I hate to even mention this, but live scrolling windows in Smalltalk 
were one of the demo items that Dan Ingalls showed Steve Jobs when he 
came to visit PARC for the first time in '79, and they were as 
responsive or more than they are now. In fact, one of the fun on the 
fly changes that Dan made was in response to a question from Steve as 
to why the scrolling had to be line by line. Dan popped up the 
browser and made it go scan line by scan line (with very acceptable 
performance) in just a few seconds of changes. Needless to say, the 
Apple visitors had never seen any like this.

No one "of a certain age" has forgetten how to do this stuff. It's 
really a question of what amount of work should need to be put into 
optimization in an experimental system that is trying to change. The 
really annoying thing to me is Chuck Thacker's and Butler Lampson's 
estimation that today's CPUs (with stuff they connect to, etc.) are 
about 1000 times less efficient than was the Alto (whose 30th 
birthday is in the first week of April). This is what is killing 
experimentation. The choices Apple and other companies made as to 
what kinds of CPU resources they should try to use have crippled the 
industry (and was one of the main reasons why Smalltalk wasn't a 
factor in the early 80s when people's opinions and habits about 
programming were forming.

Cheers,

Alan

-------



At 9:28 AM -0800 3/18/03, Jack Johnson wrote:
>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


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