Item — HN Reader

It really wouldn't.

The entire point of this exercise is that it is tiny and blindingly fast.

Running it inside a bloated whole-system emulator, in a bloated failure-prone semi-interpreted language, inside a bloated failure-prone app like any modern web browser, is like proposing replacing a bicycle with a shipping container containing an exercise bike, with a VR headset, mounted on the back of a flatbed articulated truck.

Which has a broken gearbox and no tyres and can only scrape screaming and skidding along the road, enveloped in flames and smoke.

1 comments

Well, it does solve the problem of backup. Both softwares and hardwares had been and continue to be fragile; it will be a constant problem unless you ditch electronics and go with typewriters (which are indeed fine alternatives).

I hear this justification a lot.

It's not really true: it's generalising a simple point until it no longer holds.

Yes, all software is complex and fallible. But not all software is equal.

If you strip away half a dozen layers of indirection and translation, and replace gigs of code with hundreds of kilobytes of it, then there are dramatic differences. In performance, in reliability, in robustness, in maintainability, in safety.

WordPerfect for DOS, like all DOS apps, had to run in under 640 KB of usable memory -- 2/3 of a meg -- and it shared that with the OS. However, that OS went through 20 years of development and polishing and it was very solid at the end.

WordPerfect ran on about a dozen different OSes and CPUs, and as such it was very clean, exceptionally thoroughly tested and debugged software.

When you have a honed, polished single-function app -- a word processor and nothing else -- that runs in 200-300KB of memory, that can perform well on an 8MHz CPU, running on a 30-40KB OS that runs well on kit half that speed, and you run it on 21st century hardware, the result achieves a level of performance that is literally impossible with any 21st century OS with all its multitasking and multithreading and millions of lines of poorly-integrated code.