Speed now & then (Space and time?)

[Fred Cisin]

On Thu, 29 Mar 2018, Murray McCullough via cctalk wrote:
> 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!)

It's kinda like: the plane flight is half an hour shorter, but the airport 
pre-processing in an hour longer.

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!

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!
HTML has helped that along.

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?

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?

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.

--
Grumpy Ol' Fred     		cisin at xenosoft.com