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Comment by majormajor | Hacker News Reader

Anytime you upgraded from a 4 year old computer to a new one back then - from 16Mhz to 90Mhz, or 75Mhz to 333Mhz, or 333Mhz to 1Ghz, or whatever - it was immediate, it was visceral.

SSDs booted faster and launched programs faster and were a very nice change, but they weren't that same sort of night-and-day 80s/90s era change.

The software, in those days, was similarly making much bigger leaps every few years. 256 colors to millions, resolution, capabilities (real time spellcheck! a miracle at the time.) A chat app isn't a great comparison. Games are the most extreme example - Sim City to Sim City 2000; Doom to Quake; Unreal Tournament to Battlefield 1942 - but consider also a 1995 web browser vs a 1999 one.

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For me, at 52, I recall the SSD transformation to be near miraculous. I never once felt that way about a CPU upgrade until getting an M1. I went from a cyrix 5x86 133 (which was effectively a fast 486) to a pentium II 266 and it just wasn't that impressive.

The drag down of swapping became almost a non-issue with the SSD changeover.

I suppose going from a //e to a IIgs was that kind of leap but that was more about the whole computer than a cpu.

Now I have to say, swapping to an SSD on my windows machines at work was far less impressive than going to SSD with my macs. I sort of wrote that off as all the anivirus crap that was running. It was very disappointing compared to the transformation on mac. On my macs it was like I suddenly heard the hallelujah chorus when I powered on.

I agree. There were only 2 game changing upgrades for me. One was hard disk to SSD. The other was x86 laptop to M1.

You really didn't feel Pentium 4 to Core 2 Duo was a 'game changer'?

Software was already far down the bloat path by the time the Core 2 Duo came out, so the upgrade didn't make all that much of a difference in feel given how much latency was caused by software performing random reads off a disk. That's why SSDs made such a huge difference.

Back in the MS-DOS days, the amount of data needed to be read off a disk while the OS booted was negligible, so a second or two on a fast 486 felt amazing compared to the incredibly slow grind of watching code execute on an 8086 or slow 80286. Software was still in the space of having to run tolerably on an 8086, so the added resources of a newer faster machine actually did improve the feel of the system.

Athlon 3200+ to core 2 duo. Not it didn’t feel as much as M1.

M1 allowed me to do things I thought was impossible which was fast, fanless, cool, and extremely long battery life.

Moving from floppy disk to hard disk was pretty big for me. :)

Hey, moving from cassette tape to floppy was also pretty awesome - random access speed demon!

Absolutely. I was amazed with going from C64 datasette to Amiga 500 floppy.

I went 386 DX 33 to a Pentium 75, which wasn't a wild amount of time. I'd argue that's way bigger than when I got an SSD (but I agree SSD was a huge improvement).

I went from a 1Mhz Apple //e in 1986 to a Mac LCII in 1992 with a 68030/16 MHz LCII. That was the last time I felt a step change in day to day work. Of course things like games, video and audio encoding got faster.

The next time I felt a step change was the M series of Macs. P

That's my point, the software was getting bloated at least as fast as the CPUs were getting faster, so you had to upgrade to a new CPU every few years to run the latest software. With SSDs, there was a huge overlap in CPU speeds that may or may not have an SSD, so upgrading to one meant a huge performance boost, within the same set of runnable software.

Also, going from Sim City to Sim City 2000 was pre-bloat. Over the course of five years, the new version was significantly better than the original, but they both target the same 486 processor generation, which was brand new when the original SimCity was released, but rather old by the time SimCity 2000 was released. Another five years later, Sim City 3000 added minimal functionality, but required not just a Pentium processor, but a fast one.

I guess what I'm getting at is that a faster CPU means programs released after it will run better, but faster storage means that all programs, old and new, will run better.

> That's my point, the software was getting bloated at least as fast as the CPUs were getting faster

I think there's a difference between bloat and actually useful features or performance.

For example, I started making music with computers in the early 90s. They were only powerful enough to control external equipment like synthesizers.

Nowadays, I can do everything I could do with all that equipment on an iPad! I would not call that bloat.

On the other hand, comparing MS Teams to say ICQ, yeah, a lot of that is bloat.

> in the early 90s. They were only powerful enough to control external equipment like synthesizers.

Tell that to ScreamTracker!

In case anyone's wondering:

https://youtu.be/roBkg-iPrbw

Screamtracker was sampling. Great for the days and much more accesible for the teenager I was than buying and controlling synths but that was not exactly same. More a competition to the early akai MPCs.

And we were mostly ripping those samples from records on cassettes and CDs, or other mods.

Well now that you mention that, my very first steps actually were with Soundmonitor on a C64, one of the OG trackers probably (even though not called tracker yet IIRC). I kind of forgot about that, as that was still very amateurish (I mean what I made with it, not the software).

https://www.c64-wiki.de/images/f/f1/rockmon3.png

Or also at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=roBkg-iPrbw&t=400s in the video already linked below. And yes, I had to type in that listing.

There is definitely bloat. A few months ago I was messing about with making a QWERTY piano in a web page, and it was utterly unplayable due to the bloat-induced latency in between the fingers and the ears.

I wouldn't call that bloat; certainly we've been complaining about software bloat as long as I've been into computers, but at that time, software was simply pushing the capabilities of the hardware, and often running into walls.

These days, we value developer productivity over performance optimization, so we have stuff like Electron apps. The reason behind it is that CPUs (and RAM quantity, for the most part) are so far ahead of regular desktop applications that it doesn't matter. In the 80s and 90s, the hardware could barely keep up with decently-optimized software that wanted to do anything interesting.

Who is this 'we'?

The vast majority have this foisted upon them by a minority of managers/shareholders.

> SSDs booted faster and launched programs faster and were a very nice change, but they weren't that same sort of night-and-day 80s/90s era change.

For me they were.

I still remember the first PC I put together for someone with a SSD.

I had a quite beefy machine at the time and it would take 30 seconds or more to boot Windows, and around 45s to fully load Photoshop.

Built this machine someone with entirely low-end (think like "i3" not "Celeron") components, but it was more than enough for what they wanted it for. It would hit the desktop in around 10 seconds, and photoshop was ready to go in about 2 seconds.

(Or thereabouts--I did time it, but I'm remembering numbers from like a decade and a half ago.)

For a _lot_ of operations, the SSD made an order of magnitude difference. Blew my mind at the time.

Sure, but what about once Photoshop was open? Aka where you spend most of your day after you start up your stuff?

Would you take the SSD and a 500Mhz processor or a 2Ghz dual-core with a 7200k or 10000k HD? "Some operations are faster" vs "every single thing is wildly faster" of the every-few-years quadrupling+ of CPU perf, memory amounts, disk space, etc.

(45sec to load Photoshop also isn't tracking with my memory, though 30s-1min boot certainly is, but I'm not invested enough to go try to dig up my G4 PowerBook and test it out... :) )

SSDs came out after CPUs started to slow down on doubling (single threaded) performance every 12-18mo or so.

So it was the only way to get that visceral improvement in user experience like CPU and platform upgrades were in the mid 90's to very early 00's.

The experience of just slapping a new SSD in a 3 year old machine was similar to a different generation of computer nerds.

Nothing could really match the night and day difference of an entire machine being double to triple the performance in a single upgrade though. Not even the upgrade from spinning disks to SSD. You'd go from a game being unplayable on your old PC to it being smooth as butter overnight. Not these 20% incremental improvements. Sure, load times didn't get too much better - but those started to matter more when the CPU upgrades were no longer a defining experience.

Nah I agree with him. Spinning disks were always a huge bottleneck (remember how long MS Word took to open?) and SSD's basically fixed that overnight. The CPU advancements were big, but software had a chance to "catch up" (i.e. get less efficient) because they it was a gradual change. That didn't really happen with SSDs because the change was so sudden and big.

I'd say software never really "caught up" to the general slowness that we had to endure in the HDD era either. Even my 14 year old desktop starts Word in a few seconds compared to upwards of 60s in the 90s.

The closest I've seen is the shitty low end Samsung Android tablet we got for our kids. It's soooo slow and laggy. I suspect it's the storage. And that was actually and upgrade over the Amazon Fire tablet we used to have which was so slow it was literally unusable. Again I suspect slow storage is the culprit.

C64 1982 Amiga 1985

Never witnessed anything before or after with that jump in specs

I was a PC gamer in the late 90s. It was very expensive. Nowadays you can build a nice rig and you can be sure to play all the latest games for 5 years.

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