I miss when computers didn’t incessantly try to extract money from users

@thomasfuchs

Back then:

Computers were getting faster at such a rate that a two-year-old computer felt like it needed replacement.
Core software was gaining features that were actually useful as the underlying computing power increased.
The number of people who didn't have a computer was huge and so the total number of computers being sold was increasing each year.

All of these meant that selling computers or software was basically a money-printing machine. People wanted the newer version and the number of people buying each version grew.

Sadly, the entire industry became addicted to this revenue-growth-without-trying model. And that started to hit a brick wall when a couple of things happened:

First, software became 'good enough' for a bunch of things. I think Office '97 was good enough for probably 90% of home users. The earlier versions were missing features because computers weren't fast enough to be able to handle them. Every new release came with features that people really wanted but couldn't have within the constraints of what was possible to implement. By the late '90s, the hardware was no longer the primary constraint.

Second, hardware stopped getting rapidly faster. My 2013 laptop is slower than my 2023 one. But it's still usable. It runs more or less the same software (the old one is x86-64, the new one AArch64, but I run the same programs). The old one was a quad-core Haswell CPU running at up to 3.5 GHz. The new one has 12 cores (8 fast, 4 slow) and is faster per core. Most workloads have CPU usage sitting at under 10%, so even a 10x speedup wouldn't be noticeable for those, and it's probably closer to 5x for most things that are CPU-limited. Building LLVM on the newer machine is great, it was a bit slow on the older one (but still okay)

In 2003, a 1993 computer would have been painfully slow. A decent 1993 computer would be a 60-66MHz 486 or Pentium. A 2003 machine would have been over 1 GHz and with more instructions per clock, so a factor of 25-50x faster.

Even the gap between the 1993 machine and 1996 expected performance would have been big. The computer I got in 1996 was a 200 MHz Pentium clone with 32 MiB of RAM. A typical 486DX2-66 came with 8 MiB, so the delta from 1993 to 1996 was close to the delta between my 2013 and 2023 machines.

This combination meant that hardware and software refresh slowed down. At the same time, markets became saturated. Bill Gates' goal was 'a computer on every desk'. For most rich countries, that was basically achieved by the early 2000s. Until that point, companies were seeing rapid growth simply by more of the people who could afford computers deciding to buy one. After that, not so much. Some growth continued as the global middle class got bigger, but that grew far more slowly.

EDIT: That 1993 computer, if it ran Office, would have run Word 2.0 or 6.0. 6.0 was the first version to add spell checking as you typed (prior to that, you had to run the spell checker manually and inspect each thing it flagged then explicitly add, ignore or fix it. 6.0 really didn't like to run with less than 8 MiB of RAM (it was laggy and slow if you tried). A 66 MHz 486 and 8 MiB of RAM was fine as long as it was the only program you were running. Start up Paint Shop Pro and open a large image and you're swapping again. My 1996 machine could run Word and an image editor in NT 4 (memory protection, yay!) without swapping. That got a lot better once I bumped the RAM to 64 MiB. By 2003, the idea of having to close a program when I opened another to make sure I had enough RAM had basically gone, I closed programs when I was done with them.

@ArtHarg @david_chisnall @thomasfuchs Performance:watt, so very similar to your planes.

@woe2you @david_chisnall @thomasfuchs I don’t think that that is the equivalent metric. Extra performance is no longer a real benefit and watts are not a limiting factor (for the average end user, at least). So extra performance or less watts are not going to sell computers by themselves.

@ArtHarg @woe2you @thomasfuchs

Yes, it's more about diminishing returns and closely related to Amdahl's Law.

If I fly to New York, it takes me an hour or so to get to the airport, I then want to allow a couple of hours slack, then it takes a while to go through immigration, customs, and baggage claim, then probably an hour or so to get to my final destination. If the plane takes zero time, it's probably a four hour trip.

Concorde took about three hours, giving a seven-hour total trip time. Current commercial flights take about eight, giving a twelve-hour flight time. Both are basically 'I'm spending the day travelling'. If you live in London and are getting a helicopter from JFK to your office at the far end then Concorde can let you turn up for a lunch meeting and be home at the end. But for most people, this wasn't the case, Concorde was just a much more expensive way of spending the day travelling.

Contrast that with flights vs ships. It takes a week for a (powered) ship to cross the Atlantic. The difference between spending a day each way travelling and spending a week each way is huge. A one-week holiday or a short business trip is feasible with a one-day travelling time. If it takes two weeks for the round-trip travel then most people can't take a holiday.

This also applies to computing things. The laptop I started doing LLVM development on took an hour and a half for a clean build. It took five minutes to link a debug build. With my last laptop, I'd often build on a big server that could do a clean build in 10 minutes and link a debug build in under ten seconds (a lot of that change came from moving to a better linker). My new (well, three years old now) laptop is able to do a clean build in a bit over ten minutes and normally turn around incremental builds in a few seconds. Going faster won't improve my productivity.

And building LLVM is an outlier. Most people don't do batch processing things that are so computationally expensive. 20 years ago, I was doing a bunch of video editing things and the editing tools had a preview and final-version render mode. Preview rendering typically took a minute or two for large segments or tens of seconds for shorter snippets. That really slowed down the working. A few years later, most of these things moved to pixel shaders and later versions of the tools I was using were able to do the preview instantly. Faster than that is not useful.

That's great for consumers, it's less good for an industry that's focused on growth.