On Thursday, June 13, 2013 07:01:23 AM Lyle Tuttle wrote:

In the 'old' days, I worked for the Atomic Energy Commission designing, building and maintaining computer controlled experiments using radiation from and located on the face of the reactor.....our SDS "mainframe" <G> ran ALL experiments (including some x-ray diffraction projects in remote locations) in real-time......that computer had 16K core memory.......and people came from all over the world to see what we were doing....now a watch has more memory.....

Time flies, and the only constant is change......    

Lyle has brought up a question that is interesting to me. I hear stories like this of these amazing things people did with computers 30 and 40 years ago and then the comment always comes up like "And we only had xx kb of ram".

So my question is, was programming in what ever language they used back then more efficient and today's languages are seriously bloated and require more ram, or do programmers today not know how to program as efficiently?

Or what gives?