my first hard disk was 20 mb... (a little story and a question to you all)

[Former captain of the Enterprise]

yeah... not GB, 20 Mb..... this was what was called back then on a "clone"
IBM compatible made by believe it or not "Hyundai".
That machine that worked at 4.7 MHz...... it had less than 512 kb of ram..
don't ask me how much.. I cant remember, and of course could run only dos.
It also had a floppy disk, the old ones that were indeed flexible and large.

and what I thought back then was that I would never fill that 20 mb of disk
space.... how could I?
the only thing I could do with that is use some simple programs like pw
(professional write)
to write text, and a few other very old programs of that era...games were
horrible, the graphics on that, was
monochrome. I could write hundreds of books on that computer... even if I
wrote 12 books a year.. I would not fill that space in a life time....

Now I downloaded skype.. skype is 20mb... lol that was the total capacity
that old disk drive had!

Of course this was not my first computer.. my first computer was a spectrum
with 48kb of ram no floppy, no hard drive no monitor,
you needed a TV for a screen, it had 8 colors (that was why they called it a
spectrum because it had colors..wow), one small beeper sound with one
monophonic channel, and for storage you used a tape recorder and audiotapes
that stored the programs. Interestingly the games for the spectrum were far
better
than the IBM clone had.

Now 1 jpg image is 48 kb, and jpg is a compressed format too....! To load
that 1 jpg from a tape you would need about 10 minutes of audio tape
playing!

Now we have vista... the OS alone needs 10 GB of space only for it self,
512mb ram only for it self,
and a huge amount of processing power only to lift its own services running
in the background.

And what does this story tells us? Is the bloat we see, really progress?
I think that actually when hardware had less power programmers needed to
think more and cram as much capability out
of the hardware as possible. Especially for the spectrum... those
programmers had learned to write directly into machine language! lol....

And that is why I dare say... that vista if written directly in machine
language by genius programmers, the complete OS could be less than 100mb and
need only 16 mb of ram to run itself, and it would be lightning fast, turn
on instantly and leave all the cpu and memory to the programs in need.

Now programmers do a sloppy job, and don't care much about bloat... even
though bloat makes everything go slower.. they don't care,
because they know more powerful computers will come out to handle their
bloat.

A good modern example is the comparison of utorrent and azureous. These both
are torrent programs. One is made with care and is only 150k,
the other needs 20 mb! lol, that is 133 times more resources, and of course
it is far slower, also when they load, one takes about 50 times more ram
than the other.. this is a disgrace!


What do you say? Do you prefer having intelligent design, or lazy
programmers making bloat, just because they can? Bloat adds up you know...
with every program being bloated badly designed, we end up having dual cores
with 1 gig of ram crawling! lol this is insane!

 

[Julian]

yeah... not GB, 20 Mb..... this was what was called back then on a "clone"
IBM compatible made by believe it or not "Hyundai".
That machine that worked at 4.7 MHz...... it had less than 512 kb of ram..
don't ask me how much.. I cant remember, and of course could run only dos.
It also had a floppy disk, the old ones that were indeed flexible and
large.

and what I thought back then was that I would never fill that 20 mb of
disk space.... how could I?
the only thing I could do with that is use some simple programs like pw
(professional write)
to write text, and a few other very old programs of that era...games were
horrible, the graphics on that, was
monochrome. I could write hundreds of books on that computer... even if I
wrote 12 books a year.. I would not fill that space in a life time....

Now I downloaded skype.. skype is 20mb... lol that was the total capacity
that old disk drive had!

Of course this was not my first computer.. my first computer was a
spectrum with 48kb of ram no floppy, no hard drive no monitor,
you needed a TV for a screen, it had 8 colors (that was why they called it
a spectrum because it had colors..wow), one small beeper sound with one
monophonic channel, and for storage you used a tape recorder and
audiotapes that stored the programs. Interestingly the games for the
spectrum were far better
than the IBM clone had.

Now 1 jpg image is 48 kb, and jpg is a compressed format too....! To load
that 1 jpg from a tape you would need about 10 minutes of audio tape
playing!

Now we have vista... the OS alone needs 10 GB of space only for it self,
512mb ram only for it self,
and a huge amount of processing power only to lift its own services
running in the background.

And what does this story tells us? Is the bloat we see, really progress?
I think that actually when hardware had less power programmers needed to
think more and cram as much capability out
of the hardware as possible. Especially for the spectrum... those
programmers had learned to write directly into machine language! lol....

And that is why I dare say... that vista if written directly in machine
language by genius programmers, the complete OS could be less than 100mb
and need only 16 mb of ram to run itself, and it would be lightning fast,
turn on instantly and leave all the cpu and memory to the programs in
need.

Now programmers do a sloppy job, and don't care much about bloat... even
though bloat makes everything go slower.. they don't care,
because they know more powerful computers will come out to handle their
bloat.

A good modern example is the comparison of utorrent and azureous. These
both are torrent programs. One is made with care and is only 150k,
the other needs 20 mb! lol, that is 133 times more resources, and of
course it is far slower, also when they load, one takes about 50 times
more ram than the other.. this is a disgrace!


What do you say? Do you prefer having intelligent design, or lazy
programmers making bloat, just because they can? Bloat adds up you know...
with every program being bloated badly designed, we end up having dual
cores with 1 gig of ram crawling! lol this is insane!

It would probably tackle a million man years to write a modern operating
system
in Assembler let alone machine code and those men wouldn't come cheap even
if you could find them.

ps. I have more computing power on my desk now, with a modest Dell,
than the UK's largest supermarket company had all together, when
I joined as a programmer in the early 80's.

 

[Former captain of the Enterprise]

how about making better more intelligent development tools?

Look at nature.. it is very efficient...

PC Technology isn't! Perhaps there is something we must learn here....

 

[Dustin Harper]

Well, noadays, it would be very difficult to make a modern OS under 16MB.
Even for the video display, it would need ~4MB to run at 1024x768 with 24
bit color. Sound is a little extra, as are all your onboard I/O devices, CD
drives, mouse driver, keyboard, USB.... Give those up, and it's doable.

I can get you under 50 MB for an OS. You can do quite a bit with it, but
it's still very limited. Damn Small Linux. Try it out, it's good for some
things, but you'll find that it wouldn't work full time as an OS for the
public.

Also, DOS 6.22 runs fine under 16MB, so does Windows 3.11. I remember
running that with a 386 and 2MB of RAM.

But, if I were running Windows 3.11, wouldn't I be wasting all my hardware?
Why did I buy 3 GB of RAM and a quad core CPU if they won't be used?

IF, and that's a very strong if, a programmer came up with an OS that was
smaller, what features would it have? Even in assembler, it wouldn't be
much. Perhaps we need a totally new approach to the OS model. Maybe
something like a pick and choose. You get the kernel by default (compiled
for your specific hardware), your choice of GUI (full of eye candy, or very
basic, or in between), any or all programs that are wanted, only the
specific drivers you need and use (no PS2 devices? No driver!). You don't
play games? Only a 2D graphics driver. If you need to change anything, make
it easy to do. Great for power users, but not so great for the everyday Joe
who just wants it to work out of the box. I'd buy it, though!

--
Dustin Harper
(e-mail address removed)
http://www.vistarip.com

--

 

[Mike Hall MVP]

Just think, with intelligent design, maybe all of the features and seating
capacity of a 747 or Airbus 380 could be squished into a C-47 sized
airplane.. Airbus and Boeing are all about 'bloat', lets face it.. same with
auto manufacturers.. those lazy shysters put just 5 seats in a Cavalier.
what were they thinking about?

yeah... not GB, 20 Mb..... this was what was called back then on a "clone"
IBM compatible made by believe it or not "Hyundai".
That machine that worked at 4.7 MHz...... it had less than 512 kb of ram..
don't ask me how much.. I cant remember, and of course could run only dos.
It also had a floppy disk, the old ones that were indeed flexible and
large.

and what I thought back then was that I would never fill that 20 mb of
disk space.... how could I?
the only thing I could do with that is use some simple programs like pw
(professional write)
to write text, and a few other very old programs of that era...games were
horrible, the graphics on that, was
monochrome. I could write hundreds of books on that computer... even if I
wrote 12 books a year.. I would not fill that space in a life time....

Now I downloaded skype.. skype is 20mb... lol that was the total capacity
that old disk drive had!

Of course this was not my first computer.. my first computer was a
spectrum with 48kb of ram no floppy, no hard drive no monitor,
you needed a TV for a screen, it had 8 colors (that was why they called it
a spectrum because it had colors..wow), one small beeper sound with one
monophonic channel, and for storage you used a tape recorder and
audiotapes that stored the programs. Interestingly the games for the
spectrum were far better
than the IBM clone had.

Now 1 jpg image is 48 kb, and jpg is a compressed format too....! To load
that 1 jpg from a tape you would need about 10 minutes of audio tape
playing!

Now we have vista... the OS alone needs 10 GB of space only for it self,
512mb ram only for it self,
and a huge amount of processing power only to lift its own services
running in the background.

And what does this story tells us? Is the bloat we see, really progress?
I think that actually when hardware had less power programmers needed to
think more and cram as much capability out
of the hardware as possible. Especially for the spectrum... those
programmers had learned to write directly into machine language! lol....

And that is why I dare say... that vista if written directly in machine
language by genius programmers, the complete OS could be less than 100mb
and need only 16 mb of ram to run itself, and it would be lightning fast,
turn on instantly and leave all the cpu and memory to the programs in
need.

Now programmers do a sloppy job, and don't care much about bloat... even
though bloat makes everything go slower.. they don't care,
because they know more powerful computers will come out to handle their
bloat.

A good modern example is the comparison of utorrent and azureous. These
both are torrent programs. One is made with care and is only 150k,
the other needs 20 mb! lol, that is 133 times more resources, and of
course it is far slower, also when they load, one takes about 50 times
more ram than the other.. this is a disgrace!


What do you say? Do you prefer having intelligent design, or lazy
programmers making bloat, just because they can? Bloat adds up you know...
with every program being bloated badly designed, we end up having dual
cores with 1 gig of ram crawling! lol this is insane!

--


Mike Hall
MS MVP Windows Shell/User
http://msmvps.com/blogs/mikehall/

 

[Former captain of the Enterprise]

Are you really so dumb or is it just that your post is stupid?

We are not talking about the ability to run applications thus in your
metaphor to carry passengers.
We are talking about the underlying OS code. I say you could have the same
exact thing as vista
but more compact and efficient.

It would be like making your 747 with a new design that would use lighter
and stronger materials,
that also had an antigravity device in order to lift part of the weight
instead of having huge turbines
consuming all that fissile fuel. Don't laugh.. boeing is indeed
experimenting with antigravity
technology... don't believe me?
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/sci/tech/2157975.stm

there is more to this that what you will read here

 

[Former captain of the Enterprise]

the amount of ram you say (4mb) is loaded on the display adaptor if I am not
mistaken... with no wallpaper you don't have to load the 4 mb on the
machines ram...

I have tried DSL many times just out of curiosity.. but I am not talking
about something different.
I am talking about vista with the features it has now, but rewritten in a
more condensed and efficient manner.

 

[Dana Cline - MVP]

Please, attack the idea, not the person who presents it. If we can't remain
civilized here, we're no better than barbarians.

One thing to think of - compiler technology is pretty good now days - it's
often true that compiled C++ code is faster and smaller than the
human-designed assembly language equivalent. That's why few things are ever
written in assembler these days.

Bloat? Maybe, but there's some reasons for it, everything from depth of
security to breadth of applets. Some of it is economics - I can make App A
10% smaller/faster, if I have a year to do that. But I don't, so it ships as
is. The fine art of software project management is to walk that thin line
between what you can do, what you must do, and what the public is willing to
pay for.

Linux might have more appeal - there's greater diversity, tighter code, more
elegance. But...none of those things are real incentives to write an
application for the platform, are they?

Dana Cline - MCE MVP

 

[Former captain of the Enterprise]

"some people see things as they are and say why...
I dream of things that never were and say why not!"

Yeah.. why not do things in a new fresh way.. how about making applications
that will write
other applications in more efficient manner? I don't know... all I know that
anything
people put their minds to as a goal they are able to accomplish....

How someone creating a new development platform that will crunch those
numbers
and make the files super small?

I don't know... but you see.. because I am not a programmer I have an open
mind..
programmers have been taught ways to do things, so they don't really stop
and think
how things could be done in a completely different manner. Their
predetermined paradigms
are keeping them captive.

That's why development of new technologies should not be left to programmers
alone,
but also must have visionaries and artists to assist them with new concepts.

 

[Former captain of the Enterprise]

Dana let me give you another example so you can understand why I am saying
all this...
because there is a huggeee space for improvement!

The DNA molecule is microscopic... only with the most powerful electron
microscopes have we been able to see chromosomes that consist of dna. Now
packed in that small area is all the information to create a living
creature... do you understand how much information that is????
Each cell of your body has that same information...
The human brain has more capacity of trillions and trillions the time of all
the computers that
are connected to the whole internet, yet its packed in a small 3 pound size
and uses only a few watts.

The most powerful computer we have isn't even as smart as the stupidest
insect.... lol
and we are using huge amounts of power to have that small computational
power...
I mean a CPU may be using 100 watts... an insect brain how many watts does
it use? I a fraction of a milliwatt!

There are things that we must investigate reasearch and try, and there ARE
other ways to do far better things...

but we have to have open minds .. and not stick with the things we know
already, because "it was always done that way"

I can assure you, that we are going about things in a very stupid way... and
vista earns the crown of inefficiency and poor performance/power ratio
that has ever been created by mankind!

 

[Peter R. Fletcher]

What do you think puts the image into the video RAM? For most
purposes, and certainly for high-graphics applications, either the
application or the OS has to keep at least one "copy" of the screen in
main memory to manipulate.

While your original thesis has some merit, and there are striking
examples of programs that do much the same job in much the same way
but use dramatically different amounts of resources, and while I am
sure that all modern OSes contain code that could be optimised much
better, a lot of what you may think is OS "bloat" has to do with
better I/O (particularly faster and higher-resolution graphics) and
better protection for the user from his own errors and others'
nastiness. In the days of DOS, and even of DOS-based Windows it was
all too easy for a poorly written program to crash the OS and/or for a
rogue program to take over vital machine functions. Even with the
layers of protection we have now, we are only just staying ahead of
the bad guys, I was writing code (in DEC and IBM Assembler) in the
days when every byte counted, and have at least a passing
acquaintance with most of the mainstream programming languages. I
still try to write the most efficient code possible, but in big
projects it is not worth hand-optimizing everything - if you do, you
never deliver anything. The programmers of Vista are not perfect, any
more than those who write Mac OSes and/or Linux, but perfection is not
achievable this side of the grave, and I am personally very grateful
for the enormous distance we have come from the days of the IBM XT and
the Apple II.

the amount of ram you say (4mb) is loaded on the display adaptor if I am not
mistaken... with no wallpaper you don't have to load the 4 mb on the
machines ram...

I have tried DSL many times just out of curiosity.. but I am not talking
about something different.
I am talking about vista with the features it has now, but rewritten in a
more condensed and efficient manner.

Please respond to the Newsgroup, so that others may benefit from the exchange.
Peter R. Fletcher

 

[Mike Hall MVP]

You can't have 'lean and mean' and multi functionality.. it doesn't happen..

Just think, with intelligent design, maybe all of the features and seating
capacity of a 747 or Airbus 380 could be squished into a C-47 sized
airplane.. Airbus and Boeing are all about 'bloat', lets face it.. same
with auto manufacturers.. those lazy shysters put just 5 seats in a
Cavalier. what were they thinking about?




--


Mike Hall
MS MVP Windows Shell/User
http://msmvps.com/blogs/mikehall/

--


Mike Hall
MS MVP Windows Shell/User
http://msmvps.com/blogs/mikehall/

 

[Dana Cline - MVP]

You make some good points, but as you say, you're not a programmer. That may
mean you have an open mind about how things could be done, but that doesn't
imply an inner knowledge of how they're currently done, and why they're done
that way. Software engineering is still more of an art than a craft, and as
crafts and engineering disciplines go, it's still a very new one. There
certainly is room for improvement. Computers keep getting smaller and more
powerful, and nanotech gives us some hopes that Moore's Law will continue to
hold for years to come. At some point we may be able to duplicate the
processing power of the human brain, or the data storage capacity of the DNA
molecule.

At that point, of course, we become the "intelligent designer" that some
postulate created us.

Dana Cline - MCE MVP

 

[Jim]

yeah... not GB, 20 Mb..... this was what was called back then on a "clone"
IBM compatible made by believe it or not "Hyundai".
That machine that worked at 4.7 MHz...... it had less than 512 kb of ram..
don't ask me how much.. I cant remember, and of course could run only dos.
It also had a floppy disk, the old ones that were indeed flexible and
large.

Well, I can certainly beat that. The very first computer I ever used was a
PDP-11/03. It had 32kb of memory and used the
paper tape operating system. After trying to get a single macro routine to
assemble, I decided that if this was programming, I wanted
none of it. Fortunately, I found a job using DEC's DOS operating system on
a PDP-11/45.

Life is so much easier now.

Jim

 

[Dustin Harper]

Vista could not be done that effecient, nor could any modern OS with a
graphical interface with the same features as Vista. Even with basic
features such as memory managment, I/O devices, modern video drivers, etc...
It just couldn't be done. Not saying it's impossible, but it'd be too
difficult for pretty much any programmer to even attempt to tackle.

But, that's why we have GB's of RAM. Cheap, too. I can buy 2 GB of DDR RAM
for ~$100. I bought 1 MB of RAM for $100 a little over 15 years ago (damn,
seems like yesterday!) just so I can play some game.

I do understand where you are coming from, though. But, with all the
resources available, why shouldn't they use them? Push Intel for better
compilers, or push the colleges to teach more assembler. I remember
programming old machine language for the Commodore 64. That was with 64KB of
RAM. Some of those games were phenominal. Like previously mentioned, every
byte taken was precious. Even in the more recent DOS days, with 512 or 640KB
of RAM, we had to tweak our config.sys and autoexec.bat and run memmaker and
try to get as much available RAM as we could just to play games!

A complete and total rewrite would be necessary, with totally new concepts
and ways of doing things. From the ground up. The R&D on a project like that
would take 10+ years just to get a base going. It would be great, though.

--
Dustin Harper
(e-mail address removed)
http://www.vistarip.com

--

 

[Nick Mason]

"some people see things as they are and say why...
I dream of things that never were and say why not!"

Yeah.. why not do things in a new fresh way.. how about making
applications that will write
other applications in more efficient manner? I don't know... all I
know that anything
people put their minds to as a goal they are able to accomplish....

How someone creating a new development platform that will crunch those
numbers
and make the files super small?

I don't know... but you see.. because I am not a programmer I have an
open mind..
programmers have been taught ways to do things, so they don't really
stop and think
how things could be done in a completely different manner. Their
predetermined paradigms
are keeping them captive.

Actually we do think about how things can be done. If you are writing
something for yourself then you can spend as much time as you like refining
and improving, however, if you're doing it to make money you can't do that,
you have to balance effort with benefits.

People's time is valuable and expensive, disk space and RAM are cheap.
There's a saying, one of many, often used and that's 'It's good enough for
rock and roll.' Then there's the one the company accountants and project
managers like to use at meetings 'I don't want it perfect, I want it on
Thursday!'

Absolutely correct, the first applications I wrote had to fit on those early
8 inch, and later 5.25 inch floppy disks, the double density 360kb ones. My
first IBM PC had no hard drive just twin floppies, my second PC had a 5Mb
hard drive!


There is no way you could get anything like Vista in that space!

It all comes down to money. You can write the perfect program, it can take
years, cost a fortune and fit in a few kb of memory. Then along comes a 14
year old who writes a program in VB that does exactly the same thing and he
does it in an afternoon. It doesn't matter that it's 10x bigger when
compiled because he can sell it for next to nothing and still make money
while the original programmer needs to charge a fortune to pay back the
money he borrowed to feed himself while he was working on his perfect
program.

 

[Peter R. Fletcher]

Well, I can certainly beat that. The very first computer I ever used was a
PDP-11/03. It had 32kb of memory and used the
paper tape operating system. After trying to get a single macro routine to
assemble, I decided that if this was programming, I wanted
none of it. Fortunately, I found a job using DEC's DOS operating system on
a PDP-11/45.

Life is so much easier now.

Jim

I used its predecessor!. You had to enter the primary bootstrap word
by word by toggling front panel switches - this told it how to boot
from tape. The good news was that its magnetic core memory generally
remembered where you were when you switched it off, and you could
often (but not always) restart from there without rebooting!

Please respond to the Newsgroup, so that others may benefit from the exchange.
Peter R. Fletcher

 

[Julian]

Well, I can certainly beat that. The very first computer I ever used was
a PDP-11/03. It had 32kb of memory and used the
paper tape operating system. After trying to get a single macro routine
to assemble, I decided that if this was programming, I wanted
none of it. Fortunately, I found a job using DEC's DOS operating system
on a PDP-11/45.

Life is so much easier now.

 

[Frank]

Julian wrote:

Thanks, that's funny!
Frank

 

[Former captain of the Enterprise]

you are wrong of course....

While Bandwidth was increasing and search engines were transformed into
portals
bloated with images music news bla bla bla bla.... then came Google...
with a simple white page and a logo...

and destroyed all competition.. LOL do you remember exite, lycos, altavista
? No?

Is google not making money? Sure they are..billions and billions, because
they are SMART....

if you think vista is smart.. think again.. its the dumbest piece of
software I have seen
from Microsoft since Microsoft Bob.... and that at least was cute!

There are 2 roads to wealth.. you can make something powerful, or you can
make something
miniaturized and efficient....

the BEST way is to make something efficient AND powerful....

Start learning buster.. because you are far behind me....