On 03/29/2018 03:35 PM, Fred Cisin via cctalk wrote: > On Thu, 29 Mar 2018, Murray McCullough via cctalk wrote: >> I’m not trying to date myself but have things truly sped up? In 1970’s >> Toronto I had a classic computer, sorry can’t recall what it was, >> connected >> to a 300 baud modem; by early 80’s had ‘zoomed’ to 9600 baud. Oh, my! >> [ A >> typical file size to download was probably 1 MB. ] Speed indeed! Yet >> now, >> here in rural Ontario, Canada, I’m at 5MB/s. Yikes! (Friends in >> Toronto are >> at 50MB/s.) We can do the math but content, particularly multimedia, has >> swollen in size.[ 1 GB is not unheard of. ] Were classic computing days >> that much slower? Happy computing. Murray -:) > > Application of "Moore's Law" calls for a logarithmic increase in > speed, such as doubling every 18 months. Yes, the rate, in terms of > bits per second has grown a lot. > Similarly storage capacity has grown. > > > HOWEVER, a variant of "Boyle's Law" warns that software and content > will expand to fit all available space and speed. > We have proof and it is us.
> > Once, if your handwriting is bad enough, you could type your grocery > shopping list into Electric Pencil. Took a few seconds. later > WordStar. Scripsit. WordPervert. Microsoft Weird. Does Clippy have a > template for it? > (PC-Write was a welcome respite in that growing bloat!) > I posited that 2 decades ago in a wired article. My CP/M machine booted in seconds while waiting for the winders box to decide if it would/could. > It's kinda like: the plane flight is half an hour shorter, but the > airport pre-processing in an hour longer. > I fly a Cessna150, cruse speed of 110mph, I could fly to Ohio in six hours with one fuel stop. Commercial flight is easily 4x faster and it still takes 6 hours door to door. > Once, the operating system, such as PC-DOS 1.00, fit on a single sided > MFM 160K floppy disk. Now, much software comes on DVD, because CD-ROM > (2/3 GB) isn't large enough! > Back when 160k was space, now it's a small entry in a table. > A memo announcing change of room and time for a meeting is a very > short paragraph. That used to be about half a kilobyte. > Now, it tends to be a few MB. > It seems that some serious effort has to go into wasting so much > capacity! It is hideous. But you need the picture. <insert snark> > HTML has helped that along. > HTML is not nearly so bad its slightly bigger than runoff only wordier. However that we need HTML for a screen of text is, yes, bad! I blame WYSISWYG, and Postscript! WYGINS (for those that forgot, What You Get Is No Surprise) from the days before high resolution printers. > One college administrator managed that with ease. He created the memo > in his word processor, printed it on his color printer, signed it, > SCANNED it, and attached the 24bit-color picture as an attachment to > an email. The subject line of the email was: "FYI". The text, other > than the attachment was: "See attachment". The attachment was an > uncompressed picture of a line of text in the middle of a full sheet > of paper: > "The curriculum committee has been moved to room D-233 at 2:oo" > But, in the memo, there was a horizontal rule that was not quite > horizontal; one end was a few pixels higher than the other! - scanning > with the paper not quite aligned may well be the easiest way to > accomplish THAT! > But, that was almost a decade ago. I wonder whether he is now > attaching MP4s? > Eep, the man is batty. > MP4s mean that now, not only does it take MUCH longer to create the > document, we can now waste MUCH more of the reader's time! > I find it very annoying that when GOOGLE'ing to find a simple answer, > many of the first hits are YouTube. > A few seconds glance at a text document will likely tell me whether > the answer to my question is there. Or a sketch and maybe a > photograph of somebody's hardware setup. Instead, sit through minutes > of talking heads. > With background music to make it hard to make out what is being said! > Youtube's "auto-generated CC" is a poor substitute for text. > > > Dancing kangaroos and yodelling jellyfish has let form triumph over > content! When will we finally have smell-o-vision? > Please no, smell-o-vision. I can see the hackers going for the cross between skunk, pepperspray, and some toxic chemical mess. Obviously a Blacktooth perpiheral. I will nominally run without that peripheral. Come to think of it I did that for a decades regarding sound. Most of my favorite modern Linux machines can't squawk, peep, hear, or see me. > Yes, certainly, the hardware is much faster, and has more storage space. > Yet, the task takes longer, and storage space runs out just as quickly. Thats the whole sad story. It is why I still run CP/M, RT-11 and even a DECMate! All hail fanfold! Allison
