6 ms·

wow, that link loaded in an instant. Was the web that fast two decades ago?

by eecc 7y ago

pieter_mj 7y ago
what the hell just happened? Way, way faster than anything I've seen in quite a while and loads faster than the 64.ms nonsense.
- perl4ever 7y ago
  That page appears to be about 100K, so I think it would probably have taken at least 15-20 seconds to load on dial-up? Probably back in the day you would have been swearing at how bloated it was.
  - detritus 7y ago
    I worked for a newspaper around the period this article was published (~2000) and we had a strict 120kb limit per page, aiming more for ~90kb, for the exact reasons you suggest.
    - jaclaz 7y ago
      And we can now measure webpages in Doooms (JFYI): https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13211120 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13211120 https://twitter.com/xbs/status/626781529054834688 https://twitter.com/xbs/status/626781529054834688
shantly 7y ago
Yes. Granted more people were on dial-up, but while the promise of an AJAXier web was one that felt faster, the effect in practice has been one that feels slower, if anything. There was a brief golden age in which, if one had broadband, the web was very fast using entirely static or server-rendered pages, which are considered in modern dev folklore (hilariously, to those who've seen both at work) to be slow. [EDIT] just the server rendering is considered slow or old-fashioned or somehow inefficient, I should clarify—I don't think anyone's nutty enough to think static pages are slow. Also images were much, much smaller, both in terms of pixels and amount of compression applied, using large images that weren't content was heavily discouraged, and no-one used auto playing videos. To the extent that sins against bandwidth were committed it was mostly with Flash, which we all complained about and which is now reviled, but which was in fact generally way less abusive, confusing, and performance-destroying, than what gets done now in the name of "modern UX". Pages were much smaller, devs were much more sensitive to markup bloat. The worst we had on that front were WYSYWG-made pages (Frontpage, for example) but they've got nothing on the kind of attribute bloat and huge JS payloads one sees now (and the JS in particular can keep on allocating memory after its text is loaded into memory then parsed into even more memory, with predictable results on resource use and page load times)
- NeedMoreTea 7y ago
  Latency, thanks to all those dozens of third party JS, font, tracking and other service calls, seems to be what we completely lost. Just about nothing feels instantly snappy any more, even if overall the page completes pretty quickly - for a Web 2.0 version of pretty quickly. :)
- perl4ever 7y ago
  I remember many years ago, when a 16 MHz 68030 Macintosh was somewhat usable, but old and slow, by the standards of the day. I had read how, when the 68000 came out originally, it was considered to be a "minicomputer on a chip", while the 68030 was anticipated to be a "mainframe on a chip". So, I was unable to viscerally appreciate that perspective, until I ran the original MacPaint, which was extremely optimized for the 8MHz 68000 in the original Mac, and then I was amazed at how fast the 68030 was.
  - NeedMoreTea 7y ago
    Hah, I can mention latency again! I had the Amiga, 68000 at 7.09 MHz (PAL, NTSC ran a teeny bit faster). Both Mac and Amiga gave fully featured, incredibly low latency GUIs. They might think a bit after the click, but compared to a modern GUI, oh so snappy. Windows, OSX, X with whatever Windowing never get close to that instant tip of your fingers response. I miss low latency responses.
    - perl4ever 7y ago
      Well, I wouldn't make such a categorical statement about latency. I remember an early Amiga word processor that had an unbelievably laggy and slow UI, such that it was basically unusable. The Mac mouse pointer was always responsive due to interrupts, but that didn't mean that what you clicked on was. However, the thing that I hate most about the modern web and similar UIs is that they reflow or otherwise move the content you are looking at after you click and before the click is mapped to an element, so you don't get what you click or tap on. This is absolutely unforgivable in my opinion, and absolutely not a matter of degree or grey areas unlike most of the things people complain about.
NeedMoreTea 7y ago
That was the high bandwidth page for those with an OK connection! The Beeb used to have a low bandwidth text only version of every page, but those weren't preserved - the text link will now bring you back to that page again. Let's see, 2000. Most would be on dial-up, ADSL was either in very early roll out or pre-roll out hype - so nearly everyone waiting on exchanges to be converted. Techies probably had BT Highway, a dual 64k ISDN link. That always seemed really fast, and way faster than many of today's bloatware sites now feel. Insane page and JS weight with dozens of third party calls every page came later. Early broadband, before pages grew to over-compensate for that bandwidth was delightful! Downloads and Dial up could feel sluggish, especially when you hit the sites being "clever and disruptive" with Macromedia Flash (not many yet), or a site that didn't know how to do thumbnails or image optimisation (quite a few. Usually pages with little 10x10 icons that were really 1024x768 images etc). :)
- r00fus 7y ago
  > Let's see, 2000. Most would be on dial-up, ADSL Cable internet (@home, Cox, or local provider like I had) was much faster than either of those and was available in a lot of places. I think I had a symmetric 1Mb/s, but would experience slowdowns during peak hours (nowhere near dialup).
  - lol768 7y ago
    >Cable internet (@home, Cox, or local provider like I had) was much faster than either of those and was available in a lot of places. But not in the UK, which is what the parent comment was about!
cmroanirgo 7y ago
View source reveals two tiny scripts and one small css, which is much better than the typical bloat of a modern website that has heavy reliance on various frameworks.
pjc50 7y ago
It doesn't call out to Google Analytics, or any of the social buttons. It's a classic static page, although even this manages to load a bit of javascript.

wow, that link loaded in an instant. Was the web that fast two decades ago?

by eecc 7y ago

wow, that link loaded in an instant. Was the web that fast two decades ago?

what the hell just happened? Way, way faster than anything I've seen in quite a while and loads faster than the 64.ms nonsense.

perl4ever 7y ago
That page appears to be about 100K, so I think it would probably have taken at least 15-20 seconds to load on dial-up? Probably back in the day you would have been swearing at how bloated it was.
- detritus 7y ago
  I worked for a newspaper around the period this article was published (~2000) and we had a strict 120kb limit per page, aiming more for ~90kb, for the exact reasons you suggest.
  - jaclaz 7y ago
    And we can now measure webpages in Doooms (JFYI): https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13211120 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13211120 https://twitter.com/xbs/status/626781529054834688 https://twitter.com/xbs/status/626781529054834688

shantly 7y ago

Yes. Granted more people were on dial-up, but while the promise of an AJAXier web was one that felt faster, the effect in practice has been one that feels slower, if anything. There was a brief golden age in which, if one had broadband, the web was very fast using entirely static or server-rendered pages, which are considered in modern dev folklore (hilariously, to those who've seen both at work) to be slow. [EDIT] just the server rendering is considered slow or old-fashioned or somehow inefficient, I should clarify—I don't think anyone's nutty enough to think static pages are slow. Also images were much, much smaller, both in terms of pixels and amount of compression applied, using large images that weren't content was heavily discouraged, and no-one used auto playing videos. To the extent that sins against bandwidth were committed it was mostly with Flash, which we all complained about and which is now reviled, but which was in fact generally way less abusive, confusing, and performance-destroying, than what gets done now in the name of "modern UX". Pages were much smaller, devs were much more sensitive to markup bloat. The worst we had on that front were WYSYWG-made pages (Frontpage, for example) but they've got nothing on the kind of attribute bloat and huge JS payloads one sees now (and the JS in particular can keep on allocating memory after its text is loaded into memory then parsed into even more memory, with predictable results on resource use and page load times)

NeedMoreTea 7y ago
Latency, thanks to all those dozens of third party JS, font, tracking and other service calls, seems to be what we completely lost. Just about nothing feels instantly snappy any more, even if overall the page completes pretty quickly - for a Web 2.0 version of pretty quickly. :)
perl4ever 7y ago
I remember many years ago, when a 16 MHz 68030 Macintosh was somewhat usable, but old and slow, by the standards of the day. I had read how, when the 68000 came out originally, it was considered to be a "minicomputer on a chip", while the 68030 was anticipated to be a "mainframe on a chip". So, I was unable to viscerally appreciate that perspective, until I ran the original MacPaint, which was extremely optimized for the 8MHz 68000 in the original Mac, and then I was amazed at how fast the 68030 was.
- NeedMoreTea 7y ago
  Hah, I can mention latency again! I had the Amiga, 68000 at 7.09 MHz (PAL, NTSC ran a teeny bit faster). Both Mac and Amiga gave fully featured, incredibly low latency GUIs. They might think a bit after the click, but compared to a modern GUI, oh so snappy. Windows, OSX, X with whatever Windowing never get close to that instant tip of your fingers response. I miss low latency responses.
  - perl4ever 7y ago
    Well, I wouldn't make such a categorical statement about latency. I remember an early Amiga word processor that had an unbelievably laggy and slow UI, such that it was basically unusable. The Mac mouse pointer was always responsive due to interrupts, but that didn't mean that what you clicked on was. However, the thing that I hate most about the modern web and similar UIs is that they reflow or otherwise move the content you are looking at after you click and before the click is mapped to an element, so you don't get what you click or tap on. This is absolutely unforgivable in my opinion, and absolutely not a matter of degree or grey areas unlike most of the things people complain about.

NeedMoreTea 7y ago

That was the high bandwidth page for those with an OK connection! The Beeb used to have a low bandwidth text only version of every page, but those weren't preserved - the text link will now bring you back to that page again. Let's see, 2000. Most would be on dial-up, ADSL was either in very early roll out or pre-roll out hype - so nearly everyone waiting on exchanges to be converted. Techies probably had BT Highway, a dual 64k ISDN link. That always seemed really fast, and way faster than many of today's bloatware sites now feel. Insane page and JS weight with dozens of third party calls every page came later. Early broadband, before pages grew to over-compensate for that bandwidth was delightful! Downloads and Dial up could feel sluggish, especially when you hit the sites being "clever and disruptive" with Macromedia Flash (not many yet), or a site that didn't know how to do thumbnails or image optimisation (quite a few. Usually pages with little 10x10 icons that were really 1024x768 images etc). :)

r00fus 7y ago
> Let's see, 2000. Most would be on dial-up, ADSL Cable internet (@home, Cox, or local provider like I had) was much faster than either of those and was available in a lot of places. I think I had a symmetric 1Mb/s, but would experience slowdowns during peak hours (nowhere near dialup).
- lol768 7y ago
  >Cable internet (@home, Cox, or local provider like I had) was much faster than either of those and was available in a lot of places. But not in the UK, which is what the parent comment was about!

cmroanirgo 7y ago

View source reveals two tiny scripts and one small css, which is much better than the typical bloat of a modern website that has heavy reliance on various frameworks.

pjc50 7y ago

It doesn't call out to Google Analytics, or any of the social buttons. It's a classic static page, although even this manages to load a bit of javascript.