I’ve recently been reading Shareware Heros – It’s an interesting book, even though it’s not what I might have expected. It focuses more on the business side of the shareware approach rather than the actual development of the software or the problems that needed to be solved. There were some very large numbers mentioned when discussing the Apogee Model and the income some of the titles released under that model bought in
I’ve not quite finished the book yet, but I wanted more discussion about how problems were solved when computer resources were so limited – A couple of Mhz of clockspeed, some Kb or Mb of RAM, and probably some 10’s of Mb of harddisk
Looking back, it’s insane to me how much performance people were able to push from the hardware that was available at the time. How much time did you spend on tweaking autoexec.bat and config.sys to make sure you had enough resources available for your program to run as well as it could?
I appreciate this isn’t about shareware, but it’s the book that made me start thinking
This is also very PC focused as I didn’t dabble in anything else (when there was more choice!) but you used to have to know about all sorts – IRQs, DMA, jumpers and so on. What have we got now? I’m not sure of the term. But these days you’ve got your tablet/phone, switch it on, do your thing, walk away. If you use a computer, it has effectively unlimited resources. Why would anyone need to know about the nuts and bolts? When was the last time you tinkered with something and it went slightly wrong, so you had to work out how to fix the actual machine? What’s the worst that happens these days, you accidently log out of something?
I’ve noticed over the past 10 or so years that the ability to troubleshoot within the IT industry has declined to a worrying extent. These days it feels like the solution to any problem is to throw more (virtual) hardware at the issue. Yeah, it’s great that everything is a container now, and we have fancy words to describe what should have been normal in the industry for the past 20 years, but I miss computers being a thing people understood