Speed now & then (Space and time?)

[allison]

On 03/29/2018 03:35 PM, Fred Cisin via cctalk wrote:
> 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.
>
We have proof and it is us.

>
> 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