No, not even a little bit. I’m not being patronising, but after using computers for FORTY SIX years, the differences that come about over just a few years are vast, huge, chasmic. The pace of change in the last few years has been exponential, but then it always has been, but exponential growth means the changes are larger, faster.
I’d be happy with Win98 using Office 2003 - to the extent that I do use such a combo. It works, it does almost everything I need. I run it in a VM on my MacBook. It has 1Gb allocated on a machine that face-plants when I run Word & Excel and has 16 GIGABYTE of memory on a SSD that runs TEN times faster than the typical disk that ran XP.
On my shelves I have a plastic box with half-a-dozen spare 8Gb SO-DIMMS for the random collection of Mac minis (4) and MacBooks (4) that are sat on that shelf next to the 20+ hard disks & 5+ smaller (<512Gb) SSDs. Storage here is in tens of Terabytes, in one room of my house I have my first hard disk for a Mac Plus (1Mb of RAM) - it’s 20Mb.
My main server before had 4 cores, 8 threads and 16Mb of memory. The second hand one I now use has 28 cores on each of its 2 CPUs and has 128Gb and cost less than its predecessor.
The ATmega328, the heart of the Arduino Uno, has 32KB of Flash and 2KB of RAM. I could run a LW device on that. Now I need at least 64KB of Flash and 8KB of RAM, which is not a problem as the STM32 MCU’s have 256KB of Flash and 64KB of RAM and runs 5 times faster. ESP32s have MB of Flash and 400KB of RAM and runs 20x faster.
I’ve put this to overemphasis the situation so you can re-evaluate your understanding based on the following points:
- Petr Gotthard’s LoRaWAN server was designed to include custom Linux targets.
- It uses a built-in aka embedded database, mnesia, designed for these sorts of applications
- It supports up to LW v1.0.3
- The ReadMe states “It will probably never support the sophisticated management features of the commercial-grade network-servers.”
Whereas TTS is:
- Designed to meet the full specification of LW v1.0.0 to v1.0.4 and v1.1.0 and all it’s extensions.
- Uses two external databases, Redis for holding pretty much all active data in memory and Postgres for the rest.
- Was designed to run on “Big Metal” using a language not original intended for embedded, it runs on a Pi because the Pi has increased in memory & can use SSD’s, not because TTS has been optimised for it.
- A fully featured bells & whistles LNS with separate Join Server that is designed to be spread over several servers - so each component comes with an overhead in terms of it’s runtime - which is not an issue when you have multiple Gb’s of memory, SSDs and a processor that can run multiple threads in parallel & is optimised for this level of multi-tasking.
Petr’s LW server was a nice tidy EV run-about that’s charged at home from solar panels. TTS is a Cybertruck that has single digit MPG and has an auto-puppy-run-over sensor.
The rate of change of hardware requirements is partly driven by the reduction in cost, the newer techniques & facilities of the development environments and, to be frank, the poor quality of the current CS syllabus that have failed to explain how it all works right at the desk of the registers. Having a memory safe, garbage collected runtime with all the data structures you can wish for means it is mostly OK to write code with abandon. But that environment is not one suited for a single core processor with less memory than my Biro.
What previous server? Not Petr Gotthard’s from my understanding, not that I’ve done much with it.