Tim Rowledge wrote:
> My intended point was that we seem to have forgotten how to manage with
> tiny machines. I'm sitting here at a 200MHz high performance descendant
> of the feeble 8MHz ARM cpu I used for the Active Book and the
> interactive performance is nowhere near as good. Ok, we're running 16bit
> colour instead of monochrome and the Squeak vm is not as clever as the
> Brouhaha one, but it really ought to be at least as good.

I've always thought this is a somewhat suprising general trend.

I understand we ask our computers to do more than we used to, but 
sometimes you'll be doing a simple task, say a search and replace on a 
large text file using some random utility on some random OS, and a newer 
machine will take as long or longer than (the memory of) a machine from 
a decade ago.

I remember being at MacWorld '97 and Apple touting their new "live 
scrolling" Finder windows, something NeXT had been doing for nearly a 
decade and countless others before that, and now Apple has come full 
cycle back to a prettier NeXT OS, and somehow made a 1GHz G4 feel no 
more responsive than a 25MHz 68040 (unless you're playing video).

Somewhere, collectively, we've forgotten how we accomplished the 
impossible under limited resources.  Even projects like uClinux needs 
nearly a meg of RAM for the kernel, but what would we have built with 
the same hardware ( http://www.uclinux.org/ucsimm/ ) two decades ago? 
(Or 25?  Am I really that old?)  It's as if we're dazzled by the myriad 
new possibilities and forget that the dreams of 20 years ago are still a 
stone's throw better than the status quo today.

The average embedded system has the capability of an enviable 
workstation from twenty years past.  Give me my $30 Lisa Palmtop.  I 
want to see if I can fill up a 16MB Flash.

Or better yet, let's replace all those TI85's in our kids' backpacks 
with the Pocket Mac Classic.  I suspect the graphing calculator will 
still work, and maybe ClarisWorks will make a revival.

-Jack