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by dlcarrier6 hours ago |
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upvoteby kelnos7 minutes ago|
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I wouldn't call that bloat; certainly we've been complaining about software bloat as long as I've been into computers, but at that time, software was simply pushing the capabilities of the hardware, and often running into walls.

These days, we value developer productivity over performance optimization, so we have stuff like Electron apps. The reason behind it is that CPUs (and RAM quantity, for the most part) are so far ahead of regular desktop applications that it doesn't matter. In the 80s and 90s, the hardware could barely keep up with decently-optimized software that wanted to do anything interesting.

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upvoteby steve19776 hours ago|
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> That's my point, the software was getting bloated at least as fast as the CPUs were getting faster

I think there's a difference between bloat and actually useful features or performance.

For example, I started making music with computers in the early 90s. They were only powerful enough to control external equipment like synthesizers.

Nowadays, I can do everything I could do with all that equipment on an iPad! I would not call that bloat.

On the other hand, comparing MS Teams to say ICQ, yeah, a lot of that is bloat.

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upvoteby myself2486 hours ago|
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> in the early 90s. They were only powerful enough to control external equipment like synthesizers.

Tell that to ScreamTracker!

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upvoteby prmoustache5 hours ago|
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Screamtracker was sampling. Great for the days and much more accesible for the teenager I was than buying and controlling synths but that was not exactly same. More a competition to the early akai MPCs.

And we were mostly ripping those samples from records on cassettes and CDs, or other mods.

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upvoteby steve19773 hours ago|
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Well now that you mention that, my very first steps actually were with Soundmonitor on a C64, one of the OG trackers probably (even though not called tracker yet IIRC). I kind of forgot about that, as that was still very amateurish (I mean what I made with it, not the software).

https://www.c64-wiki.de/images/f/f1/rockmon3.png

Or also at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=roBkg-iPrbw&t=400s in the video already linked below. And yes, I had to type in that listing.

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upvoteby jstanley5 hours ago|
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There is definitely bloat. A few months ago I was messing about with making a QWERTY piano in a web page, and it was utterly unplayable due to the bloat-induced latency in between the fingers and the ears.
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