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by throwaway7281 2055 days ago
Spent hours playing Apache comanche game back in the days (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MLcxgYEBAXA). It ran on a 4MB RAM machine just fine.

I wonder if we ever get back to this kind of efficient use of computers?

1 comments

Not for games and other user facing software. Development effort is finite and the extra complexity that users (reasonably) now expect is worth more than another 10% performance.

The places where it has made economic sense for me to optimise has been high volume consumer electronics. In those cases, taking up a bit less code space means you can drop to a smaller sized flash part and save 30 cents on a $20 bill of materials (for example).