Comment by martinald
5 days ago
It's interesting how this stuff works. I started learning "tech" as a millenial in the late 90s when the internet and web was relatively new.
As such I picked up an awful lot of networking/windows/linux "fundamentals" simply because you had to know it to fix anything (truing - and failing - to get my crappy 28k winmodem working on Linux probably taught me many "months" worth of fundamentals alone!).
The other thing is when you are younger learning this stuff, most of us had pretty hard financial constraints on what we were doing. I couldn't persuade my parents to replace that winmodem with a proper modem (which I would do without thinking now), so you really had to make do with what you had.
One of the best lessons I learned was during a hard financial constraint.
Roughly around 1994 I had a new compute- a 486/66MHz with 4MB of RAM. I got LINUX and installed it, and was able to run X windows, g++, emacs, and xterm- but if I compiled while emacs was running, the system would page like crazy (especially obvious in those days when harddrives were very noisy).
I had to work really hard to convince myself to pay the $200 (as an undergraduate, I had many other things I would have preferred to spend money on) to double the ram to 8MB, and then another $200 to 16MB a year later, and finally a last $200 to max out the RAM at 32MB.
Once the system had 32MB of RAM, it performed quite well, with minimal paging, and it greatly increased my productivity. I learned that while RAM can be expensive, making sure your processor is not waiting for disk is worth it.
I probably also spent $1,000s of dollars on modem upgrades (1200->2400, 2400->9600, 9600->19200, 19200->48000, 48000->56K and then switching to DSL and later fiber). Each time was "worth it" but it was expensive and so I really thought hard abotu the upgrade and the value it brought me (a high level of job opportunities in areas I find interesting).
>... if I compiled while emacs was running, the system would page like crazy
The good old days when "eight megs and constantly swapping" was a real issue. I kind of miss them. (But not the modem speeds. Don't miss those at all.)
Now we have EGACS, which is called Electron, and soon ETACS, which will be called something ending with GPT.
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Imagine an era where a software-defined whatever was deemed "improper". Today we have software-defined radios that are clearly superior; you had one and wanted it in hardware.