On 06/08/2016 12:18 PM, Dan Roganti via vcf-midatlantic wrote:
I think the term "resource-poor" for describing the 60s, 70s or maybe the 80s is inaccurate It is relative, depending on your viewpoint - if you keep looking from the 21st century viewpoint But if you were there in the thick of it back then, it was actually the norm. So you were expected to design with those constraints Constraints are a fact of life in engineering
I agree 100%. Many of us were there (myself for the 70s and 80s at least), we never thought of our computers as resource-poor. It was more like "Wow, this system has 64K of RAM! SOOO much more than the last one, look at how much more I can do!" I had the unfortunate occasion to have a very unpleasant conversation with a sociopath many months ago. He was a nontechnical older kid visiting the museum with his technical friend, and we were talking about vintage computing of course, which led to talking about games. He essentially verbally trashed early game implementations. I'll never forget it...he said something akin to, "And you finished the game and smiled, but then you realized the graphics sucked, and you realized you were sad." That's not the way it was. Not that I was ever really into games, even as a child, but still. Nothing sucked back then...everything was "AWESOME". Most of it, nowadays, is simply a bit better. (graphics, for example) The same holds for resource scarcity. We can look back on it now, and mostly wonder how we got by on such scarce resources. But you know what? That's exactly my point. We're so lazy and sloppy now, if we had to get real work done on one of those systems, we couldn't do it if our lives depended on it. Let's hope they never do. -Dave -- Dave McGuire, AK4HZ New Kensington, PA