For the techies - What's Happening Here!

I reckon I'm from the same generation as the kids in the pic. I remember being a school kid in the days of the BBC B. I'm now (and have been for years) a software developer.

I remember the awe that came with those 'primitive' computers. Before MS Windows and when data was stored on 5.25 inch floppies that had enough storage capacity to hold your name and not much more (ok, I exaggerate).

Ah yes, righting basic programs where you had to think carefully about how you did stuff, because you only had about 32k to work with, and about 8k of that was reserved for things like the screen display and other system functions, and the CPU you had to run it all on ran at about 2MHz so anything complex had to be so carefully written with efficiency in mind, otherwise it just wouldn't work.

How times have changed. Now we have quad core 64 bit processors running at over 2GHz, at least 2GB RAM and hard disks running into terabytes. Operating systems and development frameworks that take all the leg work out of things.

Back in 1986, the computers we have nowadays would have been the stuff of science fiction. Powerful beyond imagination. Yet what happens? They get bloated with tonnes of superfluous rubbish, and end up running so many concurrent processes that when it comes to actually using them, half the time their barely more responsive than the old machines, and the other half the time their out of action while we run virus scans, disk defrags, or the old 'turn it off and on again' when its started to misbehave for absolutely no discernable reason.