"IBM's vintage mainframes were extremely underpowered compared to modern computers; a System/370 mainframe ran well under 1 million instructions per second, while a modern laptop executes billions of instructions per second. But these mainframes could support rooms full of users, while my 2017 laptop can barely handle one person"
Software has gotten complex, folks were running BBS with multiple users 30+ years ago on 286 computers. First multi user machine I used was 386 BSD supporting 50-100 students at once. 486 machines were supporting thousand of users at once. A cheap under $500 server can probably handle 5k hackernew users at once without missing a beat. Love the article, but don't blame the hardware, hardware has grown, software has just grown faster with so much waste as well.
I think the authors point was that even though the mainframe was underpowered from a raw performance point of view, it augmented that performance with accessory units and processors. By offloading as much of the non-core functions (I/O) as possible, the machines themselves would be able to process as much data as possible without waiting for input.
So while software has gotten more complex/bloated and hardware ludicrously fast, we still are waiting for input, IO, network, etc.
I think of it as the old school mainframe engineers knew every trick to eke out every ounce of performance. And they used all of the tricks. We’ve sadly lost a lot of those tricks because our hardware is so fast, we can ignore the performance losses.
As an aside, I have seen some folks get incredible boot times simply by eliminating all devices wait times or loading things concurrently. Looking at game consoles is a good example of cold booting speeds but even they are much slower than even a decade or two back.
There are many factors that feed into the software complexity.
Added abstraction for ease of development, added demands of some software functions that are not so immediately apparent and the endless needs for ever higher security on software.
It is most points 1 and 3 that are the biggest issue. If we could code low level and didn't have to worry so much about folks trying to bust into various systems - the performance would be astounding.
Software has gotten complex, folks were running BBS with multiple users 30+ years ago on 286 computers. First multi user machine I used was 386 BSD supporting 50-100 students at once. 486 machines were supporting thousand of users at once. A cheap under $500 server can probably handle 5k hackernew users at once without missing a beat. Love the article, but don't blame the hardware, hardware has grown, software has just grown faster with so much waste as well.