that seemed like it would make interactions with PC's orders of magnitude better by the time the 21st century came along.
    - ajsnigrutin 3y ago
      But hey, you get ads in your start menu now, that's something! :) /s
  - yomlica8 3y ago
    I feel like I'm going crazy in these threads. UIs have really awful responsiveness these days and it is a source of constant annoyance to me. And then they hide all the elements like that, gating commonly used functions behind unpredictable delays so that users can't even find them unless they know to rub the magic spot until it appears. I clicked the start menu on a PC today and was greeted with spinning circles on an otherwise black box for at least 5-10 whole seconds before it showed anything.
    - StuffMaster 3y ago
      The world is going crazy and we are doomed to suffer. I pray some of these trends will reverse. Some youngins today complain that regular apps/programs look old and "not modern". I want to slap them hard.

andrewstuart 3y ago

I was there. They were perhaps not shit applications, but they were extremely basic. It’s a nostalgic fantasy to look back at that stuff imagining it’s in any way comparable to what users expect today. I don’t care about applications wasting RAM. Modern machines have plenty of cores and RAM and the software is unbelievably powerful today. I have some nostalgia for those days (I have a huge collection of vintage computers). But it wasn’t “the good old days”, in which software was done right and now it’s all sloppy and bloated and lazy. Not at all. I’m glad of modern software, operating systems and tools. Back then there was always something you wanted to do but couldn’t because the software to do it didn’t exist yet - very frustrating. Now almost anything you want to do, you can because someone has developed the stuff you need to do it. I’m super glad I was there for the early days but glad they’ve passed.

Bluecobra 3y ago
> I don’t care about applications wasting RAM. Modern machines have plenty of cores and RAM and the software is unbelievably powerful today. I do care when applications waste a lot of RAM and cores but application performance is still terrible. Looking at you, Microsoft Teams. I don't remember mIRC ever being a slouch, even on a Windows 95 PC with 8mb of RAM.
- ajsnigrutin 3y ago
  Yep, skype is horrible too (hmm... could there be any connection, I wonder who bought skype a few years ago...), even if you use the same functionality as with irc clients (just text chat). Fucking slow to respond, replaces code snippets with emoticons and every time you send anyone an URL, it has microsoft servers open that url... "just in case"... even if it's a http://192.168.1.100/ http://192.168.1.100/ url, which is clearly on a private ip address, and there's no way microsoft servers will be able to connect to that, but you'll still have to wait for a timeout before the message gets through.
- StuffMaster 3y ago
  I came here to make a similar comment. I've made the same Teams/mIRC comment before myself.
ajsnigrutin 3y ago
But you paid a shitton of money for those modern machines with modern amounts of ram and cpu cores, and threw away a bunch of still working hardware for that. And in a few years, your writing software (*office, word, whatever) won't gain any memorable new features, but the current 32gigs of ram suddenly won't be enough anymore, and you'll buy a new machine, say how you don't care if Word uses 40gigs of ram, because you have 256gigs installed and it doesn't matter... My firefox is currently using 7 gigs of ram, and i have 23 tabs open... al the information in all those 23 tabs is maybe 20 megabytes, and that includes the pictures in them. Look at mobile phones... you use your browser, chat programs, take and send photos and sometimes even call a person using one... and after a few years you're still doing the same, but the apps have grown so much in both size and ram usage, that you have to replace your phone, even though you still need and use the same functionality you used when you bought it. Yes, games got better and look nicer, but for most "old people", the only reason to waste money and create e-waste is bloat, because developers can't optimize anymore.
- audunw 3y ago
  The idea that RAM requirements are going up so much all the time doesn’t seem to match reality if you ask me. The fact that I’m still getting by totally fine with an old 8GB on my old laptop is frankly speaking insane. It’s from 2015. Back in the 90s using an 8 year old machine for anything modern would have been unthinkable. OK, it can’t do the latest games or 8k video editing. There are some modern tasks it can’t do. But with everything else there’s no big difference with my newer machines. I can still get by with RAM that’s within an order of magnitude of my 2008 gaming computer. Even for games. Isn’t that crazy? With everything else the requirements (disk size and GPU transistors) have gone up like 2x orders of magnitude. There’s been some jumps in ram requirements over the years but often it has been for important things like browser sandboxing or HiDPI/retina displays. There is some validity to the frustration. The switch to MS teams at work was associated with a big jump in the RAM needed for a usable system. But I also get why.. the pace of development of MS teams has been extremely fast which would’ve been hard without electron. I don’t miss Skype for business. And now they’ve worked on a version that’s more optimised? If Teams is optimised I can get by with 8-16GB for a long time
hulitu 3y ago
> the software is unbelievably powerful today. yet still not able to draw a cursor or a scrollbar so i need to wait 2 seconds in word for the cursor to appear or 1 second, after i move the mouse to the side, for the scrollbar to appear.
- fuzzfactor 3y ago
  Imagine what it would be like by now if all software had kept up the early ratio of what could be accomplished per kilobyte of memory and per megahertz of processor performance. Especially per kilobyte of code itself. Now it takes GB and GHz to accomplish the same office work as 30 years ago, and the UI responsiveness is slower by comparison. This should have only improved as more advanced hardware was deployed, so the root cause has got to be a defective software approach(s) over the long run. Not the promising brave new world that seemed like it would make interactions with PC's orders of magnitude better by the time the 21st century came along.
  - ajsnigrutin 3y ago
    But hey, you get ads in your start menu now, that's something! :) /s
- yomlica8 3y ago
  I feel like I'm going crazy in these threads. UIs have really awful responsiveness these days and it is a source of constant annoyance to me. And then they hide all the elements like that, gating commonly used functions behind unpredictable delays so that users can't even find them unless they know to rub the magic spot until it appears. I clicked the start menu on a PC today and was greeted with spinning circles on an otherwise black box for at least 5-10 whole seconds before it showed anything.
  - StuffMaster 3y ago
    The world is going crazy and we are doomed to suffer. I pray some of these trends will reverse. Some youngins today complain that regular apps/programs look old and "not modern". I want to slap them hard.