What kinds of wild things could we accomplish on this hardware if we weren't bogged down in gigabytes and teraflops of bloat?
Not that many: An early 1990s PC platform could be thoroughly described in a 200 page book and you could write a boot loader for the CPU, a VGA driver, and drivers for the most common peripherals from scratch in a few weeks.
In fact, games of that era shipped with their own audio drivers, (C/E/V)GA libraries and peripheral support.
Today this would be a) impossible because many manufacturers (cough NVIDIA cough) don't even release OSS drivers and specs and b) individual programs don't own the hardware anymore - the OS does. Also the multitude of target platforms (CPU types, -core counts, and -speeds, graphics cards, peripherals, etc.) makes it virtually impossible to ship code that it optimal for each of even the most common combinations of hardware.
The final nail in the coffin of the "super lean no bloat why-not-just-unikernel-everything-for-maximum-performance" idea can be summed up in one word: cost.
Development costs would be insane if we started optimising every aspect of every program for performance (on every possible platform, no less), memory use, and (binary-) size.
And that's even ignoring the fact that it's more often than not outright impossible to optimise for binary size, runtime performance, and memory footprint all at the same time.
Plus interactions between programs (plugins, {shell-}extensions, data formats, clipboards, etc.) require "bloat" like common interfaces and "neutral" protocols.
Most of the myth of great "old software" comes from the fact that functionality was severely limited compared to modern apps and that many folks simply weren't around to actually see and feel how much some of them actually sucked.
Sure, Visual Studio 6.0 runs incredibly fast on a vintage 3.2 GHz Pentium 4 with 2GiB of RAM using Windows 2000 - but when it released in 1998 many PCs had a 60MHz Pentium 1 or a 100MHz 486DX4 with 64MiB of RAM and it ran like a three-legged dog with worms on these machines compared to the DOS-based Borland-C...
Speaking of which, remember when sometime around the 2000s all Borland Pascal program stopped working, because CPUs had become too fast (>200MHz IIRC)? That was because their runtime used a loop to determine how fast the CPU was, which caused a divide-by-zero on fast machines IIRC.
Good times indeed...
>many PCs had a 60MHz Pentium 1 or a 100MHz 486DX4 with 64MiB of RAM and it ran
By 1998 most people switched to a Pentium because of the huge performance gain. And by 2000, everyone had a Pentium2 with ~96mb of RAM.
That's a bold claim! The PII was released around 1998 and you basically just asserted that everybody buys the latest CPU as soon as its released.
The reality is that most PC users never upgrade their machine and buy a new one instead. The average age of a PC is about 5 years and no, aside from enthusiasts nobody buys the latest and greatest as soon as gets released.
Businesses in particular hold on to their assets for some years due to depreciation (which incidentally is 5 years for PC class devices).
So in 2000, the average PC was 1995-level hardware.
Windows 98 was on its peak and the Pentium MMX often was horrendously slow to start up things. Good with Windows 95, but by 2K everyone was onto 98/SE because of good additions and an easy PNP support.
W98SE was used even when XP got released and a few years more.
Also, your statement about the P4 with that huge amounts of RAM (2GB) is even more unusual than a PII in y2k.
When I had an AMD Athlon in 2003, I barely had 256MB of RAM. I stayed with that up to 2009 with Debian 4 DVD's.I tried some Fedora releases and they where a huge no-no in my machine, and Solaris was impossible.
Reminds me of the Turbo button on PCs in the 90s, which all my school mates and I at the time thought was for a speed-up.
Au contraire!
My daily driver has 4GB of RAM, and it's possible only usable because I'm extremely frugal with my software choices. I run Debian with XFCE and pipe memory usage to my panel so I can always see whether I'm in danger of swapping. I use a Firefox extension that prevents me from opening too many tabs. I stick to the terminal for as many tasks as possible. I categorically refuse to use electron apps. And despite all that, I still ending up OOMing and having to hard reset every few days. For a normal person who doesn't know what RAM is and has an antivirus constantly running the background, the 4GB are going to be used up almost immediately, their machine will start swapping, and then they'll get the impression that their 4GB machine is "slow," despite being faster than high-end computers people used to do exactly the same things ten years ago.
I know how to fix it for myself (I have scripts to do it automatically) but most people do not and just reboot when the system becomes too unresponsive. Not so great for 2020.
Are you sure it's not the "150 IQ I-have-20-tabs-open-at-any-given-time" usage pattern that's actually causing this? I just checked out of curiosity and Edge (for lack of an installed Chrome) used "just" ~380MiB for a rather big website.
Sure, websites (and especially ads!) taking up unnecessary amounts of memory and performance play into this, too, but the expectation that you can just leave 10 bloated websites open on a glorified netbook from 2014 is more to blame than anything else.
Sometimes yes, but;
And how are non technical users supposed to know they should not do this? A lot of people do not know how bookmarks or even ‘windows’ work so they leave open the websites they visit so they do not forget them or have to open them again... How would they know that this is bad? The browser supports it and no one told them. For them there is no correlation between tabs and computer slow. Just as many people, when you say ‘your memory is full’ start throwing away picture from their drive. I think you vastly overestimate computer users... I am ‘the computer guy’ of the village because ‘I do stuff with computers’ and I run into the strangest things all the time. There is, for instance, a large stack of perfectly fine laptops in my house because some people just bought new ones because the old one ‘was slow’ and they were fed up.
Also, what do tabs open have to do with IQ?
It's a meme.
> And how are non technical users supposed to know they should not do this?
For the same reason you need a license to legally drive a car. While I'm generally not a fan of the RTFM-attitude, I have absolutely no patience for people who are unwilling to even learn about the very basics of the complex machine they're operating.
Why on earth doesn't "the computer guy" tell them about where to learn the basics instead? Teach a man to fish an all that...
> There is, for instance, a large stack of perfectly fine laptops in my house because some people just bought new ones because the old one ‘was slow’ and they were fed up.
There's several reasons for that to happen - sometimes it starts at the point of simply buying the wrong product. Leaving the whole why-even-a-laptop-in-the-first-place aside, I have been convinced for the past 10 years now that 90% of all laptop users would be better served with a tablet (preferably an iPad).
First of all, non-technical users cannot make an informed purchase decision and way too often buy garbage products (e.g. low-tier CPU with not enough RAM) in order to save maybe 10%.
Secondly, instead of learning about the product they own and its limitations, they pile on crapware on top of bloatware and not once even manage to do basic maintenance (like disk clean-up, which is literally just a button press away).
"The computer guy" shouldn't "fix" their machines but advice them to just get an iPad instead - problem solved for both sides.
It's pretty short-sighted to blame a particular set of software packages for a whole pile of problems that stack upon each other:
• underpowered hardware
• complex operating systems that require knowledge and manual maintenance to keep them running smoothly
• increasingly bloated websites and ads (just test it yourself - HN allocates single-digit MB per tab, while a news site easily causes >200 MB allocations)
• computer illiterate users that are unwilling to learn even the very basics about their machine (Sapere aude!)
• an inability of users to judge their own needs and requirements vs their options in terms of technology (i.e. desktop PC vs laptop vs Chromebook vs tablet vs smartphone)
• the failure of the industry to communicate their target audience (i.e. you don't need a laptop to watch some Netflix, browse the web, do photo editing, etc.)
• not all operating systems are the same - sometimes all it takes is to make the switch (be that Linux or MacOS)
But no! That's way too much thinking and way too differentiated a view point! It's so much easier to just blame Chrome. Or Electron. Or JavaScript. Or Windows.
Anything but daring to actually form a complete picture...
But hey, that's basically today's Zeitgeist in a nutshell anyway I suppose.