Spent my childhood optimizing CONFIG

[0ptimist@troet.cafe]

@fribbledom

[cchisholm@infosec.exchange]

@fribbledom Oh god, this is me.

[fribbledom@mastodon.social]

I've written about programming languages, compilers, open source, distributed systems...

The Fediverse's response:

"Tell us more about CONFIG.SYS and sock surveillance!"

Love it!

[dch@bsd.network]

@12thRITS @fribbledom I never get tired by seeing this. Brings back memories!

[morgan@leds.social]

@fribbledom

> Now one browser tab needs 2 GB of RAM so 17 analytics companies can find out I looked at socks.

deserves a no context tshirt.

[carboncatalyst@mastodon.social]

@fribbledom
Return to Windows ME

[llewelly@sauropods.win]

@fribbledom never fear. Now that AI has set a new precedent by forcing RAM prices to double every 6 months, soon the era of needing to optimize for minimal memory use will return!

[the_wub@mastodon.social]

@mathew @fribbledom Wear them with pride!

[llewelly@sauropods.win]

@fribbledom you know the old saying. An army lives on its feet blogs. Or something like that.

[llewelly@sauropods.win]

@SunDancer @fribbledom
ironically, most of the games would immediately run some code that was functionally speaking "hey fuck DOS and 8-bit real 8086 mode, we're running our own custom special purpose 32 bit protected mode operating system, just so we can use that honkin 4 megabytes of RAM! "

[martin_ueding@bonn.social]

@wolf480pl @patterfloof @fribbledom
I got a work laptop with 64 GB of RAM such that I can run VS Code, Slack, Obsidian, Spotify and Zotero (all Electron apps which ship their own copy of Chromium engine).

I am kind of happy that RAM got expensive again such that programmers might actually start to value it again …

[martin_ueding@bonn.social]

@fribbledom
I used to have 256 MB of RAM in the 64 MB era and it was luxurious. Now I have 16 GB in my personal laptop and I sometimes consider upgrading to 32 GB to fit all the browser tabs in there …

[wolf480pl@mstdn.io]

@martin_ueding @patterfloof @fribbledom
you do realize this can be read as a "fuck you, got mine"?

I would appreciate if programmers and product managers started caring more about resource usage.

I'd also appreciate a job where I get to spend a significant portion of my time optimizing code.

But I'm not seeing any of these happen yet, and I'm not holding my breath.

[rk@mastodon.well.com]

@fribbledom

…*frantically increases BUFFERS=*

[hyperpac@mastodon.social]

@fribbledom To be fair - optimizing config.sys and autoexec.bat wasn‘t so much fun back in the days either. It was more a pain in the a** when your favourite game just wouldn‘t run. @bijram

[raptor@infosec.exchange]

@fribbledom @buherator accurate

[arem@mstdn.ca]

@fribbledom It felt easy most of the time. If a program needed 640K, I could skip most of the startup. For protected mode, I could skip everything, just load the mouse driver, and it ran well.

It became harder with later computers, simply because the Bios was starting to become larger, but by then Dos was starting to be replaced.

[hierkiosk@social.tchncs.de]

@benofbrown This happend to me, too. Probably it was still in recycle bin, but I never got the computer running again, had no-one to help me with that. @fribbledom

[xohvotoc@chaos.social]

@fribbledom
The names of the files are the reason I like to listen to 'MASTER BOOT RECORD'

https://masterbootrecord.bandcamp.com/album/c-chkdsk-f

[jeffgrigg@mastodon.social]

@martin_ueding @wolf480pl @patterfloof @fribbledom

@fribbledom

I was just compiling two copies of the business application I'm working on (policy management in insurance), in two IDE instances. It sent my 64 GB of RAM machine into thrashing.

NO, I was NOT running Outlook nor browsers nor much of anything else at the time!