http://www.nakedcapitalism.com/2007/10/20-years-of-pcs-and-what-do-we-have-to.html Mon, 23 Nov 2009 02:08:55 -0500 http://wordpress.org/?v=2.8.4 hourly 1 http://www.nakedcapitalism.com/2007/10/20-years-of-pcs-and-what-do-we-have-to.html#comment-1056 Anonymous Mon, 15 Oct 2007 05:38:00 +0000 http://www.nakedcapitalism.com/2007/10/20-years-of-pcs-and-what-do-we-have-to-show-for-it/#comment-1056 The article and your comments ring true. However, not all applications have bloated to eliminate the speed advance. I download on a daily basis data for all US traded stock options. The file is zipped and comprises one large file with 280,000 rows by 27 data points. This file is way too large to load into Excel and would require Microsoft Access to even see the data which would take almost one minute to even load on my machine. Instead, I retaught myself Microsoft Basic which can now, when running in a Windows Command box, access larger amounts of memory. I read the entire file, sort it by ticker symbols, collect the latest option data for each stock ticker, and load and update individual files for each of the 2500 stocks which have listed options. Entire time: 6 minutes. Microsoft Basic has not advanced much since 1980 but this program when running on a 1980 (or 1985) machine would have taken all day. It is astounding to me the number of data points that can be manipulated on present technology hardware - the present day software is indeed bloated and slow. The article and your comments ring true. However, not all applications have bloated to eliminate the speed advance. I download on a daily basis data for all US traded stock options. The file is zipped and comprises one large file with 280,000 rows by 27 data points. This file is way too large to load into Excel and would require Microsoft Access to even see the data which would take almost one minute to even load on my machine. Instead, I retaught myself Microsoft Basic which can now, when running in a Windows Command box, access larger amounts of memory. I read the entire file, sort it by ticker symbols, collect the latest option data for each stock ticker, and load and update individual files for each of the 2500 stocks which have listed options. Entire time: 6 minutes. Microsoft Basic has not advanced much since 1980 but this program when running on a 1980 (or 1985) machine would have taken all day. It is astounding to me the number of data points that can be manipulated on present technology hardware – the present day software is indeed bloated and slow.

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