29 Mar
2018
29 Mar
'18
12:58 p.m.
On 03/29/2018 03:35 PM, Fred Cisin via cctalk wrote:
On Thu, 29 Mar 2018, Murray McCullough via cctalk
wrote:
We have proof and it is us.
I?m not trying to date myself but have things
truly sped up? In 1970?s
Toronto I had a classic computer, sorry can?t recall what it was,
connected
to a 300 baud modem; by early 80?s had ?zoomed? to 9600 baud. Oh, my!
[ A
typical file size to download was probably 1 MB. ] Speed indeed! Yet
now,
here in rural Ontario, Canada, I?m at 5MB/s. Yikes! (Friends in
Toronto are
at 50MB/s.) We can do the math but content, particularly multimedia, has
swollen in size.[ 1 GB is not unheard of. ] Were classic computing days
that much slower? Happy computing. Murray? -:)
Application of "Moore's Law" calls for a logarithmic increase in
speed, such as doubling every 18 months.? Yes, the rate, in terms of
bits per second has grown a lot.
Similarly storage capacity has grown.
HOWEVER, a variant of "Boyle's Law" warns that software and content
will expand to fit all available space and speed.
Once, if your handwriting is bad enough, you could type your grocery
shopping list into Electric Pencil.? Took a few seconds.?? later
WordStar. Scripsit.? WordPervert.? Microsoft Weird. Does Clippy have a
template for it?
(PC-Write was a welcome respite in that growing bloat!)
I posited that 2 decades ago in a wired article.? My CP/M machine booted
in seconds while waiting for
the winders box to decide if it would/could.
It's kinda like: the plane flight is half an hour
shorter, but the
airport pre-processing in an hour longer.
I fly a Cessna150, cruse speed of 110mph, I could fly to Ohio in six
hours with one fuel stop.
Commercial flight is easily 4x faster and it still takes 6 hours door to
door.?
Once, the operating system, such as PC-DOS 1.00, fit
on a single sided
MFM 160K floppy disk.? Now, much software comes on DVD, because CD-ROM
(2/3 GB) isn't large enough!
Back when 160k was space, now it's a small entry in a table.
A memo announcing change of room and time for a
meeting is a very
short paragraph.? That used to be about half a kilobyte.
Now, it tends to be a few MB.
It seems that some serious effort has to go into wasting so much
capacity!
It is hideous.?? But you need the picture. <insert snark>
HTML has helped that along.
HTML is not nearly so bad its slightly bigger than runoff only wordier.
However that we need HTML for a screen of text is, yes, bad!
I blame WYSISWYG, and Postscript!? WYGINS? (for those that forgot, What
You Get Is No Surprise)
from the days before high resolution printers.
One college administrator managed that with ease.? He
created the memo
in his word processor, printed it on his color printer, signed it,
SCANNED it, and attached the 24bit-color picture as an attachment to
an email. The subject line of the email was: "FYI".? The text, other
than the attachment was: "See attachment".? The attachment was an
uncompressed picture of a line of text in the middle of a full sheet
of paper:
"The curriculum committee has been moved to room D-233 at 2:oo"
But, in the memo, there was a horizontal rule that was not quite
horizontal; one end was a few pixels higher than the other! - scanning
with the paper not quite aligned may well be the easiest way to
accomplish THAT!
But, that was almost a decade ago.? I wonder whether he is now
attaching MP4s?
Eep, the man is batty.
MP4s mean that now, not only does it take MUCH longer
to create the
document, we can now waste MUCH more of the reader's time!
I find it very annoying that when GOOGLE'ing to find a simple answer,
many of the first hits are YouTube.
A few seconds glance at a text document will likely tell me whether
the answer to my question is there.? Or a sketch and maybe a
photograph of somebody's hardware setup.? Instead, sit through minutes
of talking heads.
With background music to make it hard to make out what is being said!
Youtube's "auto-generated CC" is a poor substitute for text.
Dancing kangaroos and yodelling jellyfish has let form triumph over
content!?? When will we finally have smell-o-vision?
Please no, smell-o-vision.? I can see the hackers going for the cross
between skunk, pepperspray,
and some toxic chemical mess. ? Obviously a Blacktooth perpiheral.
?I will nominally run without that peripheral.? Come to think of it I
did that for a decades regarding
sound.??? Most of my favorite modern Linux machines can't squawk, peep,
hear, or see me.
Yes, certainly, the hardware is much faster, and has
more storage space.
Yet, the task takes longer, and storage space runs out just as quickly.
Thats the whole sad story.?? It is why I still run CP/M, RT-11 and even
a DECMate!? All hail fanfold!
Allison