On Wednesday 27 October 2004 19:48, Allen wrote:
I worked on or sold all of the machines you mentioned except the Collins. Sold the first Eclipse Computer in Oklahoma. Worked on PDP 7. 9. 8 and 11's. Used in Process Control. Great machines but my PC is more powerful but I miss being able to control a whole plant in 16KB of memory and 256 KB of disk. -- Russ
GUI and Memory hogging kernels made this thing happen, kill those and you're set.
Right. Toss that kernel and you're set. What's more, you won't have to worry about viruses, worms, ad-ward or other malware. No bugs, either, other than the ones in the machine code you write yourself. Oh, yeah. Kill those memory hogging kernels and GUIs and life will be grand. It's easy to criticize, but not so easy to create useful software. Software now does more than it used to. It has to be bigger. Software engineering is like any other kind of engineering--it's all about trade-offs. Furthermore, optimization of any kind requires effort from an engineer, and that effort costs. Memory, on the other hand, keeps getting cheaper. It makes perfect sense to allow programs to become larger when the alternative would cost more than the RAM that could be saved by making them smaller. And users continue to demand more from the software they use. More functions, more capacity and more speed. Those things cannot be achieved without consuming more computational resources, including faster CPUs, larger disks and more RAM. If it's more important to you to keep from buying more capacious computing hardware, then you'll have to do with the software of yesterday. RRS