[NTLK] OT: Wasted CPU cycles [was: Re: Emate Educational Stuff]

On Sat, 2008-03-01 at 10:27 -0500, SteveCraft wrote:
> Actually, almost any Apple II educational app converted to something
> eMate-friendly would be good. The II had some great ideas for educational
> stuff and the hardware was not all that powerful compared to the Newt.

You could say that about apps that we were happy running (WordPerfect,
Word 1.0 (now known in winderz as "Textpad"), Visi/SuperCalc), as well
as the "primitive" windowing system on the original Mac (running at all
of 8MHz (yes, EIGHT megaHertz!) that we all were very enamored of.

What's happened? Programmers have gone from "Those who do it because
they love it" (they *must*) to "I'm in it for the money". Lack of
talent means bigger programs. Thus, the CPU speed race. (Thank
goodness AMD is still in the running or we'd never see anything faster
from Intel) Unfortunately, memory and i/o speeds haven't kept up.
Memory used to run as fast as the cpu, or even a bit faster back in the
8-bit days. Now your CPU is clocking instructions at multi-GHz rates
and the memory is running at 663MHz, tops. Thus, the on-board cache for
those compute-intensive applications. However, your windowing system,
text processing, graphical applications: All data-intensive. (And thus
I/O intensive!)

I think that there are very few wasted cycles in your basic Newton.
(NewtonScript of course, means waste, but it seems to have been done
well.) But, in a Windows PC or MacOSX? Bloat city. Things have only
kept up because CPU speeds have kept going up. Otherwise, you'd see
fewer fancy features (pretty screen junk) and releases that get *faster*
rather than *slower* with every release. Consider how quickly a Mac
128k (that's 1/8thMB, or 1/8192th of a GB!) booted versus your current
machine. With a processor that's 256 times faster (2GHz processor),
shouldn't it boot nearly instantaneously? Shouldn't a computer remember
what devices it has - especially a laptop? Shouldn't a warm boot be
different from a cold boot for a desktop machine (cold boot = no power,
thus you could have inserted cards!)?

The old guard has been shouted down and outvoted by swarming herds of
young bucks.

Things are going to get buggier, as they have been, not better.

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Received on Sat Mar 1 13:04:53 2008