* * * * *
                                        
  It seems that the Event Horizon for Computer History is somewhere around six
                                    minutes
                                        
So I'm reading Reddit [1] and come across an article about the increasing
bloat in Microsoft applications [2]. Nothing terribly new there, but this
bit:

> The Stone Age
> 
> Back in 1999, when I was working as an advisor to Intel's Desktop
> Architecture Labs (DAL), I remember how thrilled we all were to get our
> hands of Windows 2000 and Office 2000. Finally, a version of the
> Windows/Office stack that could leverage all of the desktop horsepower we
> were building in to the next generation Pentium 4 platform … 
> 
> First-off, let me characterize the state-of-the-art at the time. The
> Pentium 4 CPU (Central Processing Unit) was about to be unveiled and the
> standard configuration in our test labs was a single-CPU system with 128MB
> (Megabyte) of RDRAM (RAMBUS Dynamic Random Access Memory) and an IDE
> (Integrated Drive Electroncis) hard disk. While a joke by today's
> standards, this was considered a true power-user configuration suitable for
> heavy number- crunching or even lightweight engineering workstation
> applications.
> 

“What Intel Giveth, Microsoft Taketh Away [3]”

has me going nuclear.

Stone Age? In 1999?

It's 1988 and I'm given an account on the university (Florida Atlantic
University) [4] VAX [5], sharing the CPU with 50 other people on a system
that might have had 4MB of RAM (Random Access Memory) and a few hundred
megabytes of disk space (we were only allowed five minutes of CPU time per
day, which was enough for regular usage, although a friend of mine did manage
to blow through that limit regularly by playing a version of Space Invaders
[6] he wrote for it).

It's 1984, and for my birthday (and Christmas of 1983—given that my birthday
is two weeks after) I received a Color Computer 2 [7], running at a heart
stopping 889kHz (KiloHertz) with a whopping 16KB (Kilobytes) of memory and a
highly advanced means of block storage—the cassette recorder (which recorded
data at a breathtaking speed of 1500 baud).

Methinks the author of the above article is in desperate need of a clue-by
four.

Stone age my XXX.

[1] http://programming.reddit.com/
[2] http://exo-blog.blogspot.com/2007/09/what-
[3] http://exo-/
[4] http://www.fau.edu/
[5] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/VAX
[6] http://www.spaceinvaders.de/
[7] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TRS-

Email Sean Conner at sean@conman.org

.