Then vs Now Programming WAS: Re: AMD vs Intel memory managemement

Fri Jun 14 09:33:34 MST 2013

I think as an extension of this thought, there's still plenty of systems programs writing really "tight" code.  The linux kernel for example is pretty efficient, in my opinion it's on par with ye programmers of old.  The difference now a days there's a *lot* more programmers and the field is much easier to get in to.

Paul Mooring
Operations Engineer
www.opscode.com

________________________________
From: plug-discuss-bounces at lists.phxlinux.org on behalf of Kevin Fries
Sent: Thursday, June 13, 2013 6:43 PM
To: Main PLUG discussion list
Subject: RE: Then vs Now Programming WAS: Re: AMD vs Intel memory managemement

I think there is a big reality being missed here.  Back in the "old days" when developers wrote "tight" code, that was out of necessity not out of some higher purpose.  Computers did not do much, spell checkers were a luxury, as were point and click interfaces.  I remember spending more money for my first 10MB hard drive than i would spend for a 1TB today.  The price to write this tight code today is too high for the benefit it would bring.  Yes code is more bloated today, but if you take a look at the bloat in proportion to the increase in memory, disk, and network speed, it could be argued that software has gotten smaller, not larger.

Just my $0.02

Kevin

On Jun 13, 2013 2:03 PM, "Carruth, Rusty" <Rusty.Carruth at smartstoragesys.com<mailto:Rusty.Carruth at smartstoragesys.com>> wrote:
IMHO, the answer is yes.  And the answer is no.

Operating systems in ‘the olde days’ were REALLY small, and didn’t do much. No gui, for one! (Well, ok, on the IBM 1130 I used the GUI was the flashing lights on the console!)

Shoot, the entire boot loader fit on a single 80 column punch card.  The card had I think 12 bit positions per column, so that means we could load a program (from cards!) with 120 bytes of program. The computer ran 16 bit instructions, so that means in 60 instructions we could read binary data from the card reader (12 bits at a time), and store it into memory!

FORTRAN (and later C) and assembly language were probably the primary languages in use for applications.

As James said: “Cache?  We don’t need no stinkin’cache!”  Cache was a luxury that Idon’t think we even considered…

I’m not sure how much is language bloat, and how much is (perceived?) lack of need to be careful about ram or anything.  I will say that it seems that, as computers get faster, they run slower due to all the junk that comes with the OS.  It wasn’t that long ago that Linux would run ‘hummingly’ on a lowly Pentium with 512MB of ram.  Try that today with a  current distribution that isn’t aimed at ‘low-end’ computers!

Personally, I think it’s a bad thing that we can turn what would have been a supercomputer 40 years ago into a machine that runs slower than my Osborne 2 did!  (I can out-type my Lenovo ThinkPad T410 to the point that I’ve had 40 to 80 characters typed that it had not bothered to process before I gave up typing and waited for it to catch up!)  (Yes, its running Windows)

(Note, an Osborne 2 was a ‘portable computer’ (about the size of a medium piece of luggage) that ran CP/M, had 64K of RAM and 2x 5 ¼” floppies!  (The REALLY cool luggable machines had some ‘huge’ hard drive (probably 20MB!))

Rusty, climbing down off of soapbox now :)

From: plug-discuss-bounces at lists.phxlinux.org<mailto:plug-discuss-bounces at lists.phxlinux.org> [mailto:plug-discuss-bounces at lists.phxlinux.org<mailto:plug-discuss-bounces at lists.phxlinux.org>] On Behalf Of Nathan England

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.....

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?

---------------------------------------------------
PLUG-discuss mailing list - PLUG-discuss at lists.phxlinux.org<mailto:PLUG-discuss at lists.phxlinux.org>
To subscribe, unsubscribe, or to change your mail settings:
http://lists.phxlinux.org/mailman/listinfo/plug-discuss
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://lists.phxlinux.org/pipermail/plug-discuss/attachments/20130614/1c1780a6/attachment.html>