Comment by usr1106
1 year ago
I am old enough to remember times when 100 computer science students did their exercises on a VAX 11/750 with 4 MB of main memory. Admittedly it was a bit laggy when all 15 terminals were in use during peak hours. I don't remember disk sizes.
Now main memory is a different story than application size. But in most cases your main memory must be significantly bigger than size of a single application. So for that 4 MB VAX running a 2 MB application might be suitable. Let's reduce the 15 users to one, that's progress over 4 decades...
Now the question: What can that 2 MB VAX banking application not do, that the 613 MB iOS application can?
* Cryptographic operations have developed. But I am not aware that those used by a banking application are particularly memory hungry.
* The screen resolution is different, but banking on 80x25 characters would work just fine at least outside of CJK.
* The touch input might be problematic, so we would need to use a Blackberry or Nokia Communicator with physical keyboard. That would not only be a disadvantage IMHO.
(The last 2 items are largely influenced by the operating system. But of course that would need to be very different to run on a 4 MB computer.)
What else am I missing in this thought experiment? Honest question.
1. Image recognition: many banking apps offer support for transfers via QR codes.
2. I18n: the app may not speak your language, but you may set the display names of your savings accounts in Unicode.
3. Branding: text doesn’t offer much there, high resolution GUIs can offer a lot, not just a logo or colors, but also custom fonts, icons, images, interaction scenarios etc.
4. Telemetry: well, that’s just a lot of extra logging code.
5. A/B testing support: code for running experiments as well as code and assets for A and B variants.
6. Just a lot of business functionality that is much cheaper to develop today, including things like onboarding flows, chat with customer support etc etc.
That’s what comes to my mind immediately. Probably there’s plenty of other things.
> 1. Image recognition: many banking apps offer support for transfers via QR codes.
Accepted.
> I18n:
Outside of CJK, every new language takes a couple of kilobytes. You cannot explain megabytes with that.
CJK I already mentioned, it might be beyond reach? But actually in 1986 I saw the first IBM PC with a Kanji UI. I have no idea how much memory it had. But I might guess that might still have been hardware where 640 kilos(!) is more than anybody would ever need? Not sure.
> 3. Branding
I couldn't care less as a customer. The bank should offer good rates and flexible service. They can keep their branding.
> 4. Telemetry
Everything the user can do on their qwerty can be logged with kilobytes of code.
> 5. A/B testing support
Same here. Remember our interface is 80x25. Many variants of that fit into just kilobytes.
> chat with customer support
I started to use IRC in 1990. Don't remember how big the clients were and cannot quickly find a reference. I would guess 100 KB max, probably less. Using a camera would not be possible, we had that already under QR.
But actually in 1986 I saw the first IBM PC with a Kanji UI. I have no idea how much memory it had. But I might guess that might still have been hardware where 640 kilos(!) is more than anybody would ever need?
There were a number of computers and computing devices with 64K or less that displayed kanji.
> 1. Image recognition: many banking apps offer support for transfers via QR codes.
The nice link https://www.emergetools.com/app/example/ios/examp_fCeiq7Z6xe... given elsewhere in this discussion reveals another functionality: Check scanning.
Living in a country where checks have been abandoned some 30 years ago, I can only shake my head about the irony. Scanning checks with an alleged high-tech device...
> Now the question: What can that 2 MB VAX banking application not do, that the 613 MB iOS application can?
Work on your iPhone?
All the bells and whistles of that UI come at a large cost - memory.
And why not?
The iPhone's got it.
A better question might be: why does App A on the iPhone take up about ~10x as much space as the same app on Android?
And the answer is probably because iPhone users don't care...
If they did, Apple would probably do something about it...
> And why not?
> The iPhone's got it.
And why not?
Let's ruin the planet, we've got it.
Apple is more unethical in their resource waste than Google. But Google is very very far from innocent.
Is making a 256 GB storage model much more wasteful than 128GB.
How is Apple more unethical than Google on resource waste?
Apple supports all their consumer hardware longer than Google.
Apple will still let you sync your original iPod with your Mac and purchase music digitally “the old fashioned way.” Good luck using the Google Play Store on your EOL Android device.
Google is the one that wasted a whole bunch of plastic and silicon on Stadia controllers before discontinuing the service and giving people an arbitrary deadline to convert the controllers into standard Bluetooth.
In what universe is Google less wasteful than Apple?
5 replies →
> All the bells and whistles of that UI come at a large cost - memory.
I’m not sure that’s true. If they tried they could have made an app with loads of bells and whistles that’s 10x smaller (unless we’re talking about a lot of media content). It’s just not something many developers care about due to various reasons
You had me until the "users don't care". I'm a user and reported this issue which resulted in the post we're discussing. Bank management/developers don't care is the issue.
What else am I missing in this thought experiment? Honest question.
Even though I/O was slower on the VAX, with the smaller number of bytes going back-and-forth, it would probably be snapper than a modern app.
I remember when computers were advertised as supporting eight concurrent users running spreadsheets at the same time on a single machine with 64K of RAM. Often off of two or four floppy disks. No Winchester drives.
64K of RAM was stupid expensive at the time. I always wondered if they made it up selling terminals.
I also remember a high school keeping all of its records on several thousand students on two Commodore PETs hooked into a single 8050 (two 512K floppy drives) through a device called a MUPPET ("Multiple PETs").
And why is this relevant when flash storage costs $.10 per gigabyte at retail prices?
Seriously, my microSD card I just bought was $52 for 512GB of space.
On a typical 5G connection you can download a 600MB application in under a minute.
It’s really neat that we grew up with computers that had intense resource restrictions and we got by. But that is basically just trivia. Sure, some bureaucratic banking company out there doesn’t care to prune their app libraries, and I couldn’t care less, personally.
Ask the relatives of the 134 who not too long ago died in a flooding in Germany [1] whether buying electronics for cents or reverting exploitation of the planet are more important.
Probably there are 10s if not 100s of thousands of victims more in Africa, South America, South-East Asia that we in the Western world forget shortly after reading the headlines.
Myself, a European, I have traveled across the USA before mobile phones existed or internet was available to private households. Believe me, the experience was better than traveling today where you have seen everything on Streetview before even getting there and using GPS to get to the next restaurant. (Yes, getting there by plane was not climate-smart act and I would not do it again after having seen it more than once.)
[1] https://www.deutschland.de/en/topic/environment/catastrophic...
Oh, I see, it’s about hypocritical climate shaming.
The clothing industry accounts for more carbon emissions than electronics. It’s a huge chunk, about 10% last I checked. Will you become a nudist?
I don’t drive a car or even ride on a bus on a daily basis but if I buy an SD card I’m a walking climate catastrophe.
Blaming denser memory modules for climate change is sillier than the plastic straw or bag bans (instead of going after something that has a real impact).
Also do you really think that higher resolutions, memory density etc. somehow linearly scale with climate impact? Why?
> Believe me, the experience was better
Believe me, it wasn’t. We just cancelled each other out didn’t we?