What would happen if computers never got any faster?

I often wonder to what degree that is possible in modern computers. Their complexity so hugely beyond that of old 8-bit micros that I doubt a single person could completely understand it. I mean to the level it’s possible to understand a BBC micro - what every CPU cycle does, what function every gate in the video output performs, etc.

A lot of the improvements listed are due to understanding very minute details of the operation, like timing CPU exactly with the video output, changing palettes and sprites on the fly, racing the CRT beam, etc. With a reasonably modern CPU you can’t even reliably tell in advance how many cycles a simple instruction will take.

Money line, but I strenuously disagree.

We need both, but thankfully, we have that. Games like Breath of the Wild, Death Stranding, and Kingdom Hearts III; and services like YouTube, TikTok, Twitch, Stadia and Steam wouldn't exist without both. You would have games, you would have services, but you wouldn't have these games and these services without both massive computational power and massive creativity.

There's a lot more incentive to get more out of a piece of equipment that will likely never be serviceable by humans again but is still serving a valuable role than there is to get more out of a piece of equipment only ten years old, taking up space and easily replaceable by something that is a capabilities upgrade and quality of life improvement in every measurable way.

There's sentimental value to be had in old hardware and a lot of great games that are 30 or 40 years old; and it's entirely possible there's a fair amount of hardware we never exploited to its full potential before replacing it with something much more capable, but that's life, tech and economics.

The P90 creeks along running the modern kernel. mpv and mplayer can't play anything smoothly (not even as a .wav file) and mpg321 fires up pulseaudio before it starts playing so that's not happening.

In this whole exercise I've learned something valuable:

This is all very reasonable.

If someone told me they'd spend an immense effort to speed something up by 0.15 seconds I would think them extremely foolish. That 0.15 seconds translates to 60 seconds on the P90.

My AMD has literally 1,000 times more memory than the P90.

If someone said they spent some enormous effort and took the memory footprint of something from 40MB down to 28MB I'd think they're just doing a hobby but of course on the P90 that's 10% of the memory available.

As machines have progressed, the great wins of the past have become nearly unmeasurable noise.

The OpenSSH server, for example, a fairly competently written piece of software, takes about 8 seconds to serve me a password prompt.

People aren't being foolish or irresponsible or naive in not caring about these things, they're being sensible. Running a Pentium 90 with modern software --- that's the actual unreasonable hobby here.

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Here's me doing a

* side-by-side gcc compilation: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GUk9f7Nv2dM

* trying to play a video I had transcoded to 160x120 in a futile attempt https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZMTz5PNpkcw (original video I'm attempting to play is here: https://shop.cpurecords.net/track/sheffield-bleep)

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Edit: I'll give y'all access.

* telnet bootstra386.com:1994

* ssh bootstra386.com:1995

* user/pass: hn/hn

cat /proc/cpuinfo and /proc/meminfo if you want to gawk. I've put some nice things in /usr/pkg/bin. Try not to wreck it.

The original Atari 2600 Pac Man was notoriously bad. Someone made a much better version in 2014.

http://retrogamingmagazine.com/2015/09/07/pac-man-on-atari-2...

https://atariage.com/forums/topic/229152-new-pacman-for-atar...