Also, games went from writing the most cleverly optimized code you've ever seen to squeeze every last drop of compute power out of a 6502 CPU all while fitting on a ROM cartridge to not giving a single shit about any sort of efficiency, blowing up the install size with unused and duplicated assets, and literally making fun of anyone without the latest highest end computer for being poor.
Ah, back when game development was managed by game developers who were gamers themselves and prioritized quality over min-maxing shareholder profits...
Or another way to look at it, is that it was the market takeover phase of capitalism where capitalists are willing to operate at a loss to corner the market and create their own monopolies (see Nintendo, Google, Facebook, Amazon, etc). But once market grow stalls out they switch to the milking phase or enshitification phase of capitalism where they prioritize profits over everything else
IIRC software development, including games, was a pretty gritty industry last century too.
It's more a matter of having the luxury of space for bloat. (Most of the anti-user features are new, though)
2024: What are you doing with 16GB RAM and 300% CPU at 5.4GHz?
- Running some random process introduced with Windows 11 that adds literally nothing to the users experience other than heat and fan noise
Running some random process introduced with Windows 11 that adds literally nothing to the users experience other than heat and fan noise
You forgot to mention how important and helpful the telemetry will be! /s
Check out KolibriOS. It's a tiny modern operating system written in assembly.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/KolibriOS
With 16gb of RAM and 102% CPU, the computer shows you a UI on any underlying hardware, any monitor/tv/whatever, handles a moise, keyboard, sound, handles any hardware interruption, probably fetches and sends stuff to the internet, scans your disk to index files so you can search almost instantly through gigabytes of storage whether it's USB sticks, ssds, harddrive, nvme drive. And probably a lot of other stuff I'm forgetting. Meanwhile the other thingy with 4kb ram did college math problems. Impressive for the time yes, but that's it.
Yes, nowadays there is a lot of inefficiency, but that comparison does not, and never did, make sense.
We had most of this with Windows 7 and probably XP as well. Those used a fraction of the RAM, disk space, and CPU time for largely the same effect as today.
You are being practical. I would say the fair amount of RAM in usage achieving all those tasks is 512MB. Just checked my Gentoo box with XFCE and Bluetooth & PulseAudio crap running, no tuning, merely 700MB of RAM in use.
Sure, then you can start libreoffice calc and go up to around 1g of ram and close to 0% CPU anyway.
My point wasn't on exact numbers because obviously the ones in the image are made up, unless that excel file is a monster of macros, VBA scripts and connections to numerous data lakes.
