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>Did I mention it was slow? It was slow. Soooo sloooow. Slow slow slow. Like, minutes to read and render a page slow.

This. People wax nostalgically all the time how fast running Star Writer or something was back in the day, and how "bloated" modern OSs have become, without understanding that those old PCs did 1/1000 of the things modern computers do, and even those simple stuff (running a text processor) was slow compared to today's standards...



It depends. For instance, Borland's Turbo Pascal with its one-pass compiler was pretty damn fast. Its edit/compile/run cycle was amazing (an "ECRL" as fast as a REPL). And this with 64KB RAM.

Whereas some of today's IDEs and language-layered-on-a-VM experiences aren't nearly so fast. Granted they're working much harder. But the end-user experience is not always faster these days.


Ahh! The good ol' days. I started programming with Turbo Pascal when I was around 7 years old, I still remember the green glow of the CRT and the clickety-clack of oh-so-heavy mechanical keyboards. Man, those were good times, interrupting the BIOS, corrupting sectors and playing paratroopers deep into the night :D


>It depends. For instance, Borland's Turbo Pascal with its one-pass compiler was pretty damn fast. Its edit/compile/run cycle was amazing (an "ECRL" as fast as a REPL). And this with 64KB RAM.

Still, not comparable. That means that TP had to work on the memory, and not touch disk (else it wouldn't be speedy at all).

Which probably means that the libraries available would be miniscule. A decent graphics (or even math) lib can be well over 1MB. Did you got much out of that era TP besides the ability to use the core language structures?


Yep, particularly since touching the disk meant a 5-1/4" floppy diskette.

But no, the programs weren't toys. They were an order of magnitude more complex than most of today's smart phone apps. And in fact, PCs were the smart phones of their day -- a fun size version of what had been considered "real" computing, initially not taken seriously, but destined to evolve quickly.

Also you had direct access to the hardware -- there weren't ten layers of virtualization, protection, and APIs in between. You could do near-realtime things, very low latency. I think that's part of what contributed to the subjective experience being quite fast... provided you didn't need to hit the floppy disk!


> Which probably means that the libraries available would be miniscule. A decent graphics (or even math) lib can be well over 1MB. Did you got much out of that era TP besides the ability to use the core language structures?

A decent graphics/math lib written in TP could be much smaller than 1MB. There's tons of 64k demos written with Turbo Pascal (it helps that it has inline asm). By which I mean "decent" for that era. Say, a functional SVG engine would be something different of course.

The math lib would probably also have to spend bytes on certain functionality that we'd today consider "core language".


But how much of that stuff is actually needed, and how much is processor sucking prettiness?

I think people justifiably feel a bit peeved that word processors ran acceptably fast on a 286, and run acceptably fast on a modern multi-core many GHz machine, and yet the added functionality isn't that useful for most people.


Sure, for a program like Word, most users just know a small subset of the features. But they use many more of them because they rely on documents from people who know a different subset.

A useful analogy would be library functions. A new Python doesn't need to know its C Language Interface to use a library that relies upon it.


Word (and the other Office software) are amazing, vary powerful, etc. And the OS that these modern softwares run on are full of features.

And so software does do very much more than it used to do, and that's what people talk about when they talk about bloat.

I could install a minimal Arch, with JWM, and Abiword, and run everything from RAM and get blazing fast operation. But it is odd that modern software, even though it's so feature rich, is also so slow.


It's hard to say that Word is slow "performing x" when the alternative in many cases is not "performing x" at all.

Put another way, even if I never embed spreadsheets in my documents, if Abiword cannot deal with the embeded Excel spreadsheet that my client sends me, then Word's ability to deal with it is not bloat.

And if my alternative to editing the client's input numbers directly in the Word document she sent is to deal with a PDF and manipulate dumb text manually, then Word isn't running slowly.


"and yet the added functionality isn't that useful for most people."

Well, if the abillity to spell check as you type, see the formatting of the document as you work with the actual fonts et al, embed images and graphs etc isn't "that useful" to them, then they can always run something like WordPad or Notepad++.


You’ll still need something bloated to open DOCX files other people send you. (Or is there an antiword for DOCX already?)


I remember reading something about "good web development" back in ~1997 and the author saying the Yahoo! page loaded in about 6 seconds and I was thinking "wow, that's pretty fast."


I flashed back to loading up the Mosaic homepage in 1994 at 9600 baud. That world wide web thing will never fly.




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