developerWorks: The Cranky User: Performance Anxiety

“About 10 years ago I remember people complaining that Microsoft
Word was too slow on the Mac. You could type faster than the
processor handled input on such a large application. Imagine my
disappointment when I recently discovered that the same thing still
holds true. Similarly, my first computer with a hard drive loaded a
small command-line utility in under a second and a large graphics
program in perhaps half a minute. Those are good specs, but isn’t
it kind of sad that they haven’t changed much in the past 15
years?

“So the question is, where is all the CPU power going? How is it
possible that a machine with a full gigabyte of memory can run out
of room to run applications just as quickly as a machine with six
megabytes of memory did 15 years ago? In this month’s The cranky
user, I’ll get to the bottom of this big mystery. But first, I want
to revisit an old adage and see where it stands today…”

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