[mdlug] Completely replacing Windows 98se with Linux!

[Aaron Kulkis]

Ingles, Raymond wrote:
>> From: Ingles, Raymond
>> > From a practical perspective, sure. But there are a few good points. They offer an interesting contrast for perspective on how far we've come...
>> >and where we're going. For example, there isn't any undocumented firmware between you and the hardware. You can access anything you like.
> One other possibly interesting observation. Comparing the old computer to my current desktop, the modern machine has:
>
>   1. 500 times the RAM
>   2. 500 times the disk space
>   3. 500 times the video memory
>
> In terms of I/O:
>
>   1. The Ethernet is 100 times faster (Gigabit vs 10mbit)
>   2. The basic system bus is 100 times faster (PCI Express v3 vs ISA/VLB)
>   3. Peripheral connections are about 30 times faster (USB 2.0 vs Parallel port, don't have any USB 3.0 devices)
>
> But the CPU is only about 50 times as fast. (http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/benchmark-marathon,590-5.html) Of course, it has four cores, so you could make a case for it being ~200 times as fast, but even today a lot of loads aren't parallelized well.
>
> So over the past two decades, storage capacity has grown faster than I/O bandwidth, and both have grown faster than CPU power.

Slower and slower system response as software gets more and more bloated, part from sloppiness, and partly from lazy 
programmers using languages which are more and more abstract and compile more and more inefficiently -- or even worse,
"compile" to p-code or j-code or whatever-code and then run that on the whatever-code interpreter.