What would happen if computers never got any faster?
Just recently I got a Pentium 90 up and running using modern software (NetBSD 9.0). Doing a side by side speed comparison against my 3970x threadripper you can see the AMD is ~200-500x faster on a given task.<p>The P90 creeks along running the modern kernel. mpv and mplayer can't play anything smoothly (not even as a .wav file) and mpg321 fires up pulseaudio before it starts playing so that's not happening.<p>In this whole exercise I've learned something valuable:<p>This is all very reasonable.<p>If someone told me they'd spend an immense effort to speed something up by 0.15 seconds I would think them extremely foolish. That 0.15 seconds translates to 60 seconds on the P90.<p>My AMD has literally 1,000 times more memory than the P90.<p>If someone said they spent some enormous effort and took the memory footprint of something from 40MB down to 28MB I'd think they're just doing a hobby but of course on the P90 that's 10% of the memory available.<p>As machines have progressed, the great wins of the past have become nearly unmeasurable noise.<p>The OpenSSH server, for example, a fairly competently written piece of software, takes about 8 seconds to serve me a password prompt.<p>People aren't being foolish or irresponsible or naive in not caring about these things, they're being sensible.  Running a Pentium 90 with modern software --- that's the actual unreasonable hobby here.<p>---<p>Here's me doing a<p>* side-by-side gcc compilation: <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GUk9f7Nv2dM" rel="nofollow">https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GUk9f7Nv2dM</a><p>* trying to play a video I had transcoded to 160x120 in a futile attempt <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZMTz5PNpkcw" rel="nofollow">https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZMTz5PNpkcw</a> (original video I'm attempting to play is here: <a href="https://shop.cpurecords.net/track/sheffield-bleep" rel="nofollow">https://shop.cpurecords.net/track/sheffield-bleep</a>)<p>---<p>Edit: I'll give y'all access.<p>* telnet bootstra386.com:1994<p>* ssh bootstra386.com:1995<p>* user/pass: hn/hn<p>cat /proc/cpuinfo and /proc/meminfo if you want to gawk. I've put some nice things in /usr/pkg/bin. Try not to wreck it.