Which is quite strange, because even P2 level machines already had 64-128MBs of RAM, eg look at Quake 3 sysrq.
my bottom end pentium 4 presario came with 128 mb and the slowest hard drive in the world.
Office XP/2002 and Windows XP both called for 128mb minimum as far as I remember, so a lot of the machines were targetting that number.
I did eventually get a 256 MB stick of RAM. iirc I was already out of high school at that point.
One point I don't hear being talked about too much is how hopeful and stupid we were in the late nineties and early two thousands. We were supposed to have 10GHz processors by 2005, or I mean mass market for consumers by the end of the decade, at the latest?
https://www.anandtech.com/show/680/6
https://old.reddit.com/r/hardware/comments/5sqw20/the_future...
To put things in perspective, my parents practically never used the computer. For all intents and purposes, the computer was for a child to learn by parents who were not very computer savvy in a time when computers were advancing (or at least so we thought) very rapidly.
If I aould be in tbe mood and stance I would reply again, but I for what it gives I'm really grateful for my parent who indulged in this thing, despite it being a total terra incognita for them.
I think a lot of those predictions came from a world unconcerned with cores and threading.
The jump from sub ghz to 1 ghz (p2 to p3) came about suddenly, the jump from 1ghz to 3ish ghz came about suddenly (p3 to p4); and then things moved to prioritizing chip real estate for cores/threading/parallelism.
The chips we have now are great, but it would be damn nice to have a 10ghz core somewhere.
( I eventually upgraded my RAM before ditching the Presario, too, but I think it's because at the time I wanted to play Dark Age of Camelot without lagging to death in team fights.)
Clock speeds were always more about marketing than actual performance.
There are a few power-user applications where a 10X to 1000X speed bump would be very welcome - mostly video, audio, and AI.
For example - if you generate/process audio at 32X or 64X oversampling you can eliminate all of the usual DSP and conversion artefacts, even for difficult processes like non-linear distortion.
But for most applications, most users have more cycles than they need.
Today's CPUs are literally like 10-50x faster than CPUs of that era depending on how many cores you're using at once. Storage is an order of magnitude faster as well. Mission accomplished!
I've got plenty of complaints about how the industry has changed since then, but raw hardware performance certainly isn't one.
Sure, but look at the decade prior. I had a 486 DX-50 in 1992. Within a decade, we had processors clocked in the GHz. A decade after that, clock rates had pretty much stagnated as we have shifted to multiple cores. We saw something similar happen with memory capacity (huge jump in the late 1990's, and near stagnation over the past decade). The switch from hard drives to solid state drives actually resulted in a huge step backwards (in terms of capacity, though we got a huge bump in performance).
There has been progress with modern computers, but the benchmarks we used in the late 1990's are practically irrelevant these days.
It's not that meaningful of a number. A modern 3.8 GHz leaves an identically clocked P4 in the dust:
https://www.cpubenchmark.net/compare/1081vs3733/Intel-Pentiu...
If you were real lucky you'd get a Sony VAIO; but fashion be damned it had the same crap specs as the rest of the grandma gifts.
So of course I checked. It’s bizarre that they ever sold them with 128mb…
Your comment is Ribbon/magic-search-bar vs hierarchical-organization preference in a nutshell.
I've decided there are two mutually-exclusive sorts of people: (a) those who want search to surface things for them, and hate having to remember where to find things & (b) those who want to remember where/how to find things, and hate relying on fuzzy search to surface them.
IMHO, there's enough of each type that any given UI should support both.
Ribbon would have gotten less flak if they hadn't also simultaneously made a mess of the organizational hierarchy behind the scenes. (MS Office-style "select things to show from a giant list in a tiny scrollbox" is terrible)
Funny because I belong in both camps, but for different things.
I prefer fuzzy, flat search for launching applications (I mean we basically do the same on the CLI right? Hierarchy for apps seem more like arbitrary labels. Some things don't neatly fit into one label.
And prefer to locate files by hierarchy. With the exception of less familiar and very large file systems and codebases, where I will resort to either fuzzy filename find or grep like tools. I use broot for my file manager which caters to all of these modes quite nicely.
The first time we each had to debug a $PATH search order issue makes this a yes&no answer from me.
There's still a hierarchy and locations... but most of the time we can just ignore it and get on with things.
I'm in this camp, but with a bit of nuance. Fuzzy search tends not to work well for me -- if I can't remember the exact name of the application I want to use (and I often can't), then search is an iffy way to locate it.
But mostly, it's about not liking to switch between using the mouse and using the keyboard. If I'm firing up a program, I'm almost certainly using the mouse at the moment. Switching to keyboard adds a bit of unnecessary disruption.
> Ribbon would have gotten less flak if they hadn't also simultaneously made a mess
My problem with the ribbon is that the contents move around, which means I'm constantly having to search through it for the thing I want to do.
This might be one of the few useful features that I take for granted in modern Windows. That and Win + tab which I think GNOME does better. The "Windows" key in GNOME brings up the overview but also brings up search where you can either click which window you want or type what you want. Intuitive
The trick was to create your own folders to flatten the hierarchy, so you never have to look inside the "Programs" sub menu. You could even move your most frequently used items to the top level, with no folders at all, so they're available with a single click.
This got a lot easier with Windows 98 (or with the IE version that included the shell update) where you could just drag and drop to rearrange the menus.
When I saw developers using the default setup it was usually a pretty reliable clue as to their skill level.
Of course... Linux users would have said the fact that I was using Windows was an even bigger clue about my skill level.
But in which direction? I'm very skilled, and used to customize things like this -- but at a certain point, I stopped doing it because I'd develop muscle memory for my customizations that would really mess me up when using someone else's computer.
So now, I don't customize anything. It makes my life easier.
People who argue that you should just type into a search bar 100% of the time to find and launch apps are naíve. First of all, unless you have a trivial number of applications, it's absurd to expect everyone to remember the name of every program on his computer. Oh gee, what was that SD-card-formatting utility again? I don't know, but hey in two clicks I'm in my Utils folder and there it is. I'm not scouring a disorganized, flat list of 100 applications to find it.
The war against organizing stuff seems to go in cycles. Apple, for a decade or more, totally lacked a concept of ORGANIZING stuff. Their Notes app had no categories or folders. None. It was just a big pile of shit. Your recipes were mixed in with your business ideas and your meeting notes. They finally fixed that.
Maybe you should relook at this again; they don't work like that anymore - you don't need to remember "Brasero" when searching for a CD burning tool, the menu items all have a description field which is also searched.
So for your specific example, all you'd need to do is search for "SD Card", even if the name does not have the text "SD" or "Card" in it.
In most cases, when you have to type something longer than "SD Card", the difference in launching speed is even greater.
Even if such a field is 100% accurately and adequately populated for every application (which I doubt), I don't want to invoke a text-based search and have to start typing a query.
The old UI is good but I am not a fan of the everything is folders and files idea of the start menu. Maybe I'm misremembering but iirc as a child I used to forget which sub menu inside the thing I needed was except for the ones I used frequently.
I like being able to just type obs and press enter in the new windows. I preferred the old theme better than windows XP Luna theme. I had a copy of tune up software and it said the old theme is somehow easier on my ram? iirc I only had 128MB on my pentium 4 computer.