![]() ![]() You end up with a comparison that doesn’t make a lot of sense. Quality and prices went up, but it’s hard to notice-most of it is hidden behind walls or floorboards. Turns out expectations and standards slowly rose over the past 40 years: houses in the eighties didn’t have things like proper insulation, floor heating, multiple (triple-pane) windows, multiple power sockets, and Ethernet cables in every room. When we built our house three years ago, we’d wonder why it was so much more expensive than the house my parents built in the eighties-even though ours was smaller. I’ve seen similar comparisons happen elsewhere. ![]() That’s only one dimension-asset sizes-but you get the idea. Windows 95 had a 256-color palette, but when I open Slack today, there’s a chance I see three high-resolution, 200MB GIFs playing at the same time-of course, that uses more memory than paint.exe. ![]() Instead of text, we routinely share screenshots of text that take up more disk space than all of the images in a Windows 2000 installation combined (don’t fact-check me). To start, our screen resolution isn’t 640x480 anymore-we have 120Hz displays and watch 4K movies. Hardware has gotten better and faster, but the workloads we throw at computers have also grown. The comparison is not quite that simple, though. The SNES, to which Doom was ported, had a nominal clock speed of 3.58 MHz-the computer I’m writing this on has eight CPUs and each one has 3.9 GHz. Yes, if we compare CPU speeds from today with those from 1999, it’s easy to conclude that things should be a lot faster. It comes up repeatedly on the internet: software has become bloated, meaning it uses too much memory, it’s slow, it’s inefficient, and it’s often unclear why we need all that crap. Let’s start with that first adjective-bloated. Has software development indeed become “bloated, overengineered, and slow”? Software is not as simple as it used to be A SNES port in three weeks? No matter what is being ported, three weeks for a platform port is fast. ![]()
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