Den OdellFeb 23

The first Mac OS fitted in a 64kB ROM. That hard limit didn't hold back innovation, it demanded it.

The engineers who worked within those limits knew their platform completely. We've lost some of that thinking, the knowledge of our foundations.

I wrote more here:
https://denodell.com/blog/constraints-and-the-lost-art-of-optimization?utm_source=mastodon&utm_medium=social&utm_campaign=constraints_post

Constraints and the Lost Art of Optimization

How working within hard limits produced some of the most elegant software in history, and what we can learn from it.

Den Odell
Show thread[email protected]
@denodell Nowadays I try to constrain myself a bit by running my stuff on a 16GB RAM M1. For work I have a 64GB i7 with 28 cores... which seems to run glacial a lot of the time. Which I think is weird...
Feb 25 at 8:12pmIvory for Mac
Show threadDen OdellFeb 25
@ruurd Great points. And I didn't meant to denigrate today's developers, we're dealing with challenges that are different but by no means harder or easier than back then. Just for example, the first Mac OS was monochrome and had its screen built in- nowadays we need to support any type of display device in any configuration and in any color range.
Funnily enough my work machine is also maxed out and yet also runs slow sometimes, so hey ho! :)
Show thread[email protected]Feb 26

@denodell I tried not to blame you for that outright. Working on making my Dutch directness a little softer :-)

Do I remember correctly that newer color Macintoshes had a much bigger ROM in order to accommodate ColorQuickDraw routines? OTOH that is logical since the static assets also must be bigger...

Work Mac or (like me) work Windows laptop?

Show threadDen OdellFeb 26

@ruurd hehe it’s all good. Color QuickDraw in the Macintosh II was quite ambitious and supported 16.7 million colors! It needed four times the ROM though, at 256KB!

I’m on a Mac all the time, but use Parallels when I need to get into Windows!