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Comment by st_goliath | Hacker News Reader

> 5MB nowadays

Somehow we manage to piss away computing resources like nothing, requiring more and more to do the same work. So I guess for meaningful comparisons we need a way to inflation adjust computing resources too?

E.g. 5MB of 1965 disk storage, roughly equivalent to 10 TB in the eyes of 2024 programs?

Maybe we could draw a comparisons by how much a base installation of a recent OS would eat away, or how much of the available RAM an at-the-time-modern text editor would gobble up? E.g. 1980s Emacs vs whatever currently popular Electron behemoth to compare RAM on computers from those respective epochs.

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5MB of 1965 disk storage, as the article helpfully points out, stores 5 million (EBCDIC) characters of text.

5MB of 2024 storage, stores 5 million (ASCII) or as little as 1.25 million (UTF-8) characters of text.

There's no inflation to adjust here. There are still people programming microcontrollers with 1KiB or 512 bytes of RAM, 4KiB EEPROM, and maybe 1MB Flash. Those computers can do about the same things which 1965 computers with the same specs can do, just 20-100 times faster. Just because we don't use an AVR to add up Olympic scores, doesn't mean we couldn't.

The ones with five orders of magnitude more resources do a lot more. Some of it is squandered, when we can afford to do that, but in applications like AAA gaming or simulation, not so much. They operate near-optimally, just much faster, and doing a great deal more than was possible at the time.

Are we really "pissing it away"? For example the fact that VS Code is an Electron app written in HTML, CSS and TypeScript opened the door for many extension developers. I prefer it this way compared to the older native/Java-based IDEs.

Meanwhile, the reverse is true for me. I’m sick and tired of desktop chat clients and other applications being, or turning into, single-purpose Chromium instances.

The editor I'm using today updates itself from a global network of interconnected computers, using strong cryptography to ensure no one's tampered with it. It can download plugins from that same inter-net and has a sandbox that keeps malicious code from taking over the rest of its process space or accessing the filesystem. Some of those plugins make their own encrypted connections to distant computers. It displays its user interface on a truecolor screen across 2 2560x1440 monitors. It understands a huge number of programming languages and has advanced reformatting, error checking, syntax highlighting, search, building, testing, and reference-finding capabilities that can easily handle version controlled codebases with gigabytes of code. Because all its pointers are twice the size of those in older systems, I can open individual files many gigabytes in size.

Yeah, it's bigger than Emacs on a PDP-11. It does a whole lot more than Pico does, too.

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