@nprofile1q... Well, we called issues in computing "bugs" because literally back in the days of analog computing bugs would get into the systems and cause sporadic shorts and stuff.

So I guess for bug-sized computing it would have to be something tiny. Maybe fungal spores or bacteria or something? Oh there's a fungus in your program! Did you get all the bacteria out yet?

@nprofile1q... Alright, I think I see what you're saying. I honestly feel like that's not what they were trying to do (bear in mind the time frame in which it came out) but I'll be the first to admit I'm not really in a position to know for sure.

@nprofile1q... Propaganda? Are we talking about the same show? The main character spends an awful lot of time directly stating that they're getting kids killed for nothing. Unless I guess you mean like a reverse kneejerk counter-reaction to just him saying it too much or something?

@nprofile1q... Just curious, but do you know about the show M.A.S.H.? (I have to ask because it stopped airing before most of us were born, lol.)

It's mostly comedy (with a few serious moments mixed in once in a while) and it's from the doctors' point of view, so you don' actually get the stuff you're really looking for there, but it does give an interesting perspective on at least some things perhaps.

Or perhaps not. Obviously it was meant to be taken with a grain of salt then and now.

@nprofile1q... You may have something very wrong in your setup... It should not be a mere 3MB/s in even the worst cases.

I could respond with my own anecdote that I've never observed it that slow in any test I've ever done since I even knew how to actually check, but I think a more reasonable fact is that it simply wouldn't be viable for real life use at such a speed.

It really wasn't that long ago that we used harddrives still. At least most of us. I know there were some who switched to SSDs way back, but for most of us it hasn't been that long. Plenty of us at least had to have things like games/etc on harddrives even if we could afford a small SSD for the OS.

3MB/s could work in the DOS days, but I assure you it wouldn't have worked in the Windows XP days.

@nprofile1q... (And don't get me wrong, even 90MB/s is going to take a long time to fill 16GB, but what does that? Games typically use less than 8GB at a time in actual practice, loading and unloading bits as they go and many can start up with a whole lot less than that. The OS needs less than one gigabyte to get started — even Windows as crappy as it is — plus Microsoft is trying to cheat now by not doing proper shutdowns, but instead doing a hibernate (which does store a lot of data from RAM, but it's a file created by the OS optimized as well as it can to avoid fragmentation.)

@nprofile1q... I think you're missing a digit... I understand when you say random access you mean accounting for seek latency assuming it has to do a lot of seeking, but I don't think even the slowest harddrives are less than 30MB/s assuming you're running a semi-vaguely-modern-ish-ish-ish OS (or smartdrv if you're in dos.) I mean unless you manually rig it so that every single sector of a file is spread all the way across the drive from each other sector or something, but you basically would have to do this on purpose... Even if you never defrag it is almost impossible to reach that stage.

These days it's not unusual to get 60 or sometimes even 90MB/s from a good quality harddrive under normal conditions.

Also games usually package data which can make seeking and caching work better

@nprofile1q... I'm... I'm going to have to ask anyway...

What even the

@nprofile1q... I think the key here is that it was available to everyone. Technically earlier things like the SatellaView existed on other consoles but just weren't as available (eg that was Japan only.) I hear BS Zelda was pretty fun to play though.

Ironically for me, by the time I got a Dreamcast I needed an ethernet adapter instead and couldn't use a modem. 😆 They really caught things kind of wrong timing-wise. I feel like that was perpetually what happened to Sega hardware-wise. Always caught in the middle, too early for the advanced tech that ultimately took over a generation, but too late to blow away the previous generation.

@nprofile1q...

(albeit at a sky-high price)

Again you answer yourself...

Also OLEDs degrade apparently?

But yeah, people generally like how CRTs look don't they?

@nprofile1q... To get the perceived visual quality of phosphors in a display. Like I said, it was about finding a "best of both worlds" point.

@nprofile1q... Yes, I had in mind exactly what you just described to answer your own question.

They wouldn't have to have the quality and detail of good screen LEDs in themselves. If it's subpixel level, then all they need is simple monochromatic levels. That's why it struck me LCDs could also work as long as there is no bleedthrough. Each individual one would be monochromatic.