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Comment by vel0city | Hacker News Reader

"See, old computers really were pretty snappy!"

Most of the desktops I saw people using in 2004 had like 256-512MB of RAM, total. They've got 512MB of just graphics memory. And then on top of that its a GPU from 2010, so this isn't "an early 2000s machine" to assess what performance would have been like. Try running on a SiS graphics adapter on-board with 256MB of RAM, and I imagine their results would have been a bit different.

And then they've got a 480GB SSD? That's an absolute monster of a drive for 2004, practically nothing would have come close to the latency and throughput available on that drive. Even a 32GB SSD in 2004.

I always see people remark "wow look how snappy old computers were" when they're essentially built like $10,000 machines if you were to actually have those specs at that time.

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> I always see people remark "wow look how snappy old computers were" when they're essentially built like $10,000 machines if you were to actually have those specs at that time.

But the question is that, if you were to spend $10,000 or more today will you experience the same snappiness.

I would argue that it's impossible to replicate the low-latency experience of "retro" systems today with the overhead of modern software; no matter how much you are willing to spend.

Without a doubt in my mind. For fun I do use retro computers to mess around, often on original spinning rust drives while they still live so I do it side by side.

I've been messing around with some PIII laptops with integrated Intel IGPs running Windows 2000, 256MB RAM, old IDE drives. Loads of applications takes 10+ seconds to launch.

Applying effects on many photo editors is crazy slow. Editing photos taken on my camera today is an exercise in patience. It's even slow just panning around.

It can't even playback most of the videos I'll normally watch, even if you do load something like VLC. Not that it really matters, because it can't even draw a 1920x1080 image.

Doing an IMAP sync with even the crappy crypto it can do takes like a minute. You can see it drawing the graphics in the emails line by line. It takes a moment to switch emails. Replying to an email takes a few seconds for the new email window to appear, you can see it drawing the UI while it loads.

Don't get me wrong, sure maybe in notepad.exe there's a few extra nanoseconds between keystrokes. But my machine today (way less than $10k) doesn't really have any lag for the software I run for text anyways.

Next time, complain that your DOS 6.0 can't run Notepad :-) Maybe you paid a fortune for that system back in the 80s.

If I were on DOS, I'd be happy running Borland C++ with 1-2MB of RAM. Even though Ahem 640k ought to be enough for everybody. The lesser the bloat, the better.

Editing, categorizing, archiving, searching, and viewing my photos and videos isn't bloat though, it's one of the major reasons why I have a computer. There's far more to computers than just entering text on a local filesystem and compiling small applications.

So, that's just your choice then. How you wish to pay for it depends on YOUR choice. :-)

The overall memory usage is still much lower than 512MB when running the older Office XP suite - and when using Remote Desktop. In contrast, I tried running Opera 36 and my system started swapping already. That has nothing to do with hardware.

While there is a point about I/O being expensive, and I did mention that they get removed over time when chips get faster, it still points to the fact that software that is not bloated runs better. Period.

Still you're comparing snappiness of software designed for hardware seven years older than your processor (during some of the most rapid gains in performance YoY) and 13 years older than your GPU, with IO 1,000x faster than what it was targeted for. Your CPU is over 10x faster than the hardware Office XP was targeted for. The graphics card is probably at least 1,000x faster than what Office XP was intended for.

Most people think of Office 2007 as a massively bloated and sluggish piece of software. And the experience of it running on the hardware they were running in 2007, it probably was. Is it still slow and sluggish on a modern Intel/AMD CPU with an NVMe SSD?

Go run Office XP on a PII 400MHz with integrated graphics. Tell me how responsive and fast the experience is. It's a bloated mess compared to Office 95, so much extra fluff you don't need.

And I mean, why are you even expending all this waste of a GUI with true colors? So much bloat. So much waste. Imagine how much more efficient it could be if it was just drawing 80 columns.

By your logic, a PII 400 MHz came in 1997 and you are running software that was released 4 years after that processor did. So instead of figuring out how to run something that works very well, you're just ... complaining.

I agree with the fact that I could be doing this exercise in DOS with 80 columns on whatever and see what is the best environment I can live with. I actually do have a productive DOS environment as well.

And If I were doing that exercise, I'd be trying to see if I can add more stuff to it (PCPaint, DOSAMP etc.) to find out what works and what doesn't. And document it for the benefit of other people.

What is stopping you from figuring out what works for your PII 400 MHz?

I'm just pointing out when you're crushing something's design specs by 10-1,000x it's no surprise it's snappy. Do the same with modern stuff and it'll still be pretty snappy.

It's not like Office XP was some last optimized version and it's all bloat after that. Office XP could also be considered a massively bloated office suite itself.

The point is that old software and hardware are everyday usable. There are modern day software that do not suffer from the same performance issues as some of the other bloated ones. Albeit very few exist.

One can always complain about things that don't work. Instead, look at everything that works well today - it is a very good way to bring usability back into perspective. The intent is in bringing computers way beyond their intended eras and keeping things running with them. The effort recognizes and acknowledges the mistakes done so that there is a course correction going forward. HTH.

> There are modern day software that do not suffer from the same performance issues as some of the other bloated ones. Albeit very few exist.

This is what I'm saying though. You're suggesting modern software is all a bloated mess, unlike all this well-polished and optimized software they used to make. But you're only suggesting the old stuff doesn't suffer performance problems because you're going over the recommended specs 10-1,000x. Do the same with modern software, and suddenly its not so bloated now is it?

Back in the day when Office XP released it was the bloated modern software unlike that well-polished and optimized software they used to make. You're just drawing arbitrary lines of computing hardware and software to say "this is bloated, this isn't". The requirements of Office 2000 was a 75MHz CPU, 16MB of RAM, and 189MB disk space. Office XP's minimum requirements were a 133MHz CPU, 32-128MB RAM, and 210MB disk space. Additional instance of an Office app also went from only needing 4MB RAM to needing 8MB RAM. Nearly 2x the resources, so incredibly bloated!

I'm happy you're finding good use with the old hardware. Its good its serving your needs. I too tend to keep old computing hardware around until I no longer have any use for it, and even then I tend to sell it or give it to people who will actually use it instead of throwing it away. I've got some software I want to share with my kids, and it generally only runs well on like Windows 95 machines, so I actually am actively looking for some old hardware to run these educational games. So yeah, I'll be running an old Pentium III machine for them and it'll absolutely suit their needs. Sometimes a 10GHz 2TB RAM machine just isn't necessary for the task at hand, I agree.

I'm just arguing the commentary about what is "bloated" and what isn't is ignoring a lot of other factors of what "bloated" really means. If you run something at way under the designed specs, you're going to have a bad time. If you run it with hardware that's 1,000x the design specs, its no surprise it runs fast. It doesn't mean the newer stuff is "bloated" while the old stuff wasn't, it was just designed for a different target in mind. And maybe for your needs, all you need is exactly what Office XP has. If all you're doing is putting letters on paper though, then Office XP is massively bloated compared to just using a typewriter. For me, most documents I work on are being worked on with cloud collaboration stuff, so tools like Office XP don't have anywhere near the features I need from an office suite. Is it still bloat then?

I'm saying that software is getting bloated over time, and it needn't - if the idea is to keep software engineers employed, we could spend a few years doing a tick - increasing features and more years doing a tock - making things lean, efficient and sustainable.

This is a very different idea, it's just like you said: 'finding good use with the old hardware'. This is a mindset, it is something that tries to keep systems alive while ensuring sustainability. Fixing broken hardware or softwre - This is what the post is about.

As engineers, we should be realizing that there's tons of work lying around, and sustainability is a process and a goal. This is about recognizing how to put those efforts around it.

> I'm saying that software is getting bloated over time, and it needn't

But the "bloat" isn't just wasted space and resources; its often genuinely useful features. Your example with Office XP is a great example. We can look at just Word and compare it to even Word 2007. Its missing a lot of genuinely useful features. Its math equation builder is absolutely rudimentary and pretty bad compared to what is available in 2007. It doesn't show a live word count in the status bar. It doesn't offer the quick styles functionality. It lacks good bibliography and citation tools. Its document comparison engine is very rudimentary. It lacks a full screen reading mode. Its spell checker is extremely rudimentary. Are these additions just bloat?

A contextual spell checker is going to use more CPU and RAM than just looking at whitespace and seeing if the word matches a database or hits a set of basic morphology rules, isn't? Handling a more complicated set of changes to do comparisons on is probably going to lead to a more complicated internal representation of the document, consuming more resources, isn't it? Having the processing and designs of the reading mode means the application is larger and consumes more ram, doesn't it? So its increasing the requirements by a good bit, but you're getting a lot of features along side it.

Ah, but Office 2007, that's a bloated mess.

But once again, if your standard is just putting black letters on a white page, why are you even bothering drawing colors to the screen? Aren't colors just bloat? Why have a screen at all? Just bloat.

So yeah, does Word 2021 require a lot more resources to run than Office XP? Sure. It also does a whole hell of a lot more. Far better pen input with smart shapes, equations, and more. Far better dictation support. Even more enhanced contextual spelling/grammar tools along with a smart editor feature to give better critique. Better annotation and commenting tools. Better change tracking and comparison tools. Better collaboration features and live cloud syncing. New search tool to search settings, resources, help, and more. Accessibility checker tool helps find potential improvements to your documents like help adding alt-text and other things.

Its not like Office 2021 is just the same thing as Office XP but now it needs at least a gigahertz and a few gigs of RAM. If that were the case, I'd agree its just bloat. But its got thousands and thousands of improvements and new features, all of which demand just a little bit more and a little bit more resources. Its unreasonable to expect for them to be able to shoehorn all the same features of Office 2021 into similar requirements of Office XP. And even then, picking Office XP is entirely arbitrary; why not hold them up to Office 95 as the standard of resources? If its using more than 8MB of RAM and 55MB of storage space clearly its just bloat.

Why should a videogame need any more resources than the original DOOM? Clearly everything added on is just bloat.

You completely miss the point about sustainability and choose to argue, you go ahead.

If I were running an older computer, I would figure out how to be productive with Office 95.

Likely prediction: You will never build that Pentium III machine from old or refurbished parts. Nor will you be the type that will actually enjoy playing DOOM or anything with that machine. You'll instead keep complaining.

Sustainability, Preservation - It's a mindset. If you don't get it, you don't do it. :-)

Quite a rude assumption there, seeing as how I've already mentioned I have the machines and they're currently running, and I've already talked about how I do retro computing as a hobby. They're just not in the state for little kids beating on them daily. You know, from a whole preservation mindset.

I've said nothing against sustainability, only pushed back against your claims that modern software is just bloat compared to what was there in the past. Often a 1/2HP motor just isn't enough oomph for what you're wanting to achieve. There's nothing innately wrong with that, and it's not just bloat. Sometimes the things you want to move are just heavy and the physics of the challenge requires more power.

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