[citation][nom]TA152H[/nom]t's kind of funny how the young twits have no idea how powerful these processors really are. 20 MIPs can do a lot. Heck, I remember running .894 MHz, and that thing could control appliances in the house. Tandy in the 60s ran their entire business on a 16K machine. People were running very effective business software on 64K machines in the late 70s, and early 80s. The reality is, there's nothing you can do on a computer now that you couldn't 30 years ago. You have bigger numbers, and things are prettier, and stuff like that, but you're running the same basic stuff. On the plus side, the cheap crap they sell today, forgetting about getting too hot, is unreliable, offensive in workmanship, not to mention poorly supported by people who don't quite speak English. If you were to take a "good" quality case back to 1985, people would laugh at that junk. A PC/AT would smash a modern Dell like a sledgehammer against a glass. If you brought a laughable keyboard from today back 30 years, people would think it was a bad joke. If you thought it was OK for your PC to be dead in five years, people would take your temperature. On the other hand, most of the saps here wouldn't be able to overclock, as you actually had to know what you were doing, and replace the clocks on the motherboard. And if you destroyed the motherboard with inept soldering, they were really expensive. And the old saying was "The computer you really want will always cost $5000". Plus, there was that dreadful interlacing that gave me, and others headaches. Ugggh.So, things are nicer in some ways, but fundamentally very little has changed. The amount a 20 MIPs processor can do with efficient code is enormous. It's just that human nature is such that it bloats up everything if there are the resources to do so, with grotesque inefficiency. Because it can done now. Programmers don't worry about an extra additional, or resetting the pointer unnecessarily, or asking for more memory than they need. When you had 3 MIPs to work with, you looked at every line of code, every routine, and made sure you weren't doing anything unnecessary. A lot of good stuff has happened, and a lot of bad. But, for the ignorant kids who scoff, don't think something with 1/1000 of the processing power did 1/1000 of the work of something modern. They did pretty much the same thing back then, maybe without a few bells and whistles, but essentially the same thing, because people work with what they have, and when you have less, you use it more efficiently.[/citation]
You seem like you know what you're talking about and clearly have a better sense for the history, but I can't help but think what you're saying is nearly ridiculous. You seriously think computers did the same thing 30-40 years ago that they do today? Algorithm structure may be similar, but the speed, power efficiency, and small size of modern CPUs is so ridiculously beyond the old CPUs that many, many, many things are now possible that were not back in the day. Think about scientific modeling, 3d medical imaging, and engineering that are possible with modern computers. Think about modern automobiles that have microprocessors doing millions of calculations of various handling variables and such. Could old processors have technically executed all these instructions? Maybe. But the time it would take to do so and the power consumed in the process would make these things that are now so commonplace rare and sparsely used. Have programmers gotten less efficient? Perhaps. But to say that 30 year old processors can do anything modern ones can seems fairly absurd.