Back in the day of me buying a 486 PC for my college days, I remember thumbing through Computer Shopper. Somewhere in those days someone took the cache memory for processors and made a whole computer memory out of them. It was a lot more expensive!
But since those days and with the massive growth in silicon for L2/L3 caches of modern processors, I reflect on those days of operating systems and wonder "what if we could fit our OS and its apps in cache"?
Old Windows 3.1 or MS-DOS was not a pleasant experience compared to modern operating systems, almost no one can deny that. But NeXTSTEP? The color variants that came out after NeXT gave up on its black and white cubes... that is basically a modern UI, and arguably better than modern Linux GUIs.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TIrTh80Z8jw
Old NeXT cubes ran on 16-64 megabytes of RAM and 25-33 megahertz of CPU, and 400 MB to 1 GB of disk. I can't find good numbers on the color variant that ran on x86, but I think our machines at college ran that very nicely on about 32 megabytes of RAM.
The prime curve of Moore's Law has produced quite the hardware bounty. Old timers like me bemoan a seemingly bloated software layer that has grown over the decades. The current Ryzen processors boast 80 megabytes of cache, and of course RAM is dollars a gigabyte, and SSD storage is getting reasonable.
Holy crap, NeXT would run entirely in cache. OK, swap might start getting into RAM. Modern RAM comes in the tens of gigabytes, much bigger than the hard disk on those machines. It basically looks like a modern OS, with a bit less aliasing on the fonts and icons. Productivity app set is practically identical. It had TCPIP networking, an HTML 1.0 web browser, spreadsheets, mail, etc.
With the end of big leaps from Moore's Law, if we want more performance, we'll need to optimize the software stack. I think a really cool project would be to start with the basis of NeXTStEP circa 1995-1997 and very carefully add in only what is needed. I remember the Mach kernel being buggy, but that can be swapped out.
But since those days and with the massive growth in silicon for L2/L3 caches of modern processors, I reflect on those days of operating systems and wonder "what if we could fit our OS and its apps in cache"?
Old Windows 3.1 or MS-DOS was not a pleasant experience compared to modern operating systems, almost no one can deny that. But NeXTSTEP? The color variants that came out after NeXT gave up on its black and white cubes... that is basically a modern UI, and arguably better than modern Linux GUIs.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TIrTh80Z8jw
Old NeXT cubes ran on 16-64 megabytes of RAM and 25-33 megahertz of CPU, and 400 MB to 1 GB of disk. I can't find good numbers on the color variant that ran on x86, but I think our machines at college ran that very nicely on about 32 megabytes of RAM.
The prime curve of Moore's Law has produced quite the hardware bounty. Old timers like me bemoan a seemingly bloated software layer that has grown over the decades. The current Ryzen processors boast 80 megabytes of cache, and of course RAM is dollars a gigabyte, and SSD storage is getting reasonable.
Holy crap, NeXT would run entirely in cache. OK, swap might start getting into RAM. Modern RAM comes in the tens of gigabytes, much bigger than the hard disk on those machines. It basically looks like a modern OS, with a bit less aliasing on the fonts and icons. Productivity app set is practically identical. It had TCPIP networking, an HTML 1.0 web browser, spreadsheets, mail, etc.
With the end of big leaps from Moore's Law, if we want more performance, we'll need to optimize the software stack. I think a really cool project would be to start with the basis of NeXTStEP circa 1995-1997 and very carefully add in only what is needed. I remember the Mach kernel being buggy, but that can be swapped out.
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