The last iteration is "tokenmaxxing" where you try to spend as many tokens as possible first and then find out if it got you anything useful.
I remember being able to borrow a computer from somewhere when Diablo II had just come out in 2000 which had a 450Mhz Pentium III and 64 MB of RAM. 64MB of RAM was probably mid-tier at the time, i.e. very much not a given. As I recall Diablo II recommended 64MB for single player and 128MB for multiplayer (or above 4 players or something).
The computer I'm writing this on has 64 GB of RAM, 1024 times as much. By comparison I have a 20-core Intel CPU with up-to 3GHz speed or somewhere around there, even pretending each core could run at that max speed simultaneously (which they can't), that's only 133-times as much CPU power.
Maybe the NVMe read times are as/more significant than memory size increase, but the metrics on them isn't quite as front and center on PC specs as memory and CPU.
Hard drive capacity similarly impressive as RAM in terms of size (was apparently 10-30GB in 2000), but I don't have a 10TB hard disk as I don't need one that big (1TB is plenty for me), so again it's not as impactful to me as memory.
Over that time CPUs have also increased their instructions per clock by 3 to 4 times, so the comparison is a bit closer than that. 5Ghz in CPUs is also common these days which would make it even closer. RAM has also improved in more than just total size though.
This was the most impactful upgrade/breakthrough for me. The first time I put even a SATA SSD in my PC at home I was completely blown away. It still blows my mind somewhat the amount of compute I have sitting on my desk though, both in terms of memory and CPU/GPU power, but that move from spinning rust to solid state was huge.
Then Apple did to me again with the M1 launch and NVMe speeds that made swapping nearly imperceptible.
This nerd sniped me a bit. Your calculation on the amount of CPU power is too low, because of the change in IPC, but for the things we have benchmarks for, it isn't multiple orders of magnitude off like I expected. Looking at Cinebench 2003, prime95, and a few other benches, I get somewhere between 300x and 850x faster for the modern CPU over the Pentium 3.
For me, the biggest change in performance in my life was going from spinning disks to SSDs. That change felt bigger than any other leap by a long shot.
I had forgotten just how slow spinning disks are. The delay on everything is significant. Even just opening the file manager has a few second delay, Firefox took something like 15+ seconds to load in once it loads all its dependencies, something I haven't had in over a decade now.
You start to wonder if it is loading, you just have to watch the HDD light or listen to the hardware to confirm.
When I hit occasional delays - like opening a Windows Start menu or File Explorer - I still find myself straining my ears to hear that, despite no mechanical drives in use...
Now it's all calls to the internet.
akshually, it's also more closer to 500-1,000x. You can't look at clock speed only. Processor architecture makes all the difference. Pipelining, SIMD, memory bandwidth, blablala, everything got way better. Better approximation would be to use something like a synthetic benchmark or just (theoretical) FLOPS of each.
Otherwise, we can say that 6502 at 15Ghz is better than what you have now: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22859706
Up until the end of the DOS era computers booted nearly instantly, doubly so if their OS was in ROM.
It was the heavy GUI systems that came around that made boot times quite slow.
There’s not a single modern computer that is ready for input as quickly as an Apple 2...
I'm sorry to break it to you, but computers after the DOS era are vintage. I specifically mentioned Windows 95/98 and System 7.x in my comment.
I like to use Google books to refer to old issues of PC Magazine.
For $1999 in Feburary 1999, you could get the Pentium 450MHz desktop with 128GB of memory.
That said, I could do almost everything I do today on a similar machine back then. Surf the web, admin Linux servers, web development, edit video, play games, Photoshop, IRC, type papers...
https://books.google.com/books?id=mi_RGvUW6eQC&pg=PA108-IA3&...
Also, you get this _sweet_ 8MB nVidia 3d graphics card!
Damn capitalism taking us from that to a $699 MacBook Neo.
edit: But regarding your specific comment, it's true that memory size wasn't totally consistent in how it was described or marketed. But in terms of computers that you could purchase and fit in your house, if you look at things similar to Byte magazine from 1982, 1984 or whatever, it was pretty consistent that desktop microcomputers were specified in multiples of KB of RAM like a 64KB or 128KB commodore (or at the very low end 16KB or 32KB for something you would attach to your TV), or IBM PC/Clone that would ship with 512KB or 640KB or 1MB of RAM, and the more expensive ones having multiples of 1MB, 2MB, etc.
But later, with computerized channel tuning, a dead channel was shown as a screen of solid bright blue, and even later, solid black. So different generations of kids have grown up with very different mental images of the background lighting for the opening of Neuromancer.
For us though, it's an evocative phrase - right place, right time.
it’s a genre written by people who barely understand technology and consumed by even more luddite types.
it’s all uninformed fear mongering
But it is dystopian fiction, a genre that has its roots in real society problems turned up to eleven. It is not realistic, but it tends to feel real because of how psychology works, the negativity bias in particular. Same idea with 1984, pure fiction, looks nowhere near modern society, but people will go out of their way to find similarities.
The early 1980s cyberpunk genre is a speculative fiction that blends scifi and dystopia/extrapolation of current cultural phenomena to some point in the future, don't twist yourself up too much about it.
A few weeks back I had '30 Rock' on, it was funny seeing everyone with flip phones, it wasn't highlighted but it just makes you realise the age of it all.
Movies in 1950s: "For this heist you will receive a fantastical sum of $100,000."
Nowadays: "$100,000 is a mediocre downpayment in the suburbs."
Dr. Evil: Mr. President, after I destroy Washington D.C. I will destroy another major city every hour on the hour. That is, unless, of course, you pay me
[emphasis]
Dr. Evil: one hundred billion dollars.
The President: [bursts with laughter] Dr. Evil, this is 1969! That amount of money doesn't even exist.
[laughing]
The President: That's like saying, [with changed voice]
The President: "I want a kajillion bajillion dollars."
What if you got a on-chip compression algorithm so advanced that you can fit a world in a few MB and now with corporations controlling memory distribution, 3MB of high compression memory is highly valuable in the black market.
We already have the real life example of people using "mega" (10^6) as slang for "mebi" (2^20).
Off topic nit but that's not slang rather it's an example of conflicting technical jargon with an added helping of religious zealotry.
Replace "megabyte" with "exabyte" or whatever.
As an aside, there's a great essay I think in Metamagical Themas about the fuzzy task of translating literary works, which takes up the question of whether it would be valid and how to translate say Dickens into French, by relocating from London to Paris.
Part of the premise is that this is an impossible task because the referential systems are not truly analogous; the cultures aren't identical so some concepts literally have no direct translation...
...in Neuromancer the mere existence of a bank of pay phones has stood out as one of those things which even my little updater would break hard.
Also related: I've seen a slowly increasing number of complaints in book forums about text from relatively recent novels being silently updated, to change references from e.g. Myspace to Tik Tok or whatever, to try to keep the text feeling current... a perilous slope.
Put me on team “don’t update the text.”
Books are written in their contemporary cultural contexts. LeGuin said speculative fiction is about today even if the story is set in the future, and I agree.
So when you read Neuromancer, in some ways you’re reading a book that is about the 1980s in the U.S. So there are more fundamental anachronisms than just RAM and payphones, like a belief that east Asia had a lock on the future of advanced technology. Or that punk culture was cool and edgy and would endure.
I am 100% not on team "quietly/secretly update the text" eg in ebooks...
...I was more thinking of this as an interesting "art" project of sorts, adjacent maybe to an annotated edition where readers can opt in to a different kind of experience.
For me the most interesting bit wou;d be the problem-space of how to "translate" the cultural signification across time, which I think we would agree is literally (heh) impossible and a dubious and Quixotic goal.
I think it was in The Mind's I that the open question of whether in translating Tolstoy one could and should re-situate the novel in London for English readers, or, re-situate Dickens novels in Paris for the French edition, etc...
...all of this just forces one to confront literary theory in a productive way.
Because I enjoy such theory and also absurdism it does feel like it would be fun to try in particular to produce an automated PKD-esque black-box automaton which duly tries via "AI" mechanisms to produce candidate translations for us of exactly those aspects of something like Neuromancer which are most significantly coupled to the time place and framing of its writing,
the landscape of features that were most problematic (comical!) to translate would I think also be a neat heatmap reflective of our cultural evolution from/diversion from that time place and framing...
And, yeah, the memory thing hasn't aged well. Thing is, 1984 was a funny time in computing, particularly when you consider the kind of computers normal people had access to.
At that point even things like PCs and the new Mac had 128 or 256K of RAM[0], so I get that 3MB must have seemed like an ocean of memory at the time. And, realistically, more than 1MB of RAM in machines you'd typically see sat at home or on a desktop was uncommon until the beginning of the 1990s.
And, although Moore's law had been around since 1965 it's hard to know how aware people outside of specialist circles would have been of it in 1984.
I suppose Gibson must have done some pretty in depth research for Neuromancer, right? But the memory thing is sort of ancillary to the story, so how much would he really have focussed on that? Probably not much.
And then do you really want to harshly judge the book on that one slightly laughable thing, in other ways, it was incredibly forward looking and almost prophetic? Doesn't seem right.
I think the sensible position is you have to let it slide and see it as a possible alternative future that never quite came to pass in that way but that which we can see strong echoes and foreshadowings of even still.
[0] In 1984 microcomputers, as opposed to, cough, "serious" computers like the PC and Mac, with 128K of RAM were still very new, with 32 - 64K being the entry level, and if you had one with 128K you were king of the hill. 128K in 1984 seemed like a ton of memory to most of us, but it's worth bearing in mind that only a handful of years before computers like the ZX81, which had only 1K of RAM, were the common entry level, so the progression was already clear if you looked at the situation in the right way, but you had to have been paying attention for a while to have noticed. I remember the first time I used a machine with 4MB of RAM in, maybe, 1990 - an Archimedes at school - and feeling like it was just this absolutely inexhaustible ocean of memory. In 1984 3MB would have felt almost inconceivably huge unless you were in the high performance computing, or maybe the mainframe, worlds.
Isn't he on record that his documentation was listening to techies talking shop in bars?
> And then do you really want to harshly judge the book on that one slightly laughable thing about memory when, in other ways, it was incredibly forward looking and almost prophetic.
He seems to understand humans. Gibson's world and Brunner's Stand on Zanzibar are imo the most "prophetic" sf books written so far.
Yeah, I think this is it. The humans were the point, not the minutiae of the tech.
(Btw, I hadn't noticed you'd responded whilst I was editing my comment to express myself a bit more clearly - I hope anyway - so the quotes don't quite match but I don't think it matters, because the sentiment is hopefully clear enough both ways!)
Yeah. I don’t think he was a technophile himself. Which might have helped him because he was not trying to be realistic. But at the same time there are things he understood deeply.