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river Forums Junkie Location: Land of Oz Registered: June 2004	Re: The Good ol' days of computers Tue, 18 January 2005 21:11 Hi, The most shameful thing is the shit programmers that now inherit the world. Let me take you back with another old-man river tale..... Back in the 70's and early-mid 80s the hardware was very expensive but programmer time was quite cheap. We programmed in assembler and then walked-through and hand-optimised our code for compactness and performance. To get more performance you'd have to again go through and try and optimise your code. No one was gonna spend another few thousand dollars for an extra 16K of memory! As hardware prices fell and programmer wages skyrocketed, the situation reversed. The solution now is to buy another processor or whack more memory in the bitch. Don't bother fixing or tightening your code. You can get away with shit code now and trust me, I've seen a lot of code that would make baby jesus cry. I think all programmers should spend some time with little 8bit processors, doing assembly language - so they can understand the hardware (ie CPU registers, stack, memory limits, instruction cycle timings and interrupts) before they go off and write bloated inefficient code that does bugger all and still sucks the life out of a 3Ghz Pentium with 2G of RAM. There are still some great programmers out there, but the vast majority are crap. I liken it, in some fashion, to the cars of years ago to the ones that will probably be in our future. Take your old 1970s era car - with no ABS, manual transmission, manual choke, etc - just your basic old style car. Look to the future and see cars that have all the mod things - say, ABS, adaptive suspension, and the ability to drive in traffic without driver interference, auto-transmission, automatic everything etc. I think the 70's era vehicle demands more from the driver and it's a hell of a lot more fun. If you're just a passenger, then I guess the later era cars are better for you. 64bits, to me, equal more inneficient programming, more bloated OS and pretty graphics that does bugger-all (excpet for top-notch games, where graphical capabilites are necessary). Well, that's my rant. Luckily I didn't get onto the hardware aspects of todays electronics where everything is thrown away if its broken. I like to build my systems from the chip level upwards and fix them (down to chip level), which is damn near impossible with the SMT, PLA and PGA type of hardware around today. Besides, this shit goes into landfill and there's some very nasty stuff in PCBs and chips that will leak into the environment. seeyuzz river [Report message to a moderator]

	Subject	Poster	Date
	The Good ol' days of computers	SilverGhost	Mon, 17 January 2005 07:17
	Re: The Good ol' days of computers	skellator	Mon, 17 January 2005 07:29
	Re: The Good ol' days of computers	SilverGhost	Mon, 17 January 2005 07:31
	Re: The Good ol' days of computers	Apollo	Mon, 17 January 2005 07:56
	Re: The Good ol' days of computers	davedrifts	Mon, 17 January 2005 08:08
	Re: The Good ol' days of computers	jackel	Mon, 17 January 2005 10:13
	Re: The Good ol' days of computers	river	Mon, 17 January 2005 11:24
	Re: The Good ol' days of computers	rob_RA40	Tue, 18 January 2005 21:32
	Re: The Good ol' days of computers	river	Tue, 18 January 2005 21:44
	Re: The Good ol' days of computers	clubagreenie	Mon, 17 January 2005 12:09
	Re: The Good ol' days of computers	styler	Tue, 18 January 2005 12:04
	Re: The Good ol' days of computers	river	Tue, 18 January 2005 21:36
	Re: The Good ol' days of computers	river	Tue, 18 January 2005 21:11
	Re: The Good ol' days of computers	clubagreenie	Wed, 19 January 2005 11:35
	Re: The Good ol' days of computers	rthy	Wed, 19 January 2005 11:51
	Re: The Good ol' days of computers	BlackMR2	Fri, 21 January 2005 07:52
	Re: The Good ol' days of computers	rob_RA40	Tue, 18 January 2005 22:03
	Re: The Good ol' days of computers	river	Tue, 18 January 2005 22:12
	Re: The Good ol' days of computers	ra23mad	Sat, 22 January 2005 00:16
	Re: The Good ol' days of computers	Apollo	Sat, 22 January 2005 13:02
	Re: The Good ol' days of computers	megan	Sat, 22 January 2005 12:28
	Re: The Good ol' days of computers	Hodgie	Sat, 22 January 2005 12:44
	Re: The Good ol' days of computers	eviltwin	Sat, 22 January 2005 14:17
	Re: The Good ol' days of computers	river	Sun, 23 January 2005 06:21
	Re: The Good ol' days of computers	BlackMR2	Sun, 23 January 2005 16:11
	Re: The Good ol' days of computers	RobST162	Sun, 23 January 2005 21:51
	Re: The Good ol' days of computers	BlackMR2	Mon, 24 January 2005 07:58

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