Computers make plenty of use of the metric system. Memory, disk space, and processor speed are all measured in metric units. How come we don’t have a metric unit for computer power? We can call it a Moore, after Intel’s Gordon Moore’s famous “law” that computer power would double every two years.
I spent part of this weekend working with older, surplus PCs. An old IBM desktop machine with a 166 MHz processor and 16 MB of RAM ran Windows 95 with amazing speed, considering its age. The application response was snappy on this old hardware. I can only imagine how it would run on a modern, gigahertz system.
A Moore would be used to define a set type of performance. For instance, a Moore could refer to application performance by a system with W operating system, with X processor, Y memory, and Z I/O. Performance would be measured relative to this standard, in Moores.
That way one could properly account for the effect of bloatware on the performance of a modern computer. What do you think?