this post was submitted on 09 Mar 2024
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Early electronics are fascinating. The amount of power we were getting out of devices back in the day is crazy. Like this comment probably takes up more memory than Adventure on the Atari 2600.
I wonder what we could pull off now if people tried to squeeze every ounce of power out of modern day equipment?
We still do optimize software today, it's just that there's a cap to how much computing you can really need for stuff like flying through space.
The most impressive optimized software things we do now tends towards the more abstract, or banal in modern views.
Calculating the most efficient route to launch a spacecraft to slingshot off a bunch of different planets takes more computation than actually flying or controlling the spacecraft.
We can also model every particle involved in a nuclear detonation to optimize blast yields, which is how we optimize lethality while reducing the number of warheads.
Video games are also typically pretty optimized at their core, it just tends to be overshadowed by being "boring" uses.
Agreed. I used to follow a mod group and the optimizations they used to pull off on 8086 is ridiculous. Nowadays an embedded browser app takes up 5gb on my phone. Wtf.