4 ms·
No? Getting on a BBS in 1983 at 300 baud means text files "downloaded" at the same speed you can read. Word processors were crazy painful to use, and incredib
by gilbetron 9y ago
No? Getting on a BBS in 1983 at 300 baud means text files "downloaded" at the same speed you can read. Word processors were crazy painful to use, and incredibly slow. A text editor was just a line-by-line replacement. My TRS-80 would slow to a crawl even making the most basic (ha!) of programs.
Over the years, I've often thought about why computers never seem to get faster - mostly it is because people have a tolerance for response speeds, and that is unchanging. So software sits somewhere inside that tolerance range, because why be ultra fast when most people don't really care that much?
- 1_2__4 9y agoGiven the whole article is about how some people do care your dismissive comment is as pointless as it is incorrect.
- gilbetron 9y agoSure, some small amount of people care, definitely. And there are options for them. And everyone would like it if things were faster, but they just don't care enough to put their money towards a fast, but less feature-filled, option. Plenty of UX research confirms what I have stated. Why does the average webpage take N seconds to load, with a standard deviation of D? Because that's the range most people are ok with it and going faster has rapid diminishing returns, while going slower lets you get away with a lot of inefficiencies that results in reduced cost.
- cocoablazing 9y agoIn reality, so many people have a problem with it that they are actively interfering with the code of the webpages to the point of endangering the business model of much of the web.
- antod 9y agoYeah. For me in 1983 loading something meant 5 mins waiting for the cassette to play through. Switching to a different program meant repeating the process again.
- gilbetron 9y agoOne of the computers I had was cassette tape based, and the tape "reader" broke. I was rather shocked to find I could use my parents cassette player and connect its output to my computer, and it would (generally) read tapes just fine. As a bonus, I figured out how to have the speakers on the tape player on at the same time so I could listen to my programs being read in :D
- Rhinobird 9y agoThe author went back a tad far, but not too much. The Amiga came out in 1985 and the Apple IIGS in 1986. The user experience of those machines would be more comparable a modern PC with a thousand times the clock speed and memory
- gilbetron 9y agoI had an Amiga and the user experience was not comparable to a modern PC, except if you squint really hard. Like really hard.