Hacker News Reader

Comment by bdcravens | Hacker News Reader

but seemed much saner than trying to recreate an actual vintage 1985-era PC-AT.

That was only a 20 year old computer at that point. I can play media from 50 years ago easily. I'd argue that software are more appliances (they do things) than media, and appliances from 20, 30, 40 years ago are still serviceable and working.

Yet we are amazed when a Raspberry PI can serve web pages, despite the fact that it's many factors of more powerful than many circa-1998 web servers.

View on HN

But yet we have phones and computers that are arguably as (un) responsive as their counterparts in 1998. I really wish those issues would be addressed rather than making things flashier with sexy transition animations.

But they aren't. I'm pretty sure I've owned multiple machines that couldn't POST in the time it takes my current desktop to be at a usable state, and I have more on-die L2 cache than my first desktop had RAM.

The past was full of a lot more paging to disk and it was awful. I mean, sure, things haven't progressed as much as they could I suppose, but I also don't know the last time I had to wait 5-10 minutes for a computer to shut down.

My first XT clone could would POST in less than 3 seconds if I skipped the memory test (all 640K of it), and I stayed with DOS 2 much longer than everyone else because it run almost all software at the time, and properly configured (big BUFFERS in CONFIG.SYS, for example), it would boot from floppy in 3 more.

I've recently managed to get an ubuntu server to boot as quickly (with preconfigured network interfaces and a few other things), but for years I could find the magic combination that would boot a usable system that quickly.

And I haven't seen a Windows machine that boots to usable state in less than 15 seconds (SSD, 30 seconds on magnetic hard drive) in a long time. "Usable" means you double click on something and it responds, btw - not that it shows the desktop.

The past was full of a lot more paging to disk and it was awful.

Those sounds just went through my head. That noise hurts just to think about.

but I also don't know the last time I had to wait 5-10 minutes for a computer to shut down.

Windows 7 seems to take 5 minutes to shut down, even if I give it a head-start by explicitly closing all applications I can see or understand.

There are 137 "processes" and over 200 "services" running right now on the Windows 7 machine I am at. I can't watch them go away when I shut down, because if I leave the task manager running, Windows 7 complains about the Task Manager still running when I want to shut down.

There are many things that are much better today, but it seems that some things are getting worse.

In theory you could install Windows Performance Toolkit from Windows SDK and then trace shutdown with xbootmgr command, then try to analyse resulting .etl file (xbootmgr will save it to the current folder) with xperf. In practice that will probably take more time than you could save by optimizing shutdown.

That sounds painful. Ever since I went to Win 8 my shutdown has been instant. Startup is around 3 seconds.

It's not that we don't have the ability to be responsive, and somethings are. My desktop is still laggy at times, (though it's gotten a lot better when I switched to a lighter DE (for obvious reasons)) and my phone still has issues just loading text messages without me having to wait multiple seconds.

That's the kind of stuff I'm talking about. A Text Messaging app shouldn't have perceivable load time. My phone shouldn't freeze doing a transition between desktops. Computer desktops shouldn't take time to open up a menu.

We've come a long way, and have tons more raw performance, but I just feel that we squander it on things that don't add any value.

You can definitely play media from 50 years ago... but "easily" may be a reach too far. How many people have easy access to a player for eight-track tapes (circa 1964: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/8-track_tape), for instance? Or a way to play back old Super-8 (circa 1965: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/8_mm_film) home movies? These devices can be tracked down, but it's not like they're sitting at most peoples' fingertips.

8-track was a big flop outside of the US so didn't really get the ubiquity that competing formats did. To look at things another way: how many people can play HD-DVDs? It's only a few years old but suffered the same commercial failure as 8-track did in Europe. Yet most people still have easy access to a VHS players, audio cassette players and record decks despite those all being old technologies too.

If you have easy access to a flea market, you've got easy access to those.

Who's amazed at that? I imagine you'd be hard-pressed to produce someone that is impressed that "a tiny computer can run real computer programs".

Reply on news.ycombinator.com