alt Hacker NewsWell, yeah. Back in the mid-80's, software needed to be usable on a computer with a single 360KB floppy drive. (No HD, no SSD, no USB, no network, no ...) And even a big budget for RAM - which cost many orders of magnitude more than today - would really not get you around Bill Gates' 640KB DOS memory limit.
Comparing to current-day stuff is kinda like comparing battery-powered bathtub toys to jetskis.
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BobBagwill • today at 3:22 PM
More like comparing a racing kayak to a leaky container ship burning sulfurous bunker fuel carrying a load of short-lived consumer junk. :-)
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Those "bathtub toys" built the entire modern infrastructure, parts of which are still chugging along. If anything, I'd put the onus on software developers - like John Carmack said in 2005, "there is something deeply wrong when text editing on a 3.6 ghz processor is anything but instantaneous".
Software in the 80s showed what's possible when you really care about doing it. Software in the last 15 years feels like an exercise on what happens when you don't.