So I'm reading Reddit [1] and come across an article about the increasing bloat in Microsoft applications [2]. Nothing terribly new there, but this bit:
## The Stone Age
Back in 1999, when I was working as an advisor to Intel's Desktop Architecture Labs (DAL), I remember how thrilled we all were to get our hands of Windows 2000 and Office 2000. Finally, a version of the Windows/Office stack that could leverage all of the desktop horsepower we were building in to the next generation Pentium 4 platform …
First-off, let me characterize the state-of-the-art at the time. The Pentium 4 CPU (Central Processing Unit) was about to be unveiled and the standard configuration in our test labs was a single-CPU system with 128MB (Megabyte) of RDRAM (RAMBUS Dynamic Random Access Memory) and an IDE (Integrated Drive Electroncis) hard disk. While a joke by today's standards, this was considered a true power-user configuration suitable for heavy number- crunching or even lightweight engineering workstation applications.
“What Intel Giveth, Microsoft Taketh Away [3]”
has me going nuclear.
Stone Age? In 1999?
It's 1988 and I'm given an account on the university (Florida Atlantic University) [4] VAX [5], sharing the CPU with 50 other people on a system that might have had 4MB of RAM (Random Access Memory) and a few hundred megabytes of disk space (we were only allowed five minutes of CPU time per day, which was enough for regular usage, although a friend of mine did manage to blow through that limit regularly by playing a version of Space Invaders [6] he wrote for it).
It's 1984, and for my birthday (and Christmas of 1983—given that my birthday is two weeks after) I received a Color Computer 2 [7], running at a heart stopping 889kHz (KiloHertz) with a whopping 16KB (Kilobytes) of memory and a highly advanced means of block storage—the cassette recorder (which recorded data at a breathtaking speed of 1500 baud).
Methinks the author of the above article is in desperate need of a clue-by four.
Stone age my XXX.
[1] http://programming.reddit.com/
[2] http://exo-blog.blogspot.com/2007/09/what-
[5] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/VAX
[6] http://www.spaceinvaders.de/