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Comment by liendolucas | Hacker News Reader

If I had known 20 years ago that software would be like it is today I would have ever chosen to be a programmer. Everything seems gargantuesque. Hardware and software hand in hand competing in an endless race. And things are not better, nor easier, nor simpler. What a disappointment.

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Showed a young kid (I think the machine was older than him) an old Gateway G6-300 machine from 1999. Pentium 2 300MHz, 128MB SDRAM, 5GB hdd, Win98 FE, with over 3.5 GB free. I'm more a hardware than software person so the main draw for me was the unknown (to me) Chromatic Research Mpact AGP onboard graphics.

Anyway, his comment made me chuckle: "Wow, looks like everything runs pretty quick!" And he was right, everything loaded instantly. Even IE6, Netscape Communicator, Adobe Acrobat 5, etc

Related, there was this post from few months back about how everything was more responsive with an older OS:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36446933 - Windows NT on 600MHz machine opens apps instantly. What happened?

Follow up post by the original author:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36503983 - Fast machines, slow machines

Not only that, but even older website layouts were more responsive.

I wish we could do what Linus did and start a lean walled garden ruled with an iron fist. How nice would everything be if it was written like Apollo mission software but ran on today's hardware! Sigh

I was actually thinking about the Apollo computers. We assisted man on landing the moon with a micro fraction of we have today. And flawlessly! It astonishes me so much that achievement when I compare it to where the industry is today that each day I'm more convinced that we have completely lost the skyline.

Not flawlessly. There was a pretty scary bug with the radar(s?) during the moon landing of Apollo 11.

And the people you are working with are progressively more insecure, less confident, less capable, and less literate.

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