Open thread for December 9 - 16, 2013

NancyLebovitz

If it's worth saying, but not worth its own post (even in Discussion), then it goes here.

It wasn't even true in 1995, I don't think. The first way of evaluating it that comes to mind is the startup times of "equivalent" programs, like MS Windows, Macintosh OS, various Corels, etc.

It would be interesting to plot the time sequence of major chip upgrades from intel on the same page as the time sequence of major upgrades of MS Word and/or MS Excel. My vague sense is the mid/early 90s had Word releases that I avoided for a year or two until faster machines came along that made them more usable from my point of view. But it seems the rate of new Word releases has come way down compared to the rate of new chip releases. That is, perhaps hardware is creeping up faster than features are in the current epoch?

8fubarobfusco13y

Startup times for desktop operating systems seem to have trended up, then down, between the '80s and today; with the worst performance being in the late '90s to 2000 or so when rebooting on any of the major systems could be a several-minutes affair. Today, typical boot times for Mac, Windows, or GNU/Linux systems can be in a handful of seconds if no boot-time repairs (that's "fsck" to us Unix nerds) are required. I know that a few years back, there was a big effort in the Linux space to improve startup times, in particular by switching from serial startup routines (with only one subsystem starting at once) to parallel ones where multiple independent subsystems could be starting at the same time. I expect the same was true on the other major systems as well.