It's easy to feel a lot of nostalgia, but those truly were simpler times when we expected a lot less of our computers/programs.
Sure they didn't scale as much or have embedded video, but in terms of "did they do function X"? Yes they all worked fairly well.
The massive horsepower gains are REALLY noticeable in the evolution of games. But outside of that in "productivity"... ye gods we are wasting horsepower to basically do the same crap we used to do.
What is really really exasperating is when any app freezes for multiple seconds. I start counting 4 billion... 8 billion... 12 billion (assuming 4 billion instructions per second). How does that happen with having 1000x the horsepower?
And the RAM we waste these days. Windows ran in 4 MB! And 16GB is too small these days for development?
Moore's law is dying. Software stacks need to start optimizing themselves.
Word for Windows almost certainly supported embedded videos. WordPerfect for Windows certainly did, and I seem to recall it being based upon OLE (a Microsoft technology). This was in the Windows 3.1 era.
> ... but in terms of "did they do function X"? Yes they all worked fairly well.
The answer is truly an, "it depends." Some modern software is much more powerful. Other software feels like a throwback to the 8-bit era with a shimmering veneer. I used to think that this was a product of web and mobile development effectively forcing developers to start again from scratch, but I am starting to believe that most modern developers lack the ability to implement features that aren't provided by a framework.
Don't get me started on icons. Icons, if anything, have gotten progressively worse somehow with more resolution and colors. It's almost like the reduced color palette caused more sudden color transitions and communicated the icon's purpose back in the day.
Which might have underpinned material design... but that entire movement, at least its major expressions (e.g. Windows 8/x) is an utter disaster.
But sure there is software that does a lot more as well, luckily we did progress.
But don't forget there are millions of (mostly Windows) programs in the world which could've been (and are still!) from that era or long before (Cobol machines in the basement).
I do remember WordPerfect (the DOS version) being absolutely incredible... in no small part because you could "reveal codes" (or whatever the name of that feature was). I helped my dad produce a couple of textbooks using WP and the most difficult thing we ever encountered was... printer drivers. (Which is still a pain point today if you're not using Windows/Mac.)
30 years later, I love writing markdown and stay away from GUI rich text editors as much as I can.
There was also overlays[2][3] and extended memory (EMS/XMS) which made it possible to use quite a lot of memory.
[1]: https://ilyabirman.net/meanwhile/all/ui-museum-turbo-pascal-...
[2]: http://www.oocities.org/~franzglaser/tpsrc/overlaytxt.html
[3]: https://secondboyet.com/articles/publishedarticles/theslithy...
Saving stuff to harddisk with 8.3 file name notation and working on super-crappy monitors is still a dealbreaker, not to mention Git.
I recently wrote a little demo on Amiga 500, 68k Motorola. And it was excruciating.
Today's software development is sometimes unfortunate, but I find the benefits more remarkable than in the 90th.
Most of the React Native code I have seen is just presenting customized widgets to the user, and being a front-end for an API.
It is difficult to compile a RN project from a year ago, and very difficult for a three year old RN project.
By contrast, I wrote a paint program in Java almost 15 years ago, and it ran comfortably on a 486DX4/100 machine. And it will run without any modification on a computer today.
git clone https://github.com/unqueued/SimplePaint
cd SimplePaint
make
java SimplePaint
I've written fairly sophisticated business logic in Visual Basic 6, and I remember how much less cognitive load there was developing it. In the early 2000s, it was no problem to interface with a variety of different databases and APIs.
And like Java, most of these programs will probably run on Windows 10 with no modification.
One thing I really miss is how much less room there was for things to go wrong. Even in Visual Basic, the primitive threading support was so much simpler. Even when dealing with data streams from various sockets, handles, and the GUI, I spent maybe 1/10th the time as with React Native.
Of course I appreciate that React Native can do some unique and cool stuff. But I find that in practice what it is used for is stuff which could have been done so much better with other technologies.
The tools of the past still work blazingly fast on current PC. But look closely, a database such as postgresl is really light on resources and goes very fast for workloads of the 90's (or event SQLite). A C compiler with make goes fast too. Except your code now runs on a multiprocess operating system with tons of security, crash proof stuff (remember rebooting your PC because an off by one in your C code ?, remember fiddling with CONFIG.SYS to be able to use stuff about 640KB ?). A compressor is way faster than before. Stuff like Maxima are so much better now...
The only thing that has inflated is UI. But as far as UI for coder are concerned, things are good today I think. I use emacs, it still rocks. I use IntelliJ and it's pretty fast + it has code refactoring, code navigation and other wonders. Sometimes I write Jupyter notebooks, have you ever saw that ? It's incredible how much powerful that is to explain ideas. Of course I could do it with pen and papers, but I have so much more comfort to do it now.
So it's not that bleak :-)
One more example, I write demos for Apple 2+ from time to time. And guess what : do I code them on the Apple 2 ? No way, 40x24 display ? floppy disks ? crashing computer ? No git ? No good text editor ? No browser ? Nope, I would never code on an Apple 2+ today. But coding on today's tool with Apple2 as a target, that's waaaaaay better than in the good old days !
I hit those limits writing a battletech game in Turbo Pascal.
And not exactly doing optimization...
But yeah, Turbo Pascal really makes you wonder where all the horsepower (LITERALLY 1000x more speed or more with multicore and all the branch prediction, spec exec, ops fusion, out of order exec, etc) is going.
And 4MB ram. That fits in CPU cache and then some!
Library bloat is so out of control.
Here.
> I'm writing programs for iOS in React Native
Try Firemonkey from Delphi. It will allow you to write cross-platform applications, though for iOS/Mac you'd still need XCode, but at least you'll compile in seconds a small/medium application.
From what I remember of TP6 it would take me a few years. Maybe even a decade. Oh and a lot of libraries (like mouse support) used assembly code and prob only worked on a limited numbed of computers.
Are we talking about the site, or the web browser to view it with? I could probably do either in a month.
Using Lazarus/Free Pascal, about 1 week each.
Obviously to get there you first need to get all the iOS UI kit into Pascal. Then also a compiler from Pascal to iOS binaries.
PS: don’t forget the dev tooling.
In 2021, I'm writing programs for iOS in React Native. I need Xcode that weighs in at ~8GB _compressed_, node.js, and RN plus the whole slew of dependencies. On my 2020 Intel Mac mini w/ 32 GB of RAM, Xcode takes multiple minutes to build just the native part of the project from scratch.
Where, where on earth did I go wrong?