> The entire Oberon System, including its compiler, text editor and window system occupied less than 200K bytes of main memory, and compiled itself in less than 40 seconds on a computer with a clock frequency of 25 MHz. In the current year 2007, however, such figures seem to have little significance. When the capacity of main memory is measured in hundreds of megabytes, and disk space is available in dozens of gigabytes, 200K bytes do not count. When clock frequencies are of the order of gigahertz, the speed of compilation is irrelevant. Or, expressed the other way round, in order that a computer user will recognize a process as being slow, the software must indeed be lousy.
drob518•1h ago
> The entire Oberon System, including its compiler, text editor and window system occupied less than 200K bytes of main memory, and compiled itself in less than 40 seconds on a computer with a clock frequency of 25 MHz. In the current year 2007, however, such figures seem to have little significance. When the capacity of main memory is measured in hundreds of megabytes, and disk space is available in dozens of gigabytes, 200K bytes do not count. When clock frequencies are of the order of gigahertz, the speed of compilation is irrelevant. Or, expressed the other way round, in order that a computer user will recognize a process as being slow, the software must indeed be lousy.