buffington

Remember the olden days when BBSes were the closest thing to what we now call the Internet? I think it's safe to say that proportionally speaking, file sharing was just as huge back then as it is today, but arguably there were better systems in place to make sense of all the sharing.

For example, on the BBS I ran in 1991, people would upload interesting free and shareware apps, mostly for DOS, and the BBS software would extract a file from the zipped upload called the FILE_ID.DIZ file. This file contained a semi structured description of the application and its size, and sometimes categorical information.

This little bit of meta data was super valuable, especially when we didn't have software sophisticated enough to do text searches of our hard drives in split seconds. Most importantly it helped you make sense what everything was in a pile of thousands of files.

My now ancient BBS was a sophisticated and efficient small town librarian, and my now modern machine is a consumption-driven adult child with a trust fund, a 20,000 square foot home, and a real-time-supply of everything possible pumping into every square inch of space.

It's 2007 and I have Spotlight in OS X. I have a Quad Core 3.0Ghz 64bit Xeon machine with a 1.5TB striped RAID, each drive with 16MB of buffer cache, capable of transferring files at 300MB/second. Compared to the machine I owned in 1991, a 386-33Mhz with an 85MB hard drive, my current machine is essentially 45,000 times faster¹ than the then top of the line machine.

Yet I find myself staring at a Finder window with a mere 147 files in a folder called Downloads and I don't have a clue as to what half the apps are or do. The only way I can find out is by opening them up and trying them out.

Surely there must be some sort of solution for this problem that I'm unaware of. I'm tempted to write a web based front end that let's me add a FILE_ID.DIZ file to each downloaded app and just relive the good old days of asking the librarian what's new, and could she please find me that one app that does this one thing.

¹ Reportedly, the 386-33Mhz tested between the 0.5 and 0.7 MFLOPS range. This data is hard to find these days, so I've erred on the side of caution and given it an entire 1.0 MFLOPS. MFLOPS (M for mega, or one-thousand, Floating Point Operations per Second) are a common way of determining how fast a computer's processor can go.

Using an app called Power Fractals, I determined that my Mac Pro can do 45340 floating point operations per second. That's a lot faster than I expected. To put it into perspective, in 1991 the fastest single super computer you could get might have been the Intel Paragon which could do about 75 MFLOPS with 4 processors. But it might not fit in my office, let alone under my desk. Building a 45340 MFLOPS Paragon system would require I own a dedicated data center larger than my garage.

MFLOPS aren't the only thing that makes a computer fast, but it's an easy number to work with. I'm guessing that a 45340 MFLOPS Paragon system running software written expressly for the Paragon would run circles around my Mac Pro. But I'd stake a lot on the fact that it can't run World of Warcraft, let alone World of Warcraft and Microsoft Excel at the same time.

Admittedly, I'm not sure if comparing one MFLOPS number to another means that one is x times faster than the other. If the scale is perfectly linear, then maybe I'm correct. But if it's like the Richter scale, all bets are off. It's safe to say though that the Mac Pro is without question so much faster than a 386-33 that the 386-33 might as well be a nice round chunk of basalt.