30 May
2023
30 May
'23
7:05 p.m.
On Tue, May 30, 2023 at 11:09 AM Paul Koning via cctalk <
cctalk(a)classiccmp.org> wrote:
Microschlock overcame the problem of its shitty code by taking advantage of
Moore's Law: your computer is slow? It's not our software, you just don't
have enough memory.
But it didn't matter how much you increased your memory or hard drive
space, Microsoft would just fill it up, needlessly. And then blame you
when you didn't upgrade your hardware. Again.
Sellam
On May 30, 2023, at 1:22 PM, Mike Katz via cctalk
<cctalk(a)classiccmp.org>
wrote:
In 1981 when i got my first 5MB hard disk drive at work (I had to write
the drivers for the OS myself) I was able to put all or my source code,
binaries, executable, applications and the operating system and not fill
half of that disk.
A single .raw file from my camera can be over 20MB now.
Is technology advancing us or just helping us to create more and more
storage needs 😁?
Yes.
We used to call that the "virtual disease" in honor of the fact that VMS
applications tended to be 5x or 10x the size of PDP-11 applications that do
similar things. As a result, developing for both by wring it for VMS and
then backporting to PDP-11 tended to give terminally bad performance, while
going the other way worked quite well. ("KOALA" which I'm not sure ever
shipped, comes to mind as an example of the former.)
Disk drive growth is pretty amazing. My first hard drive was 256 kB (an
RC-11, on the college physics department PDP-11/20 in 1973). Amd even the
big hard drives on the main timesharing system weren't that much bigger
(2.4 MB each, a pair of RK05s).