Have computers become bloated and over complicated?

And why is the answer "oh-my-gosh-yes-are-you-kidding"?

“Have computers in general become bloated and over complicated? Would it be better if we took the simplicity of the C64 / Apple II generation and updated the hardware?

Basically turn it on and boom, a dos prompt (with a pretty background) opens or load a disk and boom...an app runs.” - Vimiew (on Lunduke.Locals.com)

It’s a good question!

Let’s take a quick look back at computers, over the last 30 years, and what they were able to do with their limited resources (by today’s standards).

In the 1980s, we had computers that could cold boot all the way to a graphical desktop in a matter of seconds.

To be fair, we also has 1980s rigs that took a minute or two for the same purpose.

In the early 1990s, we had graphical desktop systems with extremely powerful office suites… including WYSIWYG desktop publishing and high-end graphic design. All with mere MEGABYTES of memory. And processors that were a tiny fraction of the speed of modern CPUs.

Microsoft Office 4.2 running on MacOS 7.5.x. Has all the word processing features most people use nowadays. Except it uses less memory and runs faster.

In 1999, 23 years ago, I purchased an iMac DV. Had a G3 processor (at 400 MHz), 128 MB of RAM. And could do digital video editing like a champ. Heck. You can’t even boot an operating system with 128 MB of RAM nowadays.

And that’s not even going back as far as the original question asked! Go back all the to the Apple II or Commodore 64? Shoot. The things that developers did with mere KB of memory is nothing short of technical wizardry!

Compare that to modern equipment — with specifications that are astronomically higher in almost every possible way — and the fact that much of our software actually manages to run slower than similar software did 30 or 40 years ago…

I think the question, then, is quite fair and reasonable.

Add on top of this the fact that there are distinct advantages to having simpler to use software. Less distractions. Easier to focus. Tending to be less software running at once (which also helps performance).

Well…

What if — what if — we took that old-school way of doing things… and simply updated the hardware? What if we took a DOS PC or a C64… and swapped out the CPU for something approaching modern (and able to address more memory)… then bumped up the RAM and storage.

But, for most intents and purposes, kept the way the systems functioned exactly the same.

What would that look like?

I’ll tell you one thing: The software would absolutely scream. And I don’t think that would be a bad thing.

To come back to the core question: Have computers become bloated and over complicated?

I think the answer is, undeniably, yes. And then some.

Luckily, there are some software projects out there that have focused on being lightweight — and, hence, a bit more old-school.

Tiny Core Linux, for example, can run in as little as 22 MB of RAM. (Which means that if you ran Firefox on top of Tiny Core… your web browser would take roughly 50 times the amount of RAM as your entire operating system… before even loading a web page.)

And the Suckless software (such as dwn and st), are also quite lightweight.

So… there are bright spots here and there. But not many.

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