> Ugh I'm glad those days are gone.
I'm quite the opposite... i miss the times when applications could run in a few megs of ram.... nowaday just a browser showing a simple weather report wastes 2 gigs+ of ram.
It’s a nostalgic fantasy to look back at that stuff imagining it’s in any way comparable to what users expect today.
I don’t care about applications wasting RAM. Modern machines have plenty of cores and RAM and the software is unbelievably powerful today.
I have some nostalgia for those days (I have a huge collection of vintage computers).
But it wasn’t “the good old days”, in which software was done right and now it’s all sloppy and bloated and lazy. Not at all.
I’m glad of modern software, operating systems and tools. Back then there was always something you wanted to do but couldn’t because the software to do it didn’t exist yet - very frustrating. Now almost anything you want to do, you can because someone has developed the stuff you need to do it.
I’m super glad I was there for the early days but glad they’ve passed.
I do care when applications waste a lot of RAM and cores but application performance is still terrible. Looking at you, Microsoft Teams. I don't remember mIRC ever being a slouch, even on a Windows 95 PC with 8mb of RAM.
And in a few years, your writing software (*office, word, whatever) won't gain any memorable new features, but the current 32gigs of ram suddenly won't be enough anymore, and you'll buy a new machine, say how you don't care if Word uses 40gigs of ram, because you have 256gigs installed and it doesn't matter...
My firefox is currently using 7 gigs of ram, and i have 23 tabs open... al the information in all those 23 tabs is maybe 20 megabytes, and that includes the pictures in them.
Look at mobile phones... you use your browser, chat programs, take and send photos and sometimes even call a person using one... and after a few years you're still doing the same, but the apps have grown so much in both size and ram usage, that you have to replace your phone, even though you still need and use the same functionality you used when you bought it. Yes, games got better and look nicer, but for most "old people", the only reason to waste money and create e-waste is bloat, because developers can't optimize anymore.
The fact that I’m still getting by totally fine with an old 8GB on my old laptop is frankly speaking insane. It’s from 2015. Back in the 90s using an 8 year old machine for anything modern would have been unthinkable. OK, it can’t do the latest games or 8k video editing. There are some modern tasks it can’t do. But with everything else there’s no big difference with my newer machines.
I can still get by with RAM that’s within an order of magnitude of my 2008 gaming computer. Even for games. Isn’t that crazy? With everything else the requirements (disk size and GPU transistors) have gone up like 2x orders of magnitude.
There’s been some jumps in ram requirements over the years but often it has been for important things like browser sandboxing or HiDPI/retina displays.
There is some validity to the frustration. The switch to MS teams at work was associated with a big jump in the RAM needed for a usable system. But I also get why.. the pace of development of MS teams has been extremely fast which would’ve been hard without electron. I don’t miss Skype for business.
And now they’ve worked on a version that’s more optimised? If Teams is optimised I can get by with 8-16GB for a long time
Memory: 16 MB (Windows 95, Windows 98, Windows Me) 32 MB (Windows NT 4.0 SP3, Windows 2000, Windows XP, Windows Vista, Windows Server 2008)
Office 2021: https://microsoft.fandom.com/wiki/Microsoft_Office_2021
> 4GB RAM
So, an 128x increase of ram requirement (32->4096) in ~21 years. Do you actually get 128x more of anything? Does it do 128x more? I mean sure, the icons are high-res, so maybe a few 100kB of ram for that, but 128x more? Even the 2016 version required 2 gigs less... and the 'whats new'? https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/office/what-s-new-in-off...
For some things, I agree... a jump form notepad.exe to word brings many new features and an increase in memory usage... but the new word versions keep growing and growing in size but the new feature set doesn't bring anything that would excuse such a large increase in usage.
Yes, teams was broken, and it used less memory if you used it in a browser than a native app.. so there's no excuse for that, especially since the native app was mostly a browser in disguise.
I mostly blame lazyness and overspeced developer computers for that... why optimize when you can be lazy if you have 128 gigs of ram? If we made developers use (for testing) 5 year old, mid-tier laptops bought that were available in supermarkets (so something your grandma bought in walmart on a sale 5 years ago), the world of memory usage would be a much nicer place. Same for mobile phones.. test the app on a 3 year mid-range phone, and if it's too slow, it's going to be too slow for many users.
First result on walmart.com for a "laptop"? https://www.walmart.com/ip/SGIN-15-6inch-Laptop-4GB-DDR4-128...
quad core celeron with 4 gigs of ram. This is what my grandma would have bought. Barely enough for word today, probably not enough in a few years when a new version comes out.
yet still not able to draw a cursor or a scrollbar so i need to wait 2 seconds in word for the cursor to appear or 1 second, after i move the mouse to the side, for the scrollbar to appear.
Now it takes GB and GHz to accomplish the same office work as 30 years ago, and the UI responsiveness is slower by comparison. This should have only improved as more advanced hardware was deployed, so the root cause has got to be a defective software approach(s) over the long run.
Not the promising brave new world that seemed like it would make interactions with PC's orders of magnitude better by the time the 21st century came along.
/s
I clicked the start menu on a PC today and was greeted with spinning circles on an otherwise black box for at least 5-10 whole seconds before it showed anything.
Some youngins today complain that regular apps/programs look old and "not modern". I want to slap them hard.