What would happen if computers never got any faster? • Hacker News Board

Re: What would happen if computers never got any faster?

#111

Post by hansor » Fri, Nov 27, 2020, 11:53 AM UTC

kristopolous wrote: post #18

Just recently I got a Pentium 90 up and running using modern software (NetBSD 9.0). Doing a side by side speed comparison against my 3970x threadripper you can see the AMD is ~200-500x faster on a given task. 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 who…

Hi.

I recently bought some 386SX 25Mhz laptop to develop some software as well, and I worked on low-end hardware for over decade as well(for fun!)

My findings: You could run NetBSD 1.3.1 on just 2MB of RAM.

You can play mp3 on 486DX 66Mhz with mpg123 and madplay if you change the output to 22khz and few other flags.

Pentium 100 was enough back in the 2001 to run Slackware 7, BeOS and NetBSD 1.6.1 with mp3(in lower quality), Opera web browser, few consoles, text editor - at same time without hassle, AND burning cd-rom at the same time.

Then GOOGLE "invited" Ajax in 2004 and now even computer with 2gb of ram and 1.6Ghz dual cpu, can't open simple page with JS without serious stutter...

Re: What would happen if computers never got any faster?

#112

Post by alliao » Fri, Nov 27, 2020, 11:53 AM UTC

kristopolous wrote: post #18

Just recently I got a Pentium 90 up and running using modern software (NetBSD 9.0). Doing a side by side speed comparison against my 3970x threadripper you can see the AMD is ~200-500x faster on a given task. 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 who…

alternatively, let's say we will hit some kind of physical/innovation barrier one day, and we no longer have more hardware to throw at things.. suddenly any optimization feels like an upgrade? Almost akin to the recent M1 vs Intel CPU progress...

Re: What would happen if computers never got any faster?

#113

Post by kristopolous » Fri, Nov 27, 2020, 11:55 AM UTC

samoa42 wrote: post #102

kristopolous wrote: post #18

Just recently I got a Pentium 90 up and running using modern software (NetBSD 9.0). Doing a side by side speed comparison against my 3970x threadripper you can see the AMD is ~200-500x faster on a given task. 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 who…

might be an interesting comparison with a netbsd release from the era

I had similar hardware 15-20 years ago (my laptop was about the same specs, just maybe 16mb ram?) and I ran NetBSD 1.4.x on it. This was before pkgin so you had to use the ports collection and compile or use the fairly simple pkg_add system.

For web browsing I did dillo and links -g ... it worked on a lot of the internet which at the time still did not heavily rely on stylesheets and javascript for baseline functionality. For email reading I used one of the many terminal readers, I believe pine.

For instant messaging I used naim. Social networking through websites wasn't a thing yet nor was youtube. I used mpg123 to do music and I believe I ran in screen without X up most of the time.

Before that I had an IBM 360c (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IBM_ThinkPad_360) with 8MB of ram. I used I believe NetBSD 1.2 on that. I could even recompile the kernel without hitting swap with some very interesting gcc flags that I have long forgotten - but it still took I believe most of a day (maybe 7 hours?).

NetBSD 1.6 was really where the split began ... the priorities were different and things seemed slower. It is mostly meant for academics and research so this ultimately makes sense.

It's like a lifetime ago.

So when I got this up and running, NetBSD was exactly what I turned to. It's different of course now. But the P90 is surprisingly able to reasonably keep up as long as you have patience and modest expectations.

Re: What would happen if computers never got any faster?

#114

Post by alliao » Fri, Nov 27, 2020, 11:57 AM UTC

konjin wrote: post #53

rubatuga wrote: post #34

I think the author is misguided by saying "we need more thoughtful, and more creative humans". It's as if the author is lamenting some lost productivity that we would have otherwise achieved as a society by now. Just like how human work naturally fills up the time allotted to it [1], programmers tend to use up the hardware resources to make their apps usable. If time was spent hyperoptimizing, it would not change the…

That I can outpace the cursor on a windows desktop in word 365 on a 30 page document and need to stop for a good second for it to catch up with nothing else open on a 8 gb, 4 core, 3GHz machine is so outrageous I don't know how anyone still uses Windows. Computers have gotten so unoptimized for people that a machine from the 80s has better capabilities for the average office worker than one used today. The only reaso…

Hear hear. I remember when MS Works was so slow I'd type and watch letters appearing. Then Word got better, and got quick, I was almost happy. Then cloud happened, and suddenly now whenever I'm saving a file, I find myself waiting again, to connect to the cloud... I am missing full keyboard system where once you learnt a little you could do everything by touch without touching that mouse.. and I'm missing the snappiness.

Re: What would happen if computers never got any faster?

#115

Post by 2OEH8eoCRo0 » Fri, Nov 27, 2020, 12:12 PM UTC

StavrosK wrote: post #23

kristopolous wrote: post #18

Just recently I got a Pentium 90 up and running using modern software (NetBSD 9.0). Doing a side by side speed comparison against my 3970x threadripper you can see the AMD is ~200-500x faster on a given task. 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 who…

What kind of P90 did you find that has 128 MB of RAM? My P100 had 16... It could play (and encode!) mp3s just fine, though.

My families P90 had 128MB of RAM. It was a Zeos

Re: What would happen if computers never got any faster?

#116

Post by pritovido » Fri, Nov 27, 2020, 12:14 PM UTC

weinzierl wrote: post #47

needle0 wrote: post #33

The final products of those amazing programs that show up late in the platform's lifetime are indeed running on the same hardware, but aren't those programs often developed using faster computers of later periods? For instance, Donkey Kong Country does run on an unmodified SNES purchased on its launch day, but its creation shouldn't have been possible were it not for the Silicon Graphics workstations used to create t…

> The final products of those amazing programs that show up late in the platform's lifetime are indeed running on the same hardware, but aren't those programs often developed using faster computers of later periods? They are developed on faster computers but that was already the case at the heyday of these games, so the difference might be less than you would expect. What is a huge difference though is access to info…

>Back in the day I got my weekly homeopathic dose of assembly language from a local home computer magazine.

I had the same experience, until I (we)found that the knowledge of those magazines were taken from books, so I(we) went to the source, the library of the University.

I was a kid at the time and had friends that shared the same interests as me. The library was magical.

Even today, when there is lots of amazing materials on the web, the real deep stuff is in books.

One of the great things of Internet, specially videos is that they introduce you to a topic so you can understand the book.

Re: What would happen if computers never got any faster?

#117

Post by moron4hire » Fri, Nov 27, 2020, 12:18 PM UTC

hansor wrote: post #111

kristopolous wrote: post #18

Just recently I got a Pentium 90 up and running using modern software (NetBSD 9.0). Doing a side by side speed comparison against my 3970x threadripper you can see the AMD is ~200-500x faster on a given task. 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 who…

Hi. I recently bought some 386SX 25Mhz laptop to develop some software as well, and I worked on low-end hardware for over decade as well(for fun!) My findings: You could run NetBSD 1.3.1 on just 2MB of RAM. You can play mp3 on 486DX 66Mhz with mpg123 and madplay if you change the output to 22khz and few other flags. Pentium 100 was enough back in the 2001 to run Slackware 7, BeOS and NetBSD 1.6.1 with mp3(in lower qu…

Microsoft invented AJAX. Google popularized it and developed V8 to make large scale JavaScript applications feasible. Both originally did what they did for email clients.

Re: What would happen if computers never got any faster?

#118

Post by HeadsUpHigh » Fri, Nov 27, 2020, 12:18 PM UTC

mcv wrote: post #57

Lately I've been feeling like computers have become fast enough . During the 1990s, the pace of improvement was staggering, and the impact of every hardware improvement was really felt. But these days, I've come to expect a 10-year life from my hardware. My previous PC, now 12 year old, worked admirably for 10 years. It ran The Witcher 2 just fine. It did everything just fine, except for the latest games; after some…

PC gaming is the spearhead of planned obsolescence. Everything else comes after the gaming market has paid the hefty markup.

Re: What would happen if computers never got any faster?

#119

Post by moron4hire » Fri, Nov 27, 2020, 12:28 PM UTC

rwmj wrote: post #107

tonyedgecombe wrote: post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The interesting thing is that in their day we used those devices to do real work. The main thing that sticks in my mind wasn't the slowness but the lack of stability. Rebooting/reinstalling to fix issues was very common.

They were rock solid running Linux. I remember we had a 486 where the jiffies counter overflowed (which is what happened on 386/486-era Linux after ~ 497 days). We expected it would crash then, but the machine kept running just fine.

They really weren't. It took lots of configuration tweaks and careful selection of the right software. People could and did do the same thing with Windows back then. But trying to use a PC for general purpose work, straight out of the box, stability was a problem on all extent desktop operating systems.

Re: What would happen if computers never got any faster?

#120

Post by bregma » Fri, Nov 27, 2020, 12:28 PM UTC

What would happen if computers never got any faster?

The creativity would still go into the marketing department. We would be getting new 5G computers with Xtreme Speed® that double the performance of last year on proprietary benchmarks that no one understands but can bandy about at parties.

The human genius will not be leashed by physical constraints or mathematical limits.