zlacker

>>mconle+(OP)
This just reminds me of constant "things worked so fast on my Windows 95 machine back in the day with 16MB RAM". Meanwhile any piece of software could crash your PC and it did so regularly (I still keep spamming save in software because of those days) and internet was a pandoras box.

I wonder how much overhead in modern OS/PC user experience comes from security/stability abstractions and tools.

>>moonch+bc
I think it mostly comes from the fact that computers are so fast now people write apps without worrying too much about performance - apps have always grown to use whatever resources are available. But when you app had to run on a pentium with 16MB of memory - you actually had to work hard on performance because you had such limited resources.

>>jacobs+be
And computers are so vastly different. We have these layers upon layers to deal with these differences. Back in the day it was just DOS and 386/486 then optimize the crap out of it. Even doom had their sound stuff done through a compatibility layer. Now a days you need to deal with multiple video cards and os and processors. Just easier to make a one and done solution and leverage it