alt Hacker NewsIn my experience, SSDs had a bigger impact. Thanks to Wirth's Law (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wirth%27s_law) the steady across-the-board increase in processing power didn't equate to programs running much faster, e.g. Discord running on a modern computer isn't any more responsive, if not less responsive than an ICQ client was running on a computer 25 years ago.
SSDs provided a huge bump in performance to each individual computer, but trickled their way into market saturation over a generation or two of computers, so you'd be effectively running the same software but in a much more responsive environment.
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> Discord running on a modern computer isn't any more responsive, if not less responsive than an ICQ client was running on a computer 25 years ago.
The only thing more impressive that hardware engineers' delivering continuous massive performance improvements for the past several decades is software engineers' ability to completely erase that with more and more bloated programs to do essentially the same thing.
> Discord running on a modern computer isn't any more responsive, if not less responsive than an ICQ client was running on a computer 25 years ago.
I feel this. Humanity has peaked.
Agree 100%. the compute was always bottlenecked by insanely high i/o latency. SSDs opened up fast computers like no processor ever did.
I mean, HDD were much faster than floppy disks. Which were in turn much faster than tape cassettes. And so on...
This is silly. That's like saying that machines haven't gotten any better because a helicopter doesn't eat any less hay than a horse did.
Anytime you upgraded from a 4 year old computer to a new one back then - from 16Mhz to 90Mhz, or 75Mhz to 333Mhz, or 333Mhz to 1Ghz, or whatever - it was immediate, it was visceral.
SSDs booted faster and launched programs faster and were a very nice change, but they weren't that same sort of night-and-day 80s/90s era change.
The software, in those days, was similarly making much bigger leaps every few years. 256 colors to millions, resolution, capabilities (real time spellcheck! a miracle at the time.) A chat app isn't a great comparison. Games are the most extreme example - Sim City to Sim City 2000; Doom to Quake; Unreal Tournament to Battlefield 1942 - but consider also a 1995 web browser vs a 1999 one.