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| Authored by: Wol on Monday, June 11 2012 @ 03:08 PM EDT |
But that's just compression. And it's old hat. And it dates from the days when
computer memory was measured in kilobytes, and often fractions of that to boot!
My specialty, Pick (dates from the sixties). It treated the disk as virtual
memory so as far as the system was concerned everything was stored in RAM. The
system might physically have a 5Mb hard disk, so Pick just ran in 5Mb of virtual
ram. (Yes I know 5Mb is 80s PC hardware - I don't know how big early 70s disks
were.)
But again, as people keep pointing out, all of those techniques are software,
therefor they're maths, therefor they can't be patented. What was that I said
about linux (the kernel that is) having a shim between it and the real hardware
to convert the real hardware into idealised hardware to make the whole thing
more efficient? Pick was doing that in the sixties! as were probably plenty of
other systems.
I repeat. It's maths. It's not patentable. And even if it were, it's obvious and
it's old hat.
Cheers,
Wol[ Reply to This | Parent | # ]
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| Authored by: mnhou on Monday, June 11 2012 @ 03:15 PM EDT |
| That's a bit of 'horse behind the cart' logic. The hardware
is always a
limiting factor, the software is just programmed
to fit with in the currently
know limitations at the time.
From your own experience with an Apple ][+ 32k
of memory,
512K seemed like a vast ocean. Yet Apple ][ programs were
written
to it's form factor and did things that the IBM PC
took years to catch up to,
even with it's greater hardware
capacity. We never asked (much) more of that 1
MHz 6502 and
32k then what could be expected. To do so meant a poorly
performing program.
Remember when spreadsheet programs used to display the
message "Please Wait" while calculating the cell values, and
then only after
manually requesting the calculate because
the machine was too slow to
automatically do the calcs? And
then a little later, as the machines got
faster, auto-calc
could be toggled on or off, but the program would still
display the "Please Wait" message while it worked through
the spreadsheet?
Nothing particular was done to cleverly
speed up the spreadsheet program, it
just ran a fast as it
could given the limitations of the hardware. Today,
machines
are fast enough to run all calculations in "realtime" with
nary a
"wait" to be seen. Are the basic calculations any
different from before? No,
(except for bloat and hidden
Easter eggs) 1+1 is still 2, the HW is just that
much
faster. (I do often wonder if somewhere, buried in the code
of Excel is a
lost "Please Wait" just waiting for it's day
to shine again.) [ Reply to This | Parent | # ]
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