BORK!BORK!BORK! Paris might sometimes be called “The City of Light” or perhaps “The City of Love” by the romantically inclined. Judging by this hotel’s elevators, “The City of Bork” is more appropriate.
Spotted by eagle-eyed Register reader Nathaniel in a Paris hotel, what we assume to be digital signage is instead stalled on the all too familiar American Megatrends BIOS configuration screen. The computer behind the scenes also seems a bit overpowered to serve information for hotel services.
Instead of enticing elevator riders into the undoubtedly delightful bars and restaurants of the establishment (apparently a Novotel not far from the Eiffel Tower) or whatever it should be doing, this screen has temptations of an altogether more technical nature.
A CometLake CPU? An i5 no less? Sort of up-to-date. And that 8 GB of RAM? The way memory prices are going, that might be enough to buy you a nice hotel room in some cities, and at least a decent coffee and a croque monsieur in Paris.
Meanwhile, Apollo had only 2 Mhz and 36 KB memory and navigated to the fucking moon.
Not using an elevator though
They haven’t installed the ropes yet.
I never get tired of this comparison, esp. with the smartphone in your hand.
One can push it further: ALL of the computing power used for/during the moonlanding has been surpassed by any smartphone, by orders of magnitude.
Nokia 3310 is much more powerful than Apollo mission computer. Crazy! And yet we need our phones getting bigger memory and faster CPUs each year. Why? Makes no sense 🤷
Damn you’re right. According to this article the apollo computer hat 32kB RAM and ran on … 0.043MHz
It’s a lost art for sure. I wrote a graphic OS for an instrument my company uses in the field. I had 2 MB of RAM and 1 MB of storage to work with, and the latter had to include space for a data logger, so the code effectively had to reside in about a quarter of that.
It gave me a lot of respect for the original Mac OS. Graphic OS with 128 KB of RAM and 400 KB floppy for storage. The latter had to have room for the OS itself + apps + user documents. They did “cheat” somewhat by having a 64 KB ROM to help with the graphics library.
But the lengths they went to to squeeze every last bit of capability out of the hardware was legendary. For example, Wozniak wrote a floppy driver that varied the spin rate depending on which track was being read. He reasoned the outer tracks could hold more data thanks to the greater diameter if the spin were slowed down.
Programmers back in the day had to be super clever. I can’t say much about programs but games used to be very restrictive and some devs managed to pull out incredible mechanics and graphics having barely any memory to work with. Today they’d release 150gb game that is no much better than a game they’ve released in 2008.
This always made me respect old school games.
A big part of games taking up more and more space is due to higher resolution assets. Creating installers only installing needed assets would drastically reduce the size for anyone not playing on extreme or whatever they call the maximum resolution.
But games do still tend to be among the archetypes of software, which hits bottlenecks that needs performance optimisations. You only have whatever hardware your end user has, you can’t just buy a bigger server… well Google Stadia tried
I love how you can take an old game now and, assuming it’s still playable, the cut scenes often look really bad compared to the regular game play, since they were pre-rendered at what would be considered low-res today. It used to be the other way around!
Also, the further back you go, the less the game industry was locked into a handful of game engines, which in some ways gave devs more creative freedom, though of course it was a lot of work to write the whole thing from scratch every time.
And a few thousand people working 24/7.
And required constant monitoring and manual input…
The problem is inefficency exacerbated by the requirement of pesky things like graphics
Decent chance they are running windows 10 or 11 and running some web browser app for getting and displaying whatever its supposed to. Thats probably several levels of isolation for something thats already trusted
With a nice user interface noone is going to ever be looking at unless something stops working
Significantly cheaper to develop at the expence of performance
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Even with graphics, you can simply compare the performance and colors of what you had back in the 90s with the bloated bullshit of today - the only exception being video, stuff today much better compressed with low quality loss. On the other hand, electron.
4k definition in screens below 16" is wasteful beyond belief.
Do they make less than 4k definition on 16" screens any more?
Elevators require constant input of where to go too though