[openbeos] Re: Support for Ancient Computers?

I read the exchange on this topic the other day.
Modern OSs are quite amazingly bloated, by that I don't mean they have too many features, I mean they are slow and take up vast amounts of RAM. Each generation it gets worse, yet they are not doing a great deal more than they did before, modern software is quite amazingly inefficient. They do more but sure as hell not enough to require 10X the memory and 10X the CPU power.
I've always seen the relatively light memory and power usage of BeOS as a *good* thing. Such low resource consumption also means Haiku is open to usage in embedded systems and low end computing devices, e.g. Via machines or even the Efika.
If you have an OS which can run on systems with limited power and limited memory it's going to run a whole lot faster on modern PCs. I have a 150MHz Cyrix PC with a S3 Virge graphics card and BeOS runs pretty respectably on it, it goes like a bat out of hell on the 800Mhz Athlon with 1st gen Radeon.
Supporting older (or maybe lower end) systems also give you insurance against a problem nobody seems to have noticed yet - CPUs are not getting faster any more, everyone think their rate of improvement is slowing down, what's actually happening is quad core processors run serial code *slower* than dual or singe core chips. This is not likely to change, in fact it'll get a lot worse as core numbers increase. Before you may say BeOS is multithreaded look up "Amdahl's law" - multithreaded software only runs as fast as the slowest serial part. 


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On the topic of bandwidth usage:
Yesterday the broadband here died and I had to use dial up, It must have taken 5 minutes just to download my email (even more annoying is the fact it's mostly spam!). 


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Nicholas Blachford
www.ps3coderz.com
www.blachford.info
"Do not fear death, fear having not lived."

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