Computer Inventor Finds Computers "Annoying"

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mikewong

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He might have not seen the SSD in action yet...
Nowadays, PCs are not the problem. It's the softwares that are bloated. The best is to rewrite them from scratch and forgetting about compatibilities with the old hardwares and software. But who would do that?
 

grieve

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[citation][nom]deadlockedworld[/nom]If I was super-rich I would have people read me all my emails too! Duh.[/citation]
If i was super rich i would be on a beach somewhere drinking my face off with 15 women.
 

V8VENOM

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"drinking my face off with 15 women." such aspirations ... and what's next on your list of meaningful contributions to life ... how to fart in the sand without getting any up your bung hole?

He doesn't hate "his invention" he hates computers of today ... based on his bloated and slow boot time comments he MUST be talking about Microsoft.
 

Kelavarus

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He embraces the 'simplicity' that allowed very few people to use and afford computers? Eh?

Also, dunno what you people are talking about. A clean install of Windows 7 boots faster than most variations of Linux (Ubuntu, Mint, and Debian), and Linux doesn't really have enough stuff in general for me to clutter it, reducing boot times, so not a fair comparison in later use. Dunno about Mac, though.

But he said "You have to wait", which doesn't mean slow. It means time full stop.

Thing is, I'm betting he never even really thought of them as entertainment or general use devices. If he did, I'd love to ask how he think he could've managed to do the SAME things that computers do now, with his apparently uber-lean memory management and zero to very little start up time, ALONG with offering choice and customization.
 
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this story is a bit confused. the sinclair zx-80 didn't open the door to the TRS (not TSR) 80; it was quite the other way around. The TRS-80 predated the Sinclairs by over two years. Then, of course, there are the Apples...C64 was 1982, but TRS-80 was first.
 

Nimmist

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Our machines were lean and efficient," he said. "The sad thing is that today's computers totally abuse their memory--totally wasteful
Because 2 digits to represent years has been so efficient for us
 

knowom

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[citation][nom]dogofwars[/nom]It's perfectly understandable. The guy paved the way for some standard but it did not go as he foresaw. It's just like if you have have a really good company that work on solid a solid foundation but then get sold into pieces and they all go with different design. With all the licensing crap that goes on, the computer industry should be way beyond what it is today and we should not have to deal with the crap like SLI licensing and such.[/citation]

Yup and crap like x86 and 64 bit licensing and general patent trolling by the likes of companies like rambus ;)
 

Tomtompiper

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How about this for irony: after a just read the article my PC just fucking BSOD on me.


Still using Windoze to surf? That's a bit risky.
 

plattyaj

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Sir Clive was an odd ball in his day so the fact that he's a grumpy old git now is no surprise.

I learned to program BASIC on a ZX80, program assembler on the ZX81 and learned to waste my life on the ZX Spectrum so, toys perhaps - but for their time remarkably productive ones!!!
 

mlopinto2k1

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What's funny is everyone here bad mouthing the guy is bashing the person who invented that POS sitting in front of you, technically speaking.
 
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he is right. current designs are far too inefficient. I have personally envisioned a complete computing overhaul... Computing has evolved in such a way to meet the demands of consumers... We've got aliens in badass spaceships constantly picking up our drunk females before we even get the chance... I mean come on guys! we need to level the playing field.
 

Ephebus

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[citation][nom]jellico[/nom]Today, software coding is a major undertaking. With the complexity of the applications and all of the features they incorporate, it takes nothing less than a small team working full time to put out anything of note. With computers having memory in the gigabytes, you code for performance, not size.[/citation]

Not exactly. Speaking more specifically of the Commodore 64, for which I used to be a games programmer. The C64 was based on the Motorola MOS 6510, which is the same processor as the 6502 used in the Apple II's and the 8-bit Nintendo, with some very minor internal hardware changes. The 6510 ran at a speed of 1 MHz, and besides being slower than the Zilog Z80, it also had a far more limited instruction set. Despite of that, programmers were able to produce far better games on the C64, both visually and sonically, than on Z80-based computers like Sinclair's own ZX-Spectrum, the TRS-80's, the MSX's and their variants.

That was because inside the C64 the (relatively) weak 6510 was accompanied by a very powerful graphics chip (compared to anything else that existed at the time, of course), and the still venerable "SID", as we affectionately used to call the computer's sound generator chip. The C64's video chip was able to perform various tricks by hardware, like moving the screen image sideways and projecting multi-colored "sprites" (small images) over the background without these affecting the graphics data below them. Programmers soon found out that it was possible to "multiplex" these sprites (the video chip only allowed for 8 of them natively), making them appear more than once per video frame and so effectively being able to use as many as 32 sprites at the same time, thus opening a whole new world of possibilities, mainly for action games.

Everything in the Commodore 64 related to video, sound, and consequently, games, was synchronized to the video frames. That way, the programmers needed to know how many processor clock cycles each instruction took to execute, and how many processor clocks "fit" within each video frame and even within each line of the video screen, in order to be able to perform these tricks. So, every routine was optimized to the extreme, and that's also the reason why the best C64 action games only worked on European C64's and not on American models. Since the European TV standards displayed 50 video frames per second and the American standard 60, programmers had more processor clocks per video frame (1/50 is greater than 1/60) to work with, besides having more lines on screen. When these games worked or were adapted to work on American C64's, they would play slightly faster, as would the sounds and the marvellous SID soundtracks - just try to grab a C64 or a SID sound chip emulator and listen to the themes of games like Cybernoid (by the Maniacs Of Noise), Cybernoid 2 (by MON's member Jeroen Tel), The Last Ninja, Delta and so many others (in 50 Hz, please!), to see what SID and some ace programming was capable of.

Memory was also very limited, because although the C64 did have 64 KB of memory and a 64 KB addressing space, only about 38 KB of RAM were initially available, because the kernel and BASIC ROM's shared part of the memory addressing space, and it was necessary to set some controlling registers in order to use the RAM underneath them.

My whole point here is: of course all technologies involved have evolved exponentially, but so has the programmers' carelessness towards code optimization. The much larger availability of memory and other computing resources has indeed resulted in most of the software produced nowadays being bloated, slow and buggy. Parts of programs that should be coded at the lowest level possible (that means, as close to native machine code as possible), aren't - much on the opposite. I would cite as a positive example Croteam's debut game Serious Sam, which through a highly optimized graphics engine was able to display massive amounts of entities on screen, and some of them huge. They lost the hand in the sequel, Serious Sam 2, which went programming-wise against everything that made the first game such an achievement. The same goes for most other games currently on the market, and of course, Windows in its various flavours since XP. Ever wondered why Vista was slower, used more memory and took so much more space on your hard drive than XP, without any really significant technology improvements to justify it? It was not because your PC was outdated as many loved to say - it was because of poor, lazy, careless design and programming. These people would certainly have a lot to learn from us old-timer ZX-81, ZX-Spectrum, Apple II, Commodore 64 and even Amiga programmers.
 

matt87_50

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"Given today's hardware standards, both machines are primitive"

eh, like that's a problem, just slap an 'i' on the beginning or end and tada! what was old is new again!
 

Xenophage

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Sinclair is 100% correct. Today's average computer systems are awash in such an unbelievable ocean of memory and computational power that it boggles the mind to think anybody could design an OS so poorly that it takes any time at all to load up or that you would ever run into an issue with limited resources. Programmers today are LAZY. They have so much horsepower to work with that optimization is an afterthought. We are not tapping into the full potential of our PC's, and I'd be very interested to see a study on that.
 

neiroatopelcc

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[citation][nom]JohnnyLucky[/nom]I wonder if Sir Clive is just turning into a cranky old fart.[/citation]
He's not. You have to remember his roots. He may have made money and a aname from making computers, but his passion isn't nessecarily computer related. In the 70s he was an electronics geek and complete nutter. He made his company famous by making simple and compact electronics kits (like brinck does today) inexpensively. In essence he made his first fortune producing build-it-yourself amplifiers and compact electronics like he first mini tv, the pocket calculator and other stuff like that. He at some point made computers, but it wasn't exactly his most enthusiastic undertaking. His company broke when he tried to make electric cars.
So in essence, don't consider him a computer nutter like Steve Stupid Jobs or Jen-Hsun Huang who have computers as their primary marked.
 

mlopinto2k1

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[citation][nom]Ephebus[/nom]Not exactly. Speaking more specifically of the Commodore 64, for which I used to be a games programmer. The C64 was based on the Motorola MOS 6510, which is the same processor as the 6502 used in the Apple II's and the 8-bit Nintendo, with some very minor internal hardware changes. The 6510 ran at a speed of 1 MHz, and besides being slower than the Zilog Z80, it also had a far more limited instruction set. Despite of that, programmers were able to produce far better games on the C64, both visually and sonically, than on Z80-based computers like Sinclair's own ZX-Spectrum, the TRS-80's, the MSX's and their variants.That was because inside the C64 the (relatively) weak 6510 was accompanied by a very powerful graphics chip (compared to anything else that existed at the time, of course), and the still venerable "SID", as we affectionately used to call the computer's sound generator chip. The C64's video chip was able to perform various tricks by hardware, like moving the screen image sideways and projecting multi-colored "sprites" (small images) over the background without these affecting the graphics data below them. Programmers soon found out that it was possible to "multiplex" these sprites (the video chip only allowed for 8 of them natively), making them appear more than once per video frame and so effectively being able to use as many as 32 sprites at the same time, thus opening a whole new world of possibilities, mainly for action games.Everything in the Commodore 64 related to video, sound, and consequently, games, was synchronized to the video frames. That way, the programmers needed to know how many processor clock cycles each instruction took to execute, and how many processor clocks "fit" within each video frame and even within each line of the video screen, in order to be able to perform these tricks. So, every routine was optimized to the extreme, and that's also the reason why the best C64 action games only worked on European C64's and not on American models. Since the European TV standards displayed 50 video frames per second and the American standard 60, programmers had more processor clocks per video frame (1/50 is greater than 1/60) to work with, besides having more lines on screen. When these games worked or were adapted to work on American C64's, they would play slightly faster, as would the sounds and the marvellous SID soundtracks - just try to grab a C64 or a SID sound chip emulator and listen to the themes of games like Cybernoid (by the Maniacs Of Noise), Cybernoid 2 (by MON's member Jeroen Tel), The Last Ninja, Delta and so many others (in 50 Hz, please!), to see what SID and some ace programming was capable of.Memory was also very limited, because although the C64 did have 64 KB of memory and a 64 KB addressing space, only about 38 KB of RAM were initially available, because the kernel and BASIC ROM's shared part of the memory addressing space, and it was necessary to set some controlling registers in order to use the RAM underneath them.My whole point here is: of course all technologies involved have evolved exponentially, but so has the programmers' carelessness towards code optimization. The much larger availability of memory and other computing resources has indeed resulted in most of the software produced nowadays being bloated, slow and buggy. Parts of programs that should be coded at the lowest level possible (that means, as close to native machine code as possible), aren't - much on the opposite. I would cite as a positive example Croteam's debut game Serious Sam, which through a highly optimized graphics engine was able to display massive amounts of entities on screen, and some of them huge. They lost the hand in the sequel, Serious Sam 2, which went programming-wise against everything that made the first game such an achievement. The same goes for most other games currently on the market, and of course, Windows in its various flavours since XP. Ever wondered why Vista was slower, used more memory and took so much more space on your hard drive than XP, without any really significant technology improvements to justify it? It was not because your PC was outdated as many loved to say - it was because of poor, lazy, careless design and programming. These people would certainly have a lot to learn from us old-timer ZX-81, ZX-Spectrum, Apple II, Commodore 64 and even Amiga programmers.[/citation]Take for example, the Commodore Amiga 500. Awesome gaming machine.
 

marsax73

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[citation][nom]acadia11[/nom]I think the comment about the phone makes sense, in that you have to constantly check your e-mail, as opposed to the phone rings you. People spend hours a day looking at their crack berries, you don't spend hours a day looking at your phone waiting for it to ring. Unless, in fact, someone you want to hear from.I get the logic, I personally, am coming to hate this super connected world, it's like an electron forced to share it's orbit, it's just not good. YOu don't ever seem to have a moment to yourself through this constant flood of information, the TV, radio, cell phone, smart phone, black berry, berry black, phone i, i pad, i pod, you are always connected, constantly, it's like the Borg, ... or that Japan Anime Serial Experiments Lane, social networking will morph into reality and the real world, essentially becomes just a back drop to living on the net. It's actually quite scary. My most peaceful moments now a days are when no one can contact me, it's damn near exhilirating...And look at Tiger, if it wasn't for that darn, Text messaging!!![/citation]

My wife is constantly on Facebook and her crackberry. It's really annoying. I mean they are cool things and used with moderation, I don't see a problem. It's a problem when she checks her phone every 2 mins waiting for something to happen. Maybe the fact that someone isn't calling you or texting you is a good thing. My home pc is strictly used for my home studio. I don't stay on it for hours playing Mafia Wars or tending to my Lil Farm. Plus I don't have to post pics of what I'm doing 4 times a day. We go out to eat and there she is...taking pics of our meal and putting it out on Facebook. Ugh.
 

madass

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My machine takes ~30 seconds to boot.....my 10 year old notebook takes 5 minutes.
I think I'll take the desktop...
Also....20 years ago, the average program as a few hundred Kb in size. Today, the average program is at least 500 megs. Then, a game was maybe 2 mb. Unreal Tournament 3 is 16 gigs. And you can't exactly call UE3 a slow engine (CryEngine 2, looking at you).
For the sake of comparison, the navigation system on board Apollo 11 had 128 kb of RAM.
 

XZaapryca

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[citation][nom]acadia11[/nom]I get the logic, I personally, am coming to hate this super connected world, it's like an electron forced to share it's orbit, it's just not good. YOu don't ever seem to have a moment to yourself through this constant flood of information, the TV, radio, cell phone, smart phone, black berry, berry black, phone i, i pad, i pod, you are always connected, constantly, it's like the Borg, My most peaceful moments now a days are when no one can contact me, it's damn near exhilirating.[/citation]

Couldn't agree more.
 
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