Hacker News Reader

HNHacker News

Top New Best Ask Show Jobs

Comment by kruxigt | Hacker News Reader

Full thread

kruxigt·

Amazing how little has changed. Higher res screens with more colours. Where do all the other processor cycles go?

View on HN

And then brand new tools like VisiData appear and everything feels like it's gone full circle.

https://www.visidata.org/

Don't underestimate just how many cycles ended up sucked into higher resolution screens with more colours. There might well be more integer calculations going on to render a single screen of text from vector fonts onto a 4K display, than from an hour of VisiCalc running away on an 8086.

Convenience and usability, mostly — for the user as well as the developer.

Both as users and developers, we’re able to do so much more with less effort on the computers of today. If you don’t believe me, I challenge you to try to get a little work done on an old 286 sometime.

It’s all relative though. Back in the early/mid ‘80s, the ability to produce a single computer-generated chart out of a table of numbers was mind-blowing! Being able to print it on your new sleek dot-matrix printer was the icing on the cake! I.e. expectations were very different back in the land of the 286.

Massively larger spreadsheets, higher-precision values, but for the most part, I'd bet it's not cycles that are so interesting--modern Excel is probably surprisingly happy at 12 MHz 99% of the time. Memory and binary size is where the real bloat is.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com