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by shrubble 755 days ago
People used 50Mhz SPARC systems to do real work, and the peripherals were all a lot slower (10mbps Ethernet, slower SCSI drives) with less and slower RAM. But it might take a week to compile everything you wanted, I agree; of course there is always cross-compiling as well.
2 comments
RobotToaster 755 days ago
That was before everything became a snap package in a docker image.
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musicale 755 days ago
> That was before everything became a snap package in a docker image.

A modern app should consist of dozens of of docker images in k8s on remote cloud infrastructure, all running "serverless" microservices in optimized python*, connected via REST* APIs to a javascript front-end and/or electron "desktop" app, with extensive telemetry and analytics subsystems connected to a prometheus/grafana dashboard.

That is ignoring the ML/LLM components, of course.

If all of this is running reliably, and the network isn't broken again, then you may be able to share notepad pages between your laptop and smartphone.

*possibly golang/protobufs if your name happens to be google and if pytorch and tensorflow haven't been invented yet

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bitcompost 755 days ago
Oh I believe in theory a 50Mhz CPU is capable of doing almost everything I need, but it just lacks the software optimized for it. I think a week to compile everything is too optimistic.
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musicale 755 days ago
Old compilers/IDEs like Turbo Pascal or Think C were/are usably fast on single-digit MHz machines and emulators.

And even if the CPU is 50 MHz, modern DRAM and NVMe flash are very fast compared to memory and storage on 1990s (or older) machines.

Older versions of Microsoft Office (etc.) ran about the same on 50 MHz systems as Office 365 runs today.

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kwhitefoot 755 days ago
I did valuable work on a 2 MHz Apple II with a 4 MHz Z80 add-on running CP/M that I used to write the documentation. The documentation part was just as fast forty years ago as it is now but assembling the code was glacially slow. The 6502 macro assembler running on the Apple too forty minutes to assemble code that filled an 8 k EPROM.
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musicale 755 days ago
6502 assemblers are amazingly fast on more recent hardware. Something like 60-70ms to run a script to assemble and link an a version of msbasic (AppleSoft) on my old laptop.

https://github.com/mist64/msbasic

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musicale 753 days ago
I usually only notice typos after hn has disabled editing... ;-(
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