On Tue, May 30, 2023 at 11:09 AM Paul Koning via cctalk < [email protected]> wrote:
> > > On May 30, 2023, at 1:22 PM, Mike Katz via cctalk <[email protected]> > wrote: > > > > In 1981 when i got my first 5MB hard disk drive at work (I had to write > the drivers for the OS myself) I was able to put all or my source code, > binaries, executable, applications and the operating system and not fill > half of that disk. > > > > A single .raw file from my camera can be over 20MB now. > > > > Is technology advancing us or just helping us to create more and more > storage needs 😁? > > Yes. > > We used to call that the "virtual disease" in honor of the fact that VMS > applications tended to be 5x or 10x the size of PDP-11 applications that do > similar things. As a result, developing for both by wring it for VMS and > then backporting to PDP-11 tended to give terminally bad performance, while > going the other way worked quite well. ("KOALA" which I'm not sure ever > shipped, comes to mind as an example of the former.) > > Disk drive growth is pretty amazing. My first hard drive was 256 kB (an > RC-11, on the college physics department PDP-11/20 in 1973). Amd even the > big hard drives on the main timesharing system weren't that much bigger > (2.4 MB each, a pair of RK05s). > Microschlock overcame the problem of its shitty code by taking advantage of Moore's Law: your computer is slow? It's not our software, you just don't have enough memory. But it didn't matter how much you increased your memory or hard drive space, Microsoft would just fill it up, needlessly. And then blame you when you didn't upgrade your hardware. Again. Sellam
