|
|
|
|
|
|
by chriswarbo
3555 days ago
|
|
|
My first computer was an 14MHz Amiga 1200 in the early 90s. In some ways the performance difference isn't too noticable, e.g. the GUI was often more responsive than those I use today. In other ways it's clearly different; e.g. waiting minutes for a JPEG to decode, as the scanlines slowly appeared one after another. |
|
|
I think that the expectations have changed though - my first computer was a C64, and loading and starting a game was a several minutes long wait. I don't remember that I was bothered that much by that, but when I tried playing an old game even 15 years ago, I couldn't believe how much time it took.
The same for my Amiga, starting it took a really long time, but I don't think I did mind. The Workbench was never slow though. Unfortunately both my A1200 and C64 have died so I can't test my patience anymore. I remember that on the A500, flood fill in Deluxe Paint was a visible process though :-)
I used the A1200 with a MC68030 expansions while going to the university up to about 1995 and it wasn't much slower to work with than the DEC Alphas that we had there - except for things requiring raw CPU power. Most of the time waiting was for I/O, and my crappy small hard drive was probably faster than the NFS mounts anyway. The Alphas had 384 MB if I remember correctly though, which was just crazy.
The Amiga wasn't fast enough to play 16 bit mp3-files in stereo even with the 68030 cpu though.
In 1995 I replaced the Amiga with a PC with Linux on it, and computing was still amazingly fast. Installing slackware was a two week project however, mostly because I had to download everything in the university and use floppies and partly because the floppies were reused and flaky so I had to go back and redownload many disks.
The internet was crazy-slow outside the university until about 1998 when I was lucky enough to live in a block that got fiber for some reason. It was still slow at most workplaces for a another decade.
At around 1998 I got a job and a laptop for work. I installed Linux and Window Maker (or was it Afterstep?) and it was totally fine to work on. It might have had a Pentium with 32 or possibly 64 MB memory. All in all it was really fast, once it had booted, and I mainly used emacs and gcc. I remember that booting Windows on that machine was much slower.
As far as I can remember it was also possible to use a browser without having 1 GB or RAM at that time.
A full compile of our product took 6 hours though. It wasn't always necessary but it had to be done occasionally. A few years later it took 30 minutes to compile.
Today, I get irritated if I have to wait more than 30 seconds before I can test a line of code.