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Which is more complex - car or an operating system?

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MK14:

--- Quote from: Mr. Scram on June 02, 2020, 09:43:19 pm ---Why would you say the modern car appeared in the 90s? I'd have said the 30s perhaps, or 50s or early 60s. The 90s feels completely arbitrary as almost all the development back then was iterative.

--- End quote ---

Well, let's take it stage by stage.
1990 (approx) DOS = NOT windows like.
Early windows = Blocky graphics (in my opinion), and not very good or stable/useful.
So, around Windows95 (roughly 1995), it was somewhat useful/stable and good.

Cars. I took a modern day car, to mean many all around air-bags, computerised engine/auto-box management, lots of electronic/computer bits. Relatively reliable/efficient engine. Etc etc.
Hence 1995. A bit sooner, if you go for very expensive cars, and a bit later, for very cheap ones.

Mr. Scram:

--- Quote from: MK14 on June 02, 2020, 09:51:20 pm ---Well, let's take it stage by stage.
1990 (approx) DOS = NOT windows like.
Early windows = Blocky graphics (in my opinion), and not very good or stable/useful.
So, around Windows95 (roughly 1995), it was somewhat useful/stable and good.

Cars. I took a modern day car, to mean many all around air-bags, computerised engine/auto-box management, lots of electronic/computer bits. Relatively reliable/efficient engine. Etc etc.
Hence 1995. A bit sooner, if you go for very expensive cars, and a bit later, for very cheap ones.

--- End quote ---
To me picking the 90s feels wholly arbitrary. Historically there are various points at which vehicle design paradigms changed or shifted significantly. The 90s are not one of those points. Car were just refined gradually in that era. That's almost the complete opposite from computer technology which was going through a crazy phase in the 90s. I'm just a bit confused by your pick because it's almost the exact opposite of what I'd have picked or even considered. :P

MK14:

--- Quote from: Mr. Scram on June 02, 2020, 10:06:52 pm ---To me picking the 90s feels wholly arbitrary. Historically there are various points at which vehicle design paradigms changed or shifted significantly. The 90s are not one of those points. Car were just refined gradually in that era. That's almost the complete opposite from computer technology which was going through a crazy phase in the 90s. I'm just a bit confused by your pick because it's almost the exact opposite of what I'd have picked or even considered. :P

--- End quote ---

I agree. It is rather Cherry-picked/arbitrary.

A 1960s car, can actually be quite good. But, a 1960s operating system, is not really comparable to Windows 10.
So, you could take a genuinely 1960s restored car, and drive it 500 miles on modern roads, in reasonable speed/convenience and quite enjoy the experience.
Whereas, a 1960s Operating System, Might struggle playing a 4K Graphics game, as it was probably expecting a serial crt text display unit, or even an ASR model 33, 10 characters per second, printing terminal.
Also, if the game is 8GBytes in size, I wonder how long it will take to load, via the ASR33's, 10 char per second (approx), paper tape reader ?

T3sl4co1l:
90s is arbitrary; Xerox Alto was 70s and already did everything Windows and Mac did (give or take performance, UI design, and most of all, cost!).  And that in turn was influenced by Engelbart's production in the 60s (which, as far as I know, was a one-off and would've been quite expensive to equip, stage and produce, but as you can see, was eminently possible with period technology).

I don't know that there was a comparable breakthrough in ICE design, say; but I am far from an expert on the history.  Perhaps fuel injection would be a similarly foundational step?  But then, that's been done in some capacity since Diesel in the 1890s.  And turbo and superchargers have been around about as long.  It's really just been a slow and tedious, incremental improvement over the years, punctuated by various research steps that succeeded (and numerous others that didn't pan out into production).

It seems more appropriate to compare the fundamental invention of the ICE to the invention of, say, the vacuum tube.  See, thing is this: electronics has benefited from truly exponential growth over the years, while absolutely nothing comparable can be said of the ICE -- the laws of thermodynamics themselves prohibit exponential growth in that space, after all.  Engines can get smaller and denser, absolutely; they can get more reliable; but only incrementally more efficient, up to the limit.

Or likewise for materials science and fabrication, for all the mechanical components in a car -- these are incrementally improved, year by year, but once the major discoveries were made -- lightweight aluminum, high strength alloy steel, etc. -- there is again only so much improvement that is possible.  (Carbon fiber is probably the next biggest improvement in that space, and it has gotten a lot cheaper over the years.)

Tim

0xdeadbeef:

--- Quote from: james_s on June 02, 2020, 09:14:56 pm ---It seems crazy that modern ECUs would have a 256MB ROM, the ECU in my car has a 4K ROM.

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I don't think there is any gasoline/diesel car with an engine control unit with more than a few MB of (flash) ROM. The absolute high end in developman right now and going into production in 2023 or so has around 8MB of flash.
And quite a bit of that is used for one or two dimensional calibration maps (most of the complex calculations are replaced by loop up tables and interpolation due to realtime requirements etc.)
Anyway, 4K seems very low even for a very old car. When I started in the industry >20years ago, the ECUs in development used something like 128k to 512k flash. Why that increased to 2-8MB in the last twenty years is easy to explain: mainly due to regulations regarding exhaust emissions and safety.

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