Linked by Thom Holwerda on Mon 24th Nov 2008 14:55 UTC, submitted by Ward D
The private computer museum of Max Burnet has every bit of computing nostalgia imaginable, ranging from the first UNIX PDP-7, a classic DEC PDP-8, the original IBM PC, a string of old Apple's including the Apple Lisa, a 
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Member since:2005-07-24
Honestly, the first reaction I had when I went from a 16Mhz Atari Mega STe to a Pentium 75Mhz with Windows 95 was "It unzips things fast." Everything else seemed way slower.
It goes back further than that. I moved from a 64k (well, 60K + 4k bank-switched) Apple ][+ running an 8 bit 6502 at 1Mhz to a 10MHz NEC V20, which was an 8088 clone, with 640k. The Apple was instant-on. The MS-DOS box had to POST and boot. Once up, the MS-DOS box was, for the most part, faster. But not much faster. 16 bit vs 8 bit, 10x the clock, over 10x the memory... and not much faster. I think I've actually spent *more* time waiting on each successive generation of machines I have owned since then. I guess that's just progress...
Edited 2008-11-25 01:45 UTC
Member since:2006-10-08
It's sad really, that when you look at the software that was made for the 8-bit and 16-bit era computers, and how the programmers just squeezed every bit of performance out of them, that we now are in the state of affairs, where the computers are so fast and have so many resources, that the software just isn't as optimized as it could / should be, so we really don't see any difference in the speed that things run.
I think you're mentioning a common observation (by those who are not spoiled by advertisement and OS "politics" already). But optimization and better programming habits seem to hinder economical growth (as well as environmental pollution by tons of "outdated" hardware).
http://osnews.com/thread?338143
Of course, I'm weird like that, and like to explore the way the OS works, which is probably why I like reading OSNews so much 
Hehe, understandable. :-)
But there is a part of me that longs for the day of the slim OS that is just there to run the Applications, instead of needing the time to set it up and keep it working.
Only the low-ressource-market and the embedded systems seem to follow this idea today...
Too bad DEC went away, they made some cool stuff....
Yes, as well as Sun or SGI.
Member since:
2006-01-10
I was kind of shocked not to see a few of Atari or more of Commodore's computers there. He has a C-64, but most of his stuff from that era were Apples.
"
The whole time I was looking at the slides, I couldn't help but think, "Wow, if you took all of those computers, somehow clustered them together, it still wouldn't even be as fast as my quad core CPU is.... but then after putting Vista on my quad core, the cluster would easily out perform it
It's sad really, that when you look at the software that was made for the 8-bit and 16-bit era computers, and how the programmers just squeezed every bit of performance out of them, that we now are in the state of affairs, where the computers are so fast and have so many resources, that the software just isn't as optimized as it could / should be, so we really don't see any difference in the speed that things run.
Honestly, the first reaction I had when I went from a 16Mhz Atari Mega STe to a Pentium 75Mhz with Windows 95 was "It unzips things fast." Everything else seemed way slower.
Modern Operating Systems are so bulky and complex these days that I tend to spend more time playing around with settings than I do actually using applications. Of course, I'm weird like that, and like to explore the way the OS works, which is probably why I like reading OSNews so much
But there is a part of me that longs for the day of the slim OS that is just there to run the Applications, instead of needing the time to set it up and keep it working. Windows is horrible in this regard. Linux is a bit better, but then I still always tend to switch Distributions all too often, looking for that perfect mix. Although for the first time ever, I think Fedora 10 is going to keep me away from a Debian based distro! But that is for a different topic....
Too bad DEC went away, they made some cool stuff....