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Comment by coldtea | Hacker News Reader

Better ask, how many things you could do per watt now, if software had that era's leanness?

I occasionally fire up Windows 95 in a VM and marvel at how fast it is. Sometimes I use it for actual tasks, although it is hard to find things Windows 95 is useful for nowadays. My copy has office 97 installed, and I use that for some spreadsheety tasks.

I really like being able to click anything and know I won't see a loading spinner.

Gosh windows 95 was great - especially the ability to navigate the OS from the keyboard alone - At one point I knew W95 so well I could literally navigate the OS by hand without a screen.

An aquaintance at one point changed all the graphics settings to black - so ever screen, menu, text etc was black and you couldnt see anything. I was able to help her by using just the keyboard to navigate to settings and restore defaults. I did it from memory and key-clicks.

Also, it was a fun OS to fuck with people in the nascient realm of virus' of the time, there was setting the desktop as an image and hiding whatever was actually on the desktop so nobody could click on things... remote access BSODs etc.

I'm on an HP flagship gaming laptop now and it consumes probably 1,000 times more power (watts) and Compute to just display this single text entry form on HackerNews than any W95 machine back in the day...

In ~1997 or so I had to shutdown a branch office in San Diego and when I did so, we had a number of plastic sealed boxes of brand-new W95 on 3.5" floppies... I kept them for over a decade and then sold them on Ebay as collectors items for $75 each... and wrote a tale about how they were computing history.

But I had a PDA in 1993 which was by CASIO - and it had a little spreadsheet app on it, and I made a Gematria translator app in it - so I could type in any words and its formulae would spit out all the Gematria numbers for a name (the Celestine Prophecy was a famous book of the time)

That PDA was similar to this one, but less sophisticated - and I had that thing for ~25 years... but unlike OP I didnt take out the battery and it ruind the device.

As fond of memories as I have of the time I used Windows 95 and how much I learned from using it as a pre-teen, I mostly remember my maintenance schedule of reinstalling by the entire OS about once every month or so when it broke. I guess that jumpstarted my lifelong career/hobby of computer fuckery.

My first PDA was a Casio too, I don't remember which exact model but it was a Pocket Viewer and it was great. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pocket_Viewer

My "true" PDA was an Audiovox Maestro I got used off of eBay. I even got a compact flash modem adapter so I could dial-up using it. I was shocked to see almost 10 years later when I got my first smart phone, a T-Mobile Dash 3G, that the OS had barely changed since the Audiovox Maestro back then!

Not sure there's a point to any of this except my own anecdotal trip down memory lane :)

Edit: autocorrect fail

"Memories... they're basically the only thing you have to think back on"

-- Steven Write

---

I love "anecdotal trips down memory lane" -- because its stunning how much I have done and known in my life that I forget.

I truly regret not listening to my mom's advice to journal.

Back when phones had physical keypad buttons and T9 text, I could send a message without taking the phone out of my pocket. It looked suspicious though

Well, UX is a spectrum. You can do things instantly on a very old machine if you don't mind using a cli. If what you want to do is a game, you can't get Cyberpunk, but you can get Pacman.

Imagine the speed you could play Pacman on a modern CPU! You could probably play a whole level in nanoseconds.

Oh, I often do. It increases productivity by orders of magnitude.

Oh, but what if you had a text based implementation of cyberpunk? Where your imagination is the GPU (the best one there is)

Alas, my imagination is also text-based (aphantasia).

You mean like A Mind Forever Voyaging?

Apparently 30 days of things, per the article.

Most computers are inefficient per watt due to waiting on IO from the human.

There's always something running in the background (usually dozens of system services) so that's not a problem - plus they scale their consumption depending on power.

Plus the waiting on IO is when they're NOT doing something. When they do (playing video, listing files and rendering thunbnails, processing video in an editing app, rendering the next frame in game, playing a synth part in a music app, applying an effect on a photo, recalculating an Excel after a change, and so on) is when you want them to be fast.

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