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Comment by pavlov | Hacker News Reader

In the mid-'80s the workstation PC vendors like Sun were competing to introduce a "3M computer". The three 'M's were megabyte, megapixel, MIPS:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/3M_computer

In the thirty years since, we've got fifty thousand times more performance (a recent Intel desktop CPU easily does 50,000 MIPS) and sixteen thousand times more memory... But most computers barely have two megapixel screens.

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Imagine describing the scene of someone running the Atom editor on a 1080p laptop to someone from the 90s who complained about Eight Megabytes And Constantly Swapping[1]. It would seem so odd; 8GB of ram, 4 cores running billions of instructions per second each. Also there's a terraflop scale massively parallel supercomputer with 2GB of RAM dedicated to drawing overlapping windows.

1: Backronym for "EMACS"

In fairness that parallel supercomputer was built for wrangling absurd numbers of triangles before it turned out to also be good at doing small groups of rectangles.

That's one of the reasons that I'm actually a little excited for Moore's Law coming to an end. For years it has been more economical to program quickly and somewhat wastefully, leaving many people with slower computers behind. Now the economics are changing, and the competition will be in creating the most efficient software, to everyone's benefit.

We just moved everything to the cloud, where you can microservices your way to even more wasted MIPS. In the past, your text editor only wasted both cores on your laptop, but now it can waste all the cores on half a dozen AWS instances.

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