You could get by fine on such a machine, so long as you were writing software for about 1993. But writing software for 2011? My source tree would just about fit on a disk that could be connected to such a machine, but it would take eons of page swapping to compile with 8MB of RAM.
Software does a lot more stuff these days, with richer media, more layers of abstraction and more reuse of code. We mock Iris as a poor knockoff of Siri, but the thing has text-to-speech and speech-to-text linked in to it, and was put together in 8 hours! Try doing that on your 486/33, with the tools of the era. You'd be lucky to have a sound card (MPC was a standard to encourage OEMs of the time to include them, along with a CD drive, if you recall) and a color console I/O library, much less a network connection good enough for cloud speech recognition.
My point? People today are forever bitching about how little we've progressed, how software development is still the same, but I can't agree. I remember what software development used to be like. It was great in that everything was small enough to be fully understandable, but that's all that was great about it - otherwise it sucked, deeply.
150% agree. I have a Pentium III class machine we still use to run our company email. It's been rock solid for so long, there has never been a need to upgrade it. Should the hardware finally fail, we have a few spares kicking around on stand-by and a build script that builds the software and an rsynced version of the mailbox store (cyrus IMAP). I guess, just another data point to your point.
Comments like this make me wish I could occasionally grant more than a +1 upvote ...
It's so true. Sometimes we need more power to make a given job possible, but as often as not we could accomplish it with far less and all that throwing extra hardware at a software problem achieves is to allow sloppy coding to proliferate.
>Upgrading is an investment in both time and funds, both can be spent better if you are already able to do what you want to do.
You are operating under the assumption that the usual way of dealing with technology is that you have some goal, and then you search for the right tool to achieve that goal. I disagree with that assumption. Most of the times you don't know that you want a specific functionality until the technology comes that implements it. Then you realize that you wanted it 'all along.' You are shaped by your environment more than you shape it.
Your time is indeed better spent doing things other than upgrading, the reason being that the software business just hasn't been able to keep up with the advances in hardware. Even though we have so much computational power available to us, we still haven't learned how to handle complexity and make more interesting, flexible interfaces. There can be innovation in document publishing software, even though we haven't seen any for such a long time. And when that innovation comes, I'm sure you will start wanting features from your word processor that you couldn't even imagine were possible.
"I haven’t bought an app for about a year. Neither hardware nor software excite me very much, after whatever brief (and usually painful) novelty has worn off."
It's probably because I'm so immersed in tech stuff at work, but it's hard for me to understand how such an imaginative science fiction author can be so... indifferent about the technology he uses.
If you're a novelist your career doesn't usually start rolling until you're in your mid-thirties. (You need life experience before you can depict characters folks want to read about.) Neophilia for its own sake usually wears off some time in the forties, even among many geeks. Moreover, if your job involves spinning text, just about any computer built in the past two decades will do the job.
(I know one award-winning SF novelist who uses an obscure British word processor, originally for CP/M and MS-DOS, now supported as a hobby project by one of the former developers -- the company is long since bust. Their SO has a hell of a job keeping them supplied with either 20 year old Compaq 386 lunchboxen or Linux boxes tailored to run DOSBox full-screen on the console without pestering them to do annoying GUI things every few days. This novelist is younger than I am.)
Gibson has repeatedly displayed a fascination with style and fashion and design language, rather than with random agglomerative collections of features bolted together into a Frankensteinian morass by a bored marketing committee. Given how Apple is oriented around design and the humanities, I find it very unsurprising that he'd be working on a Macbook Pro ...
Would love to have you do a usesthis as well - the more obscure stuff is especially fascinating as it usually carries a much better story than just "I'm using the newest Macbook Pro and I got 8GB of RAM."
Let's skip lightly past the colo server running Debian that I keep the blog on. I'm mostly a Mac shop. On my desk right now is an older 23" Apple Cinema display, being driven by an October 2010 13" Macbook Air (4Gb/250Gb SSD, OS: 10.7.2). Next to me is an iPad 2/64Gb and a 3 mifi, with a ZaggMate cover/keyboard. And there's an iPhone 4 that ain't going to be upgraded until it's at least 24 months old (next summer).
Pretty dull, huh?
(There are also hordes of eccentric items around here, such as the Viliv N5 palmtop -- currently running Win7 as I don't have the energy to battle a GMA500 chipset into cooperating with Linux right now -- but let's not get into lesser-used territory.)
- Thunderbird (mostly using gmail as an IMAP/SMTP/SSL server)
- BBedit (what can I say -- it's prettier to stare at than MacVim, and seems to support MultiMarkDown better)
- Apple Pages (I loath MS Office 2010's ribbon with a cold and fiery passion because it eats vertical screen real estate; Pages is "good enough" for layout and final markup)
- Scrivener (because when I write myself into a corner and need to refactor the deep structure of a book, Scrivener makes life a lot easier)
- NeoOffice/OpenOffice/LibreOffice (because sometimes I need something that can handle MS Office documents better than Pages)
- Calibre (ebook management software)
- NetNewsWire (this may change soon)
- SplashID (because we all need unique passwords for each website, right?)
- MacPorts
- iTerm (and Go2Shell)
...
I think that about covers it. I really don't game much, if at all (it interferes with work to have attractive nuisances on my computers).
Dream rig:
(This is going to strike you as deeply sad)
Start with a build-to-order Macbook Air 11", 4Gb RAM/128Gb SSD. Add the 1.8GHz i7 CPU bump. Don't bother with the 256Gb SSD from Apple because we are going to replace the stock SSD with a 3G OWC Mercury Aura Pro Express sized in 480Gb. Finally add a 27" Apple Thunderbolt Display for when it's sitting on my desk.
Underpowered? Sure. But it's tremendously portable, and I'm on the road for 8-12 weeks of the year. Two wires to connect, and I have a decent desktop system. Unconnect, and I have a nice 1Kg notebook.
The reason I don't have this dream rig right now is that I have the last generation, and I'm not quite enough of a sucker to upgrade every time Apple crack the whip, thanks. Maybe next year.
Awesome cstross - thanks for taking time to answer the question - I like the idea behind the MacBook Air with the 480 GB upgrade and may have to look into that myself. I just got an iPhone 4S and it surprises me how close it feels to being eligible to be my only computing device - in a few years I can imagine sitting down next to my computer and just having the Apple Wireless Thunderbolt display connect to it and have my entire computer ready to go (I'd go through the trouble of plugging in a cable if necessary :)
This line really caught my eye: "(because when I write myself into a corner and need to refactor the deep structure of a book, Scrivener makes life a lot easier)" I've heard of Scrivener being used by writers for this purpose, but do you think it would work well for programmers? I'm struggling right now like I've written myself into a corner and notes/diagrams aren't really helping as much as I'd like.
Scrivener is really tuned for slicing and dicing prose. You _could_ use it for code, just as you _could_ use MS Word as your IDE. But it would probably be a bad idea.
Sorry for the ambiguity - I guess I'm looking for a better domain modeling tool, not IDE. I'm aware of UML but always looking if there are interesting tools from other trades that might apply to programming/modeling...
Aha! -> loathe! (I think?) Correcting you on the off chance I am actually correct and can then check off "corrected the grammar of a professional author" on my bucket list...
In my defense, I recently bought The Hidden Family and The Clan Corporate during Border's clearance sale, so I feel I'm entitled to this rude behavior as a paying customer.
Office 11: Well, giving money to the Beast of Redmond goes against the grain a little, and in any event publishing tends to run on Office 97/2000/2003 .doc files, not .docx. Publishing is conservative for structural reasons. (I'd rather hand in markdown files or even LaTeX or similar, but unfortunately they've standardized on Office documents, dammit. Because "that's what everyone uses".)
The 27" ... well, I upgraded my wife's side of the office to one earlier this year (pre-Thunderbolt) and there's a limit to the depth of my pockets. Besides which, my desk is already dwarfed by the 23" panel (and said desk is an obscure 1970's Swedish designer item, not something I'm likely to replace in a hurry).
Backups: Time Capsule for on-site, 1Tb pocket hard disk for on the road, and Dropbox as a sync solution and if-all-else-burns-to-the-ground fallback.
Microsoft BizSpark (for your tech business, whatever) could get you free Microsoft products via MSDN, if you really wanted them.
My solution to big monitors and small desks is a VESA arm mount and either a wall/floor stand or a desk stand; give in to the monitor being bigger than the desk!
I don't think you can upgrade the SSD on an Air. My understanding is they are pulled apart and soldered to the MB in order to give the Air its awesome form factor.
Somebody, please correct me if I am wrong, because that is one of the primary things keeping me from an Air instead of a MacBook Pro.
Thanks for this. I knew first Gen could be updated, but didn't know the latest could be. This now makes my decision hard again: performance or weight? sigh
Performance v. weight with the Macbook Air is currently easy.
The real issue is battery life/screen size (on the move) v. weight.
The top end 13" and 11" Airbooks both upgrade via BTO to a dual core i7 clocked at 1.8GHz, with 4Gb of RAM/256Gb SSD. The difference is in screen size and battery life (the 13" model has more of both) and weight (the 11" wins here, by 300 grams).
If you're out of the office and working on the laptop a lot, or don't use an external monitor, I'd go for the 13" model (unless weight and the ability to work in very cramped spaces are an overriding priority).
If you're in the office a lot with laptop plugged into a desktop monitor, or if you don't do much work outside the office (just need the laptop to check email/web/social networks), then the 11" model wins.
But they seem to be a tie on performance, which makes life a little easier than when they first launched (the 11" was, even maxed out, slower than the 13").
My performance calculation is MacBook Pro 13" with 8gb RAM versus the 13" Air with 4gb. The 13" is a must for either, but the decision comes down to less swapping and more horsepower versus less weight.
I wonder how much impact SSDs have on swapping. I rarely need 8gb of active memory. I just can't stand waiting minutes for things to swap around right now.
Thanks for the info! One thing you should know: on all the Air models except for the first-gen, the SSD chips are part of the logic board, and therefore unable to be upgraded. As a user of OWC SSDs myself, this is a damn shame.
I'm still not sure if I'd do it for 256GB vs. 240GB or 480GB, but maybe, and the cost savings vs. Apple might make it worthwhile. Speed could be a plus too.
"obscure British word processor, originally for CP/M and MS-DOS, now supported as a hobby project by one of the former developers -- the company is long since bust."
Charlie, I'm racking my brains here. Ami Pro? Pipedream (no, that was Acorn Archimedes, and don't we wish Thatcher had supported that particular lame duck).
And how on earth does the revered author get the words out to publishers? OCR and an Olivetti might be easier...
Let's face it. A TRS-80 Model 100 in many ways is probably still the ideal portable writing machine. Only displays a couple lines at a time so you can't get too distracted with formatting and such. Rugged, full keyboard, 20+ hours of battery life, and reasonably easy to read even in full daylight. While I have migrated to an iPad 2 for many things, I sometimes wonder if that really represented an improvement...
I'm of the belief that William Gibson pretty much hates computers which is why he wrote so much about them. He doesn't write SF, he writes anti-SF. An SF author posits scientifically plausibe scenarios and shows his/her work. Gibson's novels about cyberspace and that relied extensively on handwaving, magical thinking, and "unseen, unknown threat" to develop their narratives.
This isn't negative. Gibson probably knows more about computers than you. Hint: Rather than look at technical details, he has always thought about computers from the most critical perspective: at the points where they interact with people.
Yes. Just simple tools and the writing. Canny, and aware of the demands of the industry (word: 'talks to publishers'). The page is small (word-count/ego) and to the point as well.
I would think that, as a Science Fiction writer, separating yourself from current technology as a whole would allow you to be more creative in how you perceive the world(s) you are creating.
Gibson fetishizes technology (apple products in particular) so much in his books that I'm surprised he's so blasé about the shiny new in real life. Weird.
Would it have been less boring if Gibson waxed for pages about weighing the new Lenovo laptops vs. the MacBook, or the merits of one word processor over another?
I think it's fairly fascinating to discover that the author of one of the most notable cyberpunk novels doesn't really care about technology. (In fact, that's kind of the feeling you get from Neuromancer. There's loads of amazing technology but nobody's really fawning over it. It's just there, and it's just used.)
Also, most modern software/hardware is not particularly exciting from a usefulness point of view. It is mostly the same stuff that has been around for ages in a slightly smaller package with a new coat of paint.
It really depends on the person and how they use that technology. People like I assume Gibson use tech as a means to an end, he hasn't bought a new app because he is comfortable with what he has and sees no need to try new things.
This is the same reason my mother had a hard time when she bought a new laptop with windows 7 on it, though surprisingly she really likes google chrome and tells everyone on a computer using internet explorer they should use chrome instead.
I guess the gist of what I am saying is that sometimes change can be to much for those who aren't the power user. I loved windows 7 on the RC and all the little improvements, the same with word and office 2007. I get excited about new OS releases and new programs and updates because I find them useful and it doesn't take me hours or weeks or months to become more productive because I live tech but others just don't have the time or desire to understand it.
I can't think of any famous lumberjacks for them to interview, but Hell, I'd read it. Even if it was on the order of "this axe, this chainsaw, and this old phone I can use while wearing workgloves", I'd learn a little.
Upgrading is an investment in both time and funds, both can be spent better if you are already able to do what you want to do.
Most of us could get through the day just fine on a 486/33 if we had to. In fact, we'd probably write better software if we did.