Meanwhile, Apollo had only 2 Mhz and 36 KB memory and navigated to the fucking moon.
this post was submitted on 15 Jul 2026
346 points (97.5% liked)
Not The Onion
22035 readers
125 users here now
Welcome
We're not The Onion! Not affiliated with them in any way! Not operated by them in any way! All the news here is real!
The Rules
Posts must be:
- Links to news stories from...
- ...credible sources, with...
- ...their original headlines, that...
- ...would make people who see the headline think, “That has got to be a story from The Onion, America’s Finest News Source.”
Please also avoid duplicates.
Comments and post content must abide by the server rules for Lemmy.world and generally abstain from trollish, bigoted, ableist, or otherwise disruptive behavior that makes this community less fun for everyone.
And that’s basically it!
founded 3 years ago
MODERATORS
Not using an elevator though
They haven't installed the ropes yet.
I never get tired of this comparison, esp. with the smartphone in your hand.
One can push it further: ALL of the computing power used for/during the moonlanding has been surpassed by any smartphone, by orders of magnitude.
load more comments
(2 replies)
It's a lost art for sure. I wrote a graphic OS for an instrument my company uses in the field. I had 2 MB of RAM and 1 MB of storage to work with, and the latter had to include space for a data logger, so the code effectively had to reside in about a quarter of that.
It gave me a lot of respect for the original Mac OS. Graphic OS with 128 KB of RAM and 400 KB floppy for storage. The latter had to have room for the OS itself + apps + user documents. They did "cheat" somewhat by having a 64 KB ROM to help with the graphics library.
But the lengths they went to to squeeze every last bit of capability out of the hardware was legendary. For example, Wozniak wrote a floppy driver that varied the spin rate depending on which track was being read. He reasoned the outer tracks could hold more data thanks to the greater diameter if the spin were slowed down.
Programmers back in the day had to be super clever. I can't say much about programs but games used to be very restrictive and some devs managed to pull out incredible mechanics and graphics having barely any memory to work with. Today they'd release 150gb game that is no much better than a game they've released in 2008.
This always made me respect old school games.
A big part of games taking up more and more space is due to higher resolution assets. Creating installers only installing needed assets would drastically reduce the size for anyone not playing on extreme or whatever they call the maximum resolution.
But games do still tend to be among the archetypes of software, which hits bottlenecks that needs performance optimisations. You only have whatever hardware your end user has, you can't just buy a bigger server... well Google Stadia tried
I love how you can take an old game now and, assuming it's still playable, the cut scenes often look really bad compared to the regular game play, since they were pre-rendered at what would be considered low-res today. It used to be the other way around!
load more comments
(1 replies)
And a few thousand people working 24/7.
load more comments
(6 replies)
Is this part of the elevator, or an advertising billboard installed in the elevator?
Silly goose, they're one and the same!
No, they very much aren't. I doubt this actually has anything to do with the function of the elevator at all.
Probably. But even for a billboard this is overkill!
It is probably the cheapest computer you can buy brand new which you can connect to the Internet to deploy the ads.
Probably not cheapest over all, but cheapest standardized system the advertising company/IT support company they use has. If they can handle even 90% of client needs with this hardware, it means easier and more efficient support on the back end.
load more comments
(1 replies)
Elevator manufacturers sell the displays with their elevators more often than not. The PC is not installed in the elevator, but in the machine room, and the video is being extended alongside the cabling used for the elevator itself.
I went into a store that sells grills. They all had screens. On a fucking barbecue.
I just want a box that makes fire.
Webber Kettle grill. BYOF but no screen in sight.
Two of the best meals of my entire life were made on Weber kettle grills
Remote controls. Why the fuck does every fan and window AC need one? Who genuinely searched through a dozen to find the right one instead of using the damn buttons on the thing?
'Smart' home things. My dryer and microwave can both be connected to the wifi. Never in my life have I put something in either of those devices and wished I could use a network connection to have it start working later. When I put shit in is when I want it to do it's job.
I'm a huge nerd, when you lose me on these 'features' you've definitely lost the plot.
load more comments
(3 replies)
Overkill, yes but also almost surely just a standardized hardware set the company uses regardless of the specific advertising situation.
This set of hardware can run 99% of their client requirements and requires only a single hardware configuration to support. Maybe a couple generations of support as time goes on before older hardware is replaced.
Could this particular use case be handled by something as simple as a raspberry pi? Probably, but almost surely not everything the company that provides the hardware/service/support handles for clients.
We got so far into "hardware is cheap" / "developers are expensive" / abstraction positive feedback loop, we are using a Raspberry Pi to blink a LED, but on a global scale.
Honestly speaking, using readily available hardware instead of specialty made to operate an elevator isn't a bad idea.
The elevator probably cost $250,000. The i5 is a laptop chip. I’m sure it’s part of a fanless industrial embedded system. I can’t imagine why this is even news.
load more comments
(5 replies)
Honestly considering the age of this motherboard and cpu. This is legitimately cheaper than a raspberry pi now if you buy used and it’s a lot more powerful. I would also imagine that’ll it’ll be stuck in this elevator forever because why upgrade hardware when this nugget can still show ads completely disconnected from the elevator computer since it’s been doing since 2020. Maybe I would consider this absurd back during the end of Covid but not really that much now. Considering I can buy this for under a hundred dollars on eBay and you should probably be considering as well especially if you wanna run Linux on a cheap machine. Like yeah the ram is probably soldered onto the motherboard and it’s a laptop cpu with integrated graphics worse than that of the intel hd graphics 4000 in my 2012 MacBook. But like you can do a lot with this nugget.
"I lift things up and put them down."
Meanwhile my company keeps using NUCs to control 9 live video feeds per NUC. And when they inevitably keep crashing because of thermal throttling/dust build up after around a year, they just replace them.
There is 2 things to this, its cheaper to buy hardware like a raspberry pi or similar with 8gb of ram and use that to build the elevator. And it might genuinely easier to source the parts and future spare parts.
But as a developer I want to be snarky and say why does a elevator need 8GB, it should have 256MB and use 168 MB max where 100 MB is display graphics and music, 5 is the control system with 3 copies of the variable for redundancy and the rest is telemetry and a memory leak that eats 1MB every 2 weeks because someone is resizing the audio buffer for floor announcements everytime.
But its probably just a mini pc that's using 512Mb all in all running some linux distro. and the 8GB is just not being used.
Raspberry pi’s are unreliable POS. We use some at work to just display a static web page that refreshes a few times an hour and somehow they fail at that. They’re good enough for us since we’re just an office showing some stats. But this is proper digital signage.
For something like this where you really need 100% uptime (except for this) there’s a whole army of specialty PCs built for this role. Passive cooking so there’s no fan to fail, beefy over built power supplies, and usually some built in special IO. They’ll usually have hardware watchdogs too, that’ll reboot the system if it’s not responding.
A friend makes game cabinets for casinos and they have a 100% uptime requirement from some customers. And they use odroids for that. And a casino cabinet has more sensors than I ever though possible.
Edit. With that said the machine in the elevator does not need to have 100% uptime a restart is fine, the security systems and locks are controlled by other systems that are not connectied to the carriage in the hoist way.
The computer in the elevator just places floor calls on another system over a bacnet connection. So it handles media and floor calls.
Edit2. Source misspent youth. I can recommend https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oHf1vD5_b5I and there is one more I can't find right now.
load more comments
(8 replies)
Is it inflation or 8GB of ram and x86-64 gaming capable CPUs in everything with buttons
So it's not AI data centers after all, elevators are driving the RAM shortage!!!1!
Low powered stuff probably requires more Dev or specialist software, with a off the shelf mini pc you can just put windows with kiosk mode on it. In terms of support time it's probably cheaper than cheaper hardware.
load more comments
(4 replies)
I've never been in an elevator with displays like this. I take the stairs on the rare occasion anymore that I'm in a large building.
I think I'd just lean against it, so no one need look at it. However, I'm assuming there's one on each wall, so maybe it's best just to stare at the doors as is tradition.
Billionaires keep finding every possible way, small and large, to be worse.
Elevators are Determinite Finite Autonomas ffs. In my theoretical computer science course in college, I wrote a DFA program in python that would have fit on an Arduino.
It sounds like this is running the advertising screen in the elevator, rather than controlling the elevator itself.
load more comments
(2 replies)
I wonder to how many more digital signs all over the world this applies to.
load more comments
(2 replies)
I feel seen
On the other hand, considering the cost of custom designing this elevator, building and installing it, the choice of hardware in this single place is rather neglectable.
our HMO medical facilities has elevators with MSMs news, although there isnt any sound.
Is this one of the newer ones with facial tracking? Could that be the reason for the stupid amount of power for images and video?
The Flintstones didn't even use computers in their elevators.
Most elevator runs on Windows XP...
view more: next ›