Comparing Today's Computers To 1995's

An anonymous reader writes "A look back at two articles from 1995, touting high end computers and 'must haves.' How times have changed... ...'Memory (RAM): We seem to have convinced most manufacturers to adopt eight megabytes as standard, compared with four megabytes in 1994. Don't buy less than eight. The difference in performance between an eight megabyte machine and a four-megabyte machine can be dramatic.'"

yup

[Anonymous Coward]

Those were the days....when it took 30 minutes to load a porn site

Windows 95 vs Windows 7

[MrEricSir]

Windows 95 came with a 3d capture the flag game and a Weezer music video. Windows 7? Nope.

Therefore, computers in 1995 were better.

Re:yup

[Anonymous Coward]

Now the porn is available on demand but it takes 30 minutes to load up my schlong :(

Re:yup

[PatPending]

"In my day, we didn't have videos. We got ASCII pinups on 132 column green-bar! That's the way it was, and we liked it! We loved it!"

Re:Eight Megabytes And Constantly Swapping

[philip.paradis]

"Emacs is a wonderful operating system. All it's missing is a decent text editor."

Re:Eh

[Concerned Onlooker]

Nonsense. Soon they will be Arduino controlled.

Re:Eh

[Patch86]

You mean you don't know how to use the three seashells?

Re:Eh

[LynnwoodRooster]

Bidets my anonymous friend! You haven't experienced high culture until you've had a warm jet of water shot between your ass-cheeks and a nice, gentle breeze across your recently wetted-and-washed rear end!

Re:Eh

[Anonymous Coward]

hahahaha "1995: ...handling email, web surfing..."

speak for yourself but i think somewhat less than 90% of the people currently using a computer had access to email or the internet in 1995.

Re:Eh

[KiloByte]

Capabilities have increased by a factor of a thousand or more in several areas.

What Intel giveth, Microsoft taketh away.

Re:yup

[JosKarith]

Obligatory XKCD reference -
http://xkcd.com/598/ [xkcd.com]

irony

[mevets]

he typed it on his cell phone...

Re:Eh

[Zero__Kelvin]

"Programmers back then knew how to right optimized and reliable code that took full advantage of the hardware."

... and now they don't even know how to right!

Re:Eh

[TheRaven64]

In 1995, Visual Basic 4 was released. Anyone who thinks that there were no bad programmers around then was either not alive or not paying attention.

That said, there are now a lot more programmers and, more importantly, the number of tasks where slow code is fast enough has increased and speed has stopped being the main concern. Software projects often live for over a decade and being able to continue to modify the code to meet new requirements in ten years is a lot more important than having it run very fast now (and what does 'very fast' mean? If it completes the day's processing in 0.5 seconds instead of 0.005 seconds, who cares?). Back in 1995, throwing away your code after a couple of years was only just going out of fashion.