🚀 go-pugleaf

In article <sheldon.803657188@esoteric.agron.iastate.edu>,
Steve Sheldon <sheldon@iastate.edu> wrote:

|  There is a difference between multitasking well, and getting work done.
| 
|  512K is hardly enough RAM on an Amiga to be useful.  After 2.04 came out,
| and with the overhead of having a harddrive, I would not recommend anything
| less than 2 Megs as a minimum.
| 
|  Still pretty good.
| 
|  The downside of not having virtual memory is that when you finally do fill
| up those 2 megs or whatever, you don't get anything done at all.  VM allows
| you to continue working, although slowly.
| 
|  However Windows has it's resources problems which stop you from working
| long before you run out of memory. :(  Hopefully fixed in Win95, at least it
| seems to be in my beta.

Repeated system crashes come to mind...

All this whining about bloated programs is really silly. Programs today
are much smaller and faster relative to the typical hardware than they
were in the "good old days" of hand coding every byte.

Then:

  $2000 bought a Z80 with 64k of RAM, two floppy drives (1200k), and a
mono 80x24 display. CP/M gave you 16 users, one at a time, no
multitasking, and use users as subdirectories, since there are no
subdirectories. We just moved from 110 baud to 300 baud modems, and Ward
Christensen and Randy Suess had just invented the computer bulletin
board (CBBS(tm)). Prompts and error messages were short and cryptic to
avoid using precious RAM. Languages were Fortran and BASIC.

Now:

  $2000 buys a Pentium-90, 16MB, 1GB, and a 1024x768x24bit display. You
load through 1.44MB floppies, and use shared libraries to improve RAM
usage and reduce disk time and space. You have Windows and Linux to
provide your choice of applications and multitasking. We contact
thousands of BBSs and the Internet on our cheap 28.8k modems. We have
multi-level context sensitive help, with hotspots and graphics.
Languages are anything you can imagine, from multiple vendors.

Therefore...

  Get real. The programs are sized to the performance of the current
hardware, and the cost of current programmers. My video board has a much
memory as the first Multics machine, and it's 60ns instead of 1us.
people who yearn for the good old days didn't live them!
-- 
Stupidity, like virtue, is its own reward.
	Bill Davidsen (davidsen@tmr.com) consultant/director
TMR does UNIX and other systems stuff, some real time, network and
system admin, security, C and other good stuff.