[Tfug] Cheap Memory

[Bexley Hall]

--- Angus Scott-Fleming <angussf at geoapps.com> wrote:

> On 20 Dec 2007 at 18:10, Bexley Hall  wrote:
> 
> > If you want to see just how much of your machine
> > you are "giving up" to code bloat, etc., try
> running
> > old apps on "today's hardware".
> > 
> > E.g., I used Brief (by Underware) as my text
> editor
> > under DOS on a 16MHz 386 and it *flew*.  On a *50*
> > MHz machine it was so fast that it was UNUSABLE!
> > I dread to think what it would be like on a 3GHz
> > machine (i.e., you could edit files BEFORE you
> > started typing!  :> )
> 
> dBASE IV 1.5 wouldn't run on machines faster than
> 33mhz until they issued a 
> patch.  It used clock-ticks to name-and-open

Ah, not a *bad* approach to creating a temp file
name.  Though probably not *good*, either!  (As
history seems to have decided!)

> temp.files, and on machines that 
> fast it tried to open two files with the same name.

Brief's problem, IIRC, was that *they* did typomatic
instead of letting the OS provide it as a service.
While you could adjust the typomatic rate, to some
extent, using command/config file options, the
amount of control you had over it couldn't account
for the multiples of clock speed nor the effects
of cache (especially as the typomatic delay loop
was no doubt quite "localized" and, thus, easy to fit
on a single cache line even for old/tiny caches!)

:<

Unfortunately, it doesn't appear that Borland (who
bought them out) will ever release the sources for
it.  :<

(Yet another great piece of software that just
"disappeared"...)

--don


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