I have to scan a bunch of lineart images today. Scan! With a scanner! I had forgotten how much time that takes. Wonder what I did during such tasks when there was no internet. Things have really become fast during the last decades. Or have I become that impatient?
Do you remember the times when compiling a program meant “go for a coffee break”?
a few where it was “Take the rest of the day off” 
One written on CodeWarrior that on a PowerMac 7100 would take all night to compile
We wont talk about the even slower days of the older Quadra’s
And a couple operations on a pretty beefy Sun server that was “take the weekend off” as it took 36 hours to run and consumed 100% of the 6 CPU’s it had
Fun Fun Fun
These young whipper-snappers have no idea what the rest of us endured in order for them to have the utopia that exists today 
heh
anything more than 5 minutes now is far too slow
Oh scanner! I didn’t look into scanners for up until recently. Folks in our organization wanted to archive news articles, letters, contracts and so on. And I thought: Oh my, scanning is slow and cumbersome. (Which for hirez, large scale pictures may still be the case).
But for our application I found the Canon dr-c225 document scanner, which scans front and back at the same time, up to 1 page per second, and it can send the scanned document directly to our archive app. For about US$480.-
Now we use them all the time, because it is working rapidly and easy to handle.
In short: some things ARE better than in the old days.
Back in college I did a conversion of the NEC (Numerical Electromagnetics Code) from whatever its main platform was at the time (Fortran on Unix I think) to Fortran on a Harris main frame. The Harris main frame was one our antenna lab had available to us without issue (this was back in the days when you paid real money for CPU time). The thing was so slow, it took all weekend to compile if I remember right. And it took multiple days to run an antenna simulation.
Today’s systems could probably do the same simulation in about 30 seconds…
and only if it took you 29 seconds to realized it had already completed. 
pfff A4 document scanners are something for pussies… I still remember my 300dpi, 256 greyscale hand-held scanner back in the age of Windows 3.1… this is something for real men… you have to do the job all by your own 
At the risk of being the fourth yorkshireman, I had an attachment that clipped to the head of a printer and scanned paper 1/8inch at a time…
When the head reversed direction at the end of the row, it used to knock the pixels out of alignment and Id have to twiddle odd rows by hand to get the image right.
I don’t miss that…
I actually didn’t mind too much when a compile took a long time; it gave me time to relax and, depending on the time of day, have a coffee or a beer. There was always the adrenaline rush of now knowing whether or not the compile or the resulting code would work.
On the other hand, I really hated waiting for the scanner. I sold my scanner the day after I got my first smart phone. I now use the camera to take a picture of whatever page(s) I need scanned, Dropbox it to my computer, OCR it if necessary, and, voila, done.
I remember the old technologies. I’m glad we’re past them now!
You probably didn’t mean it the way it sounds …
:-p
MPW anyone? Or MacsBug?
Remember using MPW to build a quite large app on a Power Mac 7200. Just 5 hours to compile.
MPW - Then CodeWarrior
And MacsBug
MPW’s Virtual user was perhaps the most useful bit ever http://www.mactech.com/articles/mactech/Vol.12/12.09/UsingVirtualUser/index.html
I still have 2 decent scanners and they do a much nicer job than my phones or iPads esp when set to scan at a decently high rez (1200+ DPI)
I’m just posting to bring the median age of this thread down a little
LOL… oops… I guess my post just negated the effect your post had on the average
There were the times in school when developing Pascal for the first times. The compiler compiled line by line. You could see a dot for each line, which took about 1 second per line. But then we only fooled around with bubble sort and similar.
I can’t even recall the name of the mini at the Paris American Center back in 82 or so that Apple users connected to in an early French version of a service like Compuserve or Bix. What I clearly remember is spending a whole afternoon changing a couple lines in Pascal on it, and having to wait some four hours for the compile. Even the display of prompts was slow.
In my university years, the computer sciences faculty of the TU Berlin offered a Norsk Data mainframe. The only way to work with it was to apply for a night shift license so you’d have a chance that not all of the 16 terminals were being used the 68000 CPU had a very hard time otherwise compiling the Pascal programs we were writing. Very much like what Beatrix remembers.
Oh, and my school started its informatics lessons with 2 or 3 Triumph Adler personal computers, a company before (and after) only known for building typewriters. You had to boot them from a floppy disk, and surely some of the very early nerds figured out how to create an endless boot loop on them
When I finally finish downloading this 200k image of a lawn on my 300 baud Mighty Mo Modem, I will repost it here so I can ask you to get off of it!