18 ms·
Almost everything on computers is perceptually slower than it was in 1983 (2017)
- torstenvl 7y ago(2017) Google Maps has improved the primary complaint here. You can now search along your route.
- danjayh 7y agoNot on the desktop...
- nrp 7y agoIs it deliberate satire that this was written as a very long series if tweets rather than as a well structured article like it may have been in 1983?
- eirini1 7y agoIts a thread of tweets turned into an article by a bot.
- csomar 7y agoIt reminds me of the people complaining that the streets are dirty and then go on by throwing their coffee cup on the street just as they are talking. I mean the dude is using the worst medium possible to display and transfer data. It is also slow and barely follow-able/readable. Interesting world we are living in.
- reportgunner 7y ago> I mean the dude is using the worst medium possible to display and transfer data. Whoa hold your horses. Are you sure about the worst part ? Imagine if this were an instagram story or a series of snapchat snaps. Would it be a better medium? I beg to differ.
- TheOperator 7y agoI couldn't look past the irony of that either.
- monadgonad 7y agoYou might be shocked to discover that some people use Twitter as a main means of communication and don't want to host a blog or anything.
- mapgrep 7y agoFully agree it is ironic but the fact that it is structured this way is the key reason we saw any of the content. The ideal format for this is probably a text file or simple html page on a personal website. Linking that from Twitter is one tweet. Sadly it’s not going to get the same visibility and traction as a Twitter thread where each paragraph can be linked, retweeted, liked. Look at all those RTs! Maybe the simple version would have ended up on Hacker News but more likely not — a fraction of the people would have seen it to begin with.
- johnday 7y agoI think we can actually blame React and similar frameworks for the issues we see in many modern apps, including the ones mentioned in the article. Part of the issue stems from the "strong data coupling" that's all the rage. Everything on the page should correlate at any given point in time. Add a character to a search box and the search results should be updated. The practical effect of this is that any single modification could (and often does) rewrite the contents of the entire page. The other thing the article brings up is that developers and designers often disregard input flow. This may be partly driven by not having sufficiently dynamic tooling (Illustrator can hardly be used to design out flow patterns, for example.) These two issues have a unifying quality: Websites must be "instagrammable", which is to say look good in single snapshots of time, and the dynamics take a serious back seat.
- reidjs 7y agoIf the devs use SSR and code splitting and whatnot loadtime isn't so bad. But yea these frameworks get abused because everyone wants to stay competitive and make a decent salary
- proc0 7y agoYeah but React's popularity is because there is demand and expectations for interactive UIs with tons of features that are taken for granted. Users expect basic amount of interactivity and usability that adds a ton of complexity which React offers a good model for.
- roenxi 7y agoI feel that, for a discussion on a site with the minimalistic design of HN, the demands of that sort of user are sufficiently foreign that you need a citation. Not because I particularly doubt that expectations on the wider web are different to HN. Just that the crowd here isn't going to be able to easily understand the people out there. Anyone who expects interaction was weeded out long ago.
- TeMPOraL 7y ago
- thaumasiotes 7y agoBoot times are way faster.
- sixothree 7y agoMaybe boot times are faster than 1996, but not 1983.
- thaumasiotes 7y agoBoot times are faster than they were in 1986. I feel comfortable assuming they're also faster than they were in 1983. SSDs are fast.
- rongenre 7y agoA powered-off Apple 2 or C64 could be operational in seconds. We're nowhere close to that now.
- thaumasiotes 7y agoA powered-off Dell laptop running Windows 10 is operational in seconds. I know this because that's what I use. Whereas an IBM PC booting into DOS in 1986 took, sure, seconds, but a lot more seconds. You could read a lot of the messages as they scrolled by during boot. To get to a BIOS configuration screen now, you need to independently research the key that will bring it up and memorize it. Then you have to frantically mash it during the whole very brief boot process, because there's only a split second during which it will actually work. It used to just be a boot message. When you saw the message, you had time to hit F12 or whatever.
- sixothree 7y agoA powered off Dell laptop is not nearly as fast as a TRS-80 Model 4.
- michaelmrose 7y ago
- hasperdi 7y agoMost of the arguments mentioned in the article are just a bias [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rosy_retrospection https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rosy_retrospection] and personal preference. Remember when softwares are stored in floppy. It took a while to load. Then every application came with different behavior and key bindings.
- cf 7y agoNo this has actually been measured by people. https://danluu.com/input-lag/ https://danluu.com/input-lag/ The computers are faster, can do more stuff, and monitors have higher frame rates. But for many applications that aren't games latency and non-responsive UIs are a growing problem.
- hasperdi 7y agoThat input lag is true, but that is not the argument the article is presenting. The article argues that keyboard is a better interaction hardware than mouse. Google Maps doesn't work exactly as he wanted. Popups everywhere, etc.
- aidenn0 7y agoI remember being able to type faster than the machine could keep up an an old Mac. (Maybe a Mac plus?). I couldn't type up handwritten notes reliably, because half a page in, I would fill up the buffer and characters would get dropped.
- boring_twenties 7y agoIf you want to relive that experience, just use voice.google.com.
- nikanj 7y agoOr the desktop Outlook client.
- nottorp 7y ago
- trickledown 7y agoIn 1983 virtually everything was text base. Since moving to graphical user interfaces a great deal of effort moved into more visually stimulating UI such as animations and better fonts etc. Not all of this should be counted a progress/innovation. We have waisted much of the HW performance we achieved of the years for baubles and trinkets:)
- kristianp 7y agoWindows explorer is seriously slow on Windows 10. Things like the right-click menu and creating a new folder are too slow for what is done. The new item menu is very slow, perhaps due to having office 365 installed? Creating a new folder sometimes doesn't update the display of the containing folder at all.
- marticode 7y agoI concur. I handle video files on a SSD, it can take 2-3 seconds to just view a folder with one file inside. All I want is the file name and an icon but apparently in 2019 this is an Herculean tasks.
- stevenwoo 7y agoI really wish we could turn off what appears to be a deep scan of all the files every time one opens a directory in Windows 10. I just need to see the filenames to do what I want 99% of the time.
- nikanj 7y ago"This folder contains a single .wav file. I'll automatically switch over to an artist / album / etc view, and hide all the details you normally see"
- anilakar 7y agoThe built-in image viewer application in Windows 10 takes so long to start up that it's outright unusable for its purpose.
- jtolmar 7y agoIt also has a large permanent gutter, can't successfully fullscreen an image, can't switch images while zoomed (really common lately but still dumb), resizes to some third size if you double click on it twice(??), and loses its zoom state if you switch desktops. Seriously the worst image viewer I've ever seen.
- unlinked_dll 7y agoIf you spent what people paid for a PC in 1983 (literally, without any inflation) you probably wouldn't notice anything being perceptually slower. Like the first Mac retailed for $2500 US. Go spend $2500 on a PC today, you'll have a great time. Granted, economies of scale make this kind of a dumb argument. But it has a bit of truth to it. People are just less willing to spend as much on their machines, as well as push much more limited platforms like mobile to their limits. We should definitely deal with that as developers, don't get me wrong - but not having to deal with the optimizations they dealt with 40 years ago doesn't make me unhappy.
- throwaway2048 7y agoA more expensive PC does very little to address the latency issues at play here, the problems are very much not lack of processor speed, gpu speed, or even ssd speed (most times). I know from experience, the most godlike PC you can possibly build does virtually nothing to make common applications less laggy.
- unlinked_dll 7y agoI get your point, but I don't agree on the anecdotal front. I haven't used fewer than 4c/8th and 16GB of highspeed ram in probably 5 years - and the only "common" applications that I notice going slow on me (unless on the occasion I'm not booting older/slower hardware), are things like IDEs and absurdly large spreadsheets. Even stuff like Electron apps are snappy to me and I haven't had issues with (GitKraken, VS Code, and Slack are daily drivers for me). Browser based apps are a shitshow though, but I figure that's mostly out of anyone's control. I chop that up to the browser being fundamentally a poor place for most applications, even ones that are tightly coupled to a server backend.
- throwaway2048 7y agoProblem is its perceptual, Go back and use windows XP, its a complete nightmare lagfest with any appreciable CPU load compared to windows 7+ (all UI rendering was done directly by the CPU, no GPU acceleration except a few minor things). I bet at the time you barely noticed though.
- phsource 7y agoHave some empathy! I've seen a trend where rants against the modern web often get upvoted lots on Hacker News. Consider this quote from the article: > I make no secret of hating the mouse. I think it's a crime. I think it's stifling humanitys progress, a gimmick we can't get over. Does the world's typical computer user today hate the mouse, and prefer a keyboard-only interface (CLI)? No -- in fact, command-line interfaces are less discoverable and harder to use, starting out. Even as a programmer, I struggle to remember the flags to many common command line utilities Sure, the author's example of a cashier's checkout console might be great as a text-only interface -- cashiers use it day-in, day-out, and can learn all the keyboard shortcuts in a day. But what about the self-checkout machines that shoppers use maybe once a week? Would you rather have every person have to learn a list of keyboard commands while navigating a two-color interface? Does the modern web poorly serve the author, who's good enough with technology to master any UI? Sure! But the modern web works better for the billions who otherwise would not have started using it in the first place
- aidenn0 7y agoI've never seen a self checkout machine with a mouse.
- RicardoLuis0 7y agomouse or touchscreen, the point still stands
- aidenn0 7y agoIf we are talking about how intuitive an interface is, I strongly disagree. I remember in the 90s seeing people learn to use a mouse that had never used a mouse before. There's a definite learning curve. A touchscreen with large enough targets and low enough parallax is a different story.
- arbie 7y agoKeyboard-only input is not antithetical to discoverability. You can have a menu system (including top-menu bar) with clear hotkeys displayed.
- stock_toaster 7y agoI think it comes down to the fact that GUIs _sell_. GUIs have visibility and appeal, they are something users can actually see, and have opinions about (right or wrong). GUIs are the ultimate bikeshed, and for many users, the lipstick IS the pig. ---- Anecdote: I can't count the number of times I have seen a team changing a color, updating a logo, or moving an image a few pixels, resulted in happy clients/customers, and managers sending a congratulatory company wide email. While teams solving difficult engineering problems may have garnered a quiet pat on the back, if they were lucky.
- Gibbon1 7y agoI just remember doing cad in the 1980's. If you want to talk slow. As in getting coffee while the compute redraws the screen slow. Some time around 1993-4 suddenly the hardware was fast enough. I think at this point we're trading performance for a bunch of ultimately worthless bling bling. No one's added a damn thing that improves user productivity.
- TeMPOraL 7y ago> I think it comes down to the fact that GUIs _sell_. IMO not just that, but also that the sale happens very early - before people get a chance to discover the UI is garbage. What's worse, in work context, a lot - probably most - software is bought by people other than the end users. Which means the UI can be (and often is) a total dumpster fire, but it'll win on the market as long as it appeals to the sensibilities of the people doing the purchase.
- tripzilch 7y ago> changing a color, updating a logo, or moving an image a few pixels, resulted in happy clients/customers, and managers sending a congratulatory company wide email. While teams solving difficult engineering problems may have garnered a quiet pat on the back, if they were lucky. That sounds like an extremely unhealthy business environment. It'll also leave you with just the worst engineers who cannot find a better job. A company that doesn't do this should be able to run circles around one that does.
- fouc 7y agodanluu has some articles on this topic Computer latency: 1977-2017 (https://danluu.com/input-lag/ https://danluu.com/input-lag/) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16001407 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16001407
- webboynews 7y agoI didn't have a computer in 1983. I wasn't born even. But Windows 98 felt faster than Macintosh and even Linux.
- Erlich_Bachman 7y agoToday Linux can be much faster than Windows 10.
- _bxg1 7y agoStarted with what could have been an interesting premise for discussion, and then lost me when he declared mice to be intrinsically bad in a writeup about user interfaces. It always confounds me when people assert that the number-one desirable feature in all user experience is velocity of input. As if there's nothing to be thought about, much less discovered. Just data to be entered. That may be true in certain narrow segments of interfaces, like POS software and development environments, but to pretend that all human/computer interaction fits that mold is to be willfully ignorant of the reality of personal computing. Edit: It's been pointed out that towards the end he does acknowledge some valid use-cases for mice, but he still drastically oversimplifies the space of GUI use-cases and ignores some of the key benefits of mouse-based interaction.
- throwawayjava 7y agoEven in development. In fact, probably especially in development! I've done a lot of programming where my productivity was input-constrained, so I know that that such jobs do exist. I much prefer jobs where my productivity is idea-constrained. The final code tends to be a lot more interesting, the process of creating it a lot more joyful, and the final software artifact a lot more useful. As a bonus, I tend to be paid at least an order of magnitude more for idea-constrained code.
- boring_twenties 7y agoAt least an order of magnitude? That's interesting, considering that even mediocre code jockey can make $100k a year, that must mean you make at least a million a year?
- Enginerrrd 7y agoThat's not a terribly unreasonable claim for a consultant on a particular job. The issue is you can't usually fill your schedule with such jobs.
- boring_twenties 7y ago
- elil17 7y agoI thought about reading this article, but the webpage was taking too long to load
- lysium 7y agoSo this is mostly about UI. I would have agreed that many operations take very long, eg. accessing our web-based info system or waiting until outlook open or closes that window. It‘s strange that these operations don’t happen instantly nowadays.
- shmerl 7y agoDefine everything. A lot of things were way slower in 1983.
- kissickas 7y agoThat keyboard-centric design for GUIs (I clearly have never taken a design class) is what makes Reddit Enhancement Suite such an effective product, in my opinion. HN's interface is possibly just as effective in that it discourages me from taking too many actions; I can vote on basically every reddit comment I read but using a mouse to do it on HN represents such a massive barrier compared to keyboard navigation.
- Taniwha 7y agoI've been trying to explain for years that for the past 4 decades the hardware guys have been surfing Moore's law and the software guys have been pissing it away .... Well Moore's law is falling by the wayside, if they want to start doing more with less the software guys are going to have to stop using interpreted languages, GC, passing data as json rather than as binary, all that overhead that's deriguer but that doesn't directly go to getting the job done
- tdhoot 7y agoThis is widely joked about, there's even a Wikipedia article: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Andy_and_Bill%27s_law https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Andy_and_Bill%27s_law "What Andy giveth, Bill taketh away"
- technics256 7y agoIs json really that difficult to deal with?
- Ace17 7y agoJSON provides a lot of flexibility: it's human readable, it has explicitly-named/optional/variable-length fields, it provides nesting ... all of this comes with a cost: - extra branching in the parsing code (the parser cannot predict anymore what the next field will be, they could be in any order) - extra memory allocations, decreased memory locality (due to variable-length/optional fields, and also the tree-like structure). So if your data consists in a single object composed of a timed-fixed set of little-endian integer fields, you're comparing the above costs to the cost of a single fread call* with no memory allocations. * many other data formats provide similar flexibility, text-based ones (XML) and also binary-based ones (IFF, protobuf, ISOBMFF, etc.) don't write it as such though, you must write the endianess-decoding code (which the optimizer should trash anyway on little-endian architectures - e.g LLVM does).
- michaelmrose 7y agoI don't think interpreted language or gc are inherently the issue you think they are. You can write seven layers of lagging crap in c if you like.
- dang 7y agoDiscussed at the time (2017 that is—not 1983): https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15643663 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15643663
- deleted 7y ago[deleted]
- woah 7y agoThe thread started out being about how library computers were faster in the 80's and then derailed into angry Google Maps feature requests
- jammygit 7y agoIncluding reading essays, now written half-paragraph by half-paragraph in twitter threads?
- dilaudibble 7y agoExactly right. This person wants me to read his thoughts on UX but could not make it less work for me, the user, to read them?
- d--b 7y agoThe guy's rant is a pain to read, but he's mostly right. Don't get all defensive: take this as a boatload of opportunities to make things better. I woke up the other day to find my mouse broken, and believe me, on macos, it's very hard to do anything without the mouse. I had to look up all sort of crap from my phone just to find out how to reboot the thing.
- username90 7y ago> it's very hard to do anything without the mouse Is it? I tried your example on windows and I could shut off the computer easily (alt-f4), then I opened up a browser (windows button, write chrome), navigated to your post, wrote this message and logged in without touching the mouse. I've found that you can navigate most websites without a mouse, as you can just move to the links by using the browser search and then click then with ctrl-enter. Edit: I even managed to go back and edit this message without touching the mouse.
- d--b 7y agoYes, windows is a lot keyboard-friendlier than apple. The windows key / start menu is definitely missing on mac
- username90 7y agoThen why do people like mac computers? I never liked them and I grew up with them.
- timw4mail 7y agoConsistency, better design, fashion, take your pick.
- jbjbjbjb 7y agoCommand-spacebar is probably what you’re looking for And there are many ways to restart the Mac using shortcuts: https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT201236 https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT201236
- strooper 7y agoFew days back, I installed the last version of Microsoft Encarta (2009) in an old PC (CPU E5200, RAM 4GB). To my surprise, all the millennial around me were astonished how fast and smooth that software was running and searching for information on a typically (very) slow machine.
- issa 7y agoApparently I use my computer differently than a lot of commenters. Because when I dust off my 1983 Apple IIe it gets REALLY slow when I try to have 50 open browser tabs, edit video, and run a few virtual machines.
- dijit 7y agoYet if you check how fast it renders a character to the screen it will almost certainly be faster. We've made trade-offs in the computer space, input latency and rendering of the screen (also in terms of latency) has suffered strongly at the hands of throughput and agnosticism in protocols. (USB et al.)
- pas 7y agoThe latency issues are dealt with, but you have to accept the RGB LEDs that come with gaming things.
- dijit 7y agoThat’s not true, polling of usb keyboards, multi-process scheduling and rendering through the various translation layers adds latency, quite a lot actually. You really notice it if you type on a C64 today. The machine really feels instant. Obviously it’s too anemic to do real work on and that’s kind of my point. We traded a lot of latency for a lot of throughput in other areas.
- pas 7y agoI know, there's input lag, USB driver fiddling, kernel queue, font processing, kerning, glyph harfbuzzing or whatever, blitting, compositing, rendering, freesync/g-sync, and then waiting for the LED crystals to deform and so on. Yet there are 1000 Hz USB, and optimizations for all of the above, and e2e lag soon might become solved, and then if we're lucky it'll percolate down to consumer stuff eventually.
- TapamN 7y agoNot really. Here's what an 70's/80's PC and OS had to do to print a single character in response to user input (simpified): Poll the keyboard matrix for a key press. Convert the key press coordinate to ASCII. Read the location of the cursor. Write one byte to RAM. Results will be visible next screen refresh. A modern PC and OS would do something more like this: The keyboard's microcontroller will poll the keyboard matrix for a key press. Convert the key press location to a event code. Signal to the host USB controller that you have data to send. Wait for the host to accept. Transfer the data to the USB host. Have the USB controller validate that the data was correctly received. Begin DMA from the USB controller to a RAM buffer. Wait the RAM to be ready. Transfer the data to RAM. Raise an interrupt to the CPU. Wait for the CPU to receive the interrupt. Task switch to the interrupt handler. Decode the USB packet. Pass it to the USB keyboard driver. Convert the USB keyboard event to an OS event. Determine what processes get to see the key press event. Add the event to the process's event queue. Task switch to the process. Read the new event. Filter the key press through all the libraries wrapping the OS's native event system. Read the location of the cursor. Ask the toolkit library to draw a character. Tell the windowing system to draw a character. Figure out what font glyph corresponds to that character. See if it's been cached, rasterize glyph if it's not. Draw the character to the window texture. Signal to the compositor that a region of the screen needs to be redrawn. Create a GPU command list. Have GPU execute command list. Page flip. Results will be visible next screen refresh. I could drag this out longer and go into more detail, but I don't really feel like it. I'm sure people who actually work on implementing these things can find inaccuracies with this, but it should give an idea how much more work and handshaking between components is being done now than in the 70's/80's. Switching to gaming hardware isn't enough to get down to ye olde latencies.
- vl 7y agoIt’s such a bs, UI in 80ies and 90ies was beyond slow by today’s standards. We just expected to wait more back then. Computer magazines used to publish comparisons on how fast editors can scroll through the text document!
- aiCeivi9 7y agohttps://threadreaderapp.com/thread/927593460642615296.html https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/927593460642615296.html Still not very readable.
- tiborsaas 7y agoUnfortunately, because twitter threads forces the user to dumb down their main points to a single, compressed sentence. It's a shame, since I like to read well thought out articles. Twitter takes that away because it offers a UX that's makes publishing too easy for your random ideas. People with low self control will create threads like this. With hundreds of likes comes self validation so they keep doing this.
- WalterBright 7y agoThe productivity boosters for me since 1983 aren't so much speed, it's: 1. A large hires screen so I can see lots of context 2. Lots of disk space 3. Online documentation available 4. Protected mode operating system 5. Github 6. Collaboration with people all over the world The productivity destroyers: 1. social media
- gpderetta 7y agocan't comment about 4 as it was before my time doing useful work on a computer, but everything else sounds right. >The productivity destroyers: > 1. social media stares at HN page
- WalterBright 7y ago> can't comment about 4 Having a real mode operating system (DOS) means that an errant pointer in your program could (and often did) crash the operating system requiring a reboot. Worse, it would scramble your hard disk. My usual practice was to immediately reboot on a system crash. This, of course, made for slow development. With the advent of protected mode (DOS extenders, OS/2), this ceased being a problem. It greatly speeded up development, and protected mode found many more bugs more quickly than overt crashes did - and with a protected mode debugger it even told you where the bug was! I shifted all development to protected mode systems, and only as the last step would port the program to DOS.
- auiya 7y ago7. The Internet itself
- commandlinefan 7y ago> The productivity destroyers: > 1. social media 2. Project Managers
- MaxBarraclough 7y agoAlso modern programming languages, right Walter? ;-P
- inamberclad 7y agoNot quite the same topic, but I remember someone measuring keyboard to screen input latency, and that has also increased over the years.
- thetanil 7y agoThis guy never copied floppy discs
- userbinator 7y agoReminds me of this article from 12 years ago: https://hubpages.com/technology/_86_Mac_Plus_Vs_07_AMD_DualCore_You_Wont_Believe_Who_Wins https://hubpages.com/technology/_86_Mac_Plus_Vs_07_AMD_DualC... Computers have gotten much faster in terms of raw speed and throughput, yet that hasn't translated into much of an improvement in basic UI interactions and general functioning.
- clarry 7y agoSpeaking of slow and crappy UIs, what the fuck is up with the trend of "click to read more." Youtube does this in video description and comments. If I'm scrolled down there to read comments, maybe I want to actually just read them and not click to read them? Reddit does this. I don't know what reason I have for reading a thread of comments other than reading comments, so why do I have to keep clicking read more? Twitter evidently does this. If I'm reading a thread, why do I need to click to read more? And after a couple dozen posts, click again. In this case, it also seems to expand the unread posts above the point where you're currently scrolled to, so you have to scroll back up and manually figure out where exactly the last post you read is and where the new stuff begins. Many shops do this, by cutting product descriptions at a few lines so you can't read what the product is all about without clicking read more. And they do the same thing with reviews. I'm really tired of clicking read more over and over again in places where reading is the whole point!
- dilap 7y agoGmail even does this on long emails! It’s insanely annoying.
- PikachuEXE 7y agoThis is what mobile first design gives you In mobile it might be welcome On desktop or any big screen environment this is just silly
- saagarjha 7y agoThere have been very few times that I have enjoyed clicking on one of those, even on mobile.
- jon-wood 7y agoThere’s three possibilities, although I’ll warn you now that none are great. 1. In an attempt to improve perceived performance on initial load a decision was made not to load all content in at once. In the case of a Twitter thread containing potentially hundreds of items that’s reasonable, for product descriptions less so. 2. The widget being used to display a product description on the product page itself is also used elsewhere on the site, but in a context where space is constrained to fit a grid. They got round that with a read more link. 3. Sadly the most likely for product descriptions, in an attempt to determine customer interest an arbitrary cut off was chosen for how much of a description is shown. Metrics are then tracked on which descriptions are expanded, and taken as a proxy for customer interest in those products.
- stevebmark 7y agoSearching a map of the entire world online is slower now than it was in 1983?
- taneq 7y agoThis is a comparison of native applications doing simple things in 1983 vs. web apps in 2017. Not all the world’s a web app, although that does seem to get forgotten here.
- narrator 7y agoThis guy has obviously never had to wait for GI Joe to load on a Commodore 64.
- blablabla123 7y agoThat's also how I remember the XT (~8086) I got in the 90s. When I typed or clicked, the response was instant. But that was about it, sometimes the HDD didn't work for weeks because I forgot to properly "park" it before turning the computer off. So I had to boot from floppy disk. And that was slooooow... Probably that's one core difference to today's computing, batteries are usually included, systems can run for months or even years without maintenance and crash much more seldomly. In the past people often had to wait for the computer to work again...
- _Codemonkeyism 7y agoExcept the internet it seems.
- hvasilev 7y agoI'm sorry, but I just opened this person's profile to try to follow "him" and I read "queer | leftist | capitalism is a prison | he/him". Immediately closed the browser tab.
- haecceity 7y agoCode running in real mode has less overhead than long mode but who wants to use an OS that runs in real mode besides that templeos guy.
- reportgunner 7y agoThat's what you get for catering to people who don't care for your work one bit. The same people who are telling me that their computers are slow are the same people who need a flashy animated button for every single action and the same people who refuse to understand that passwords are not just a formality. To each his own.
- mcv 7y agoWhen we plugged in our Acorn Electron (it had no power switch), it would be on and ready to use immediately (unless it hung). Nowadays it takes a minute for my work laptop to boot. When I'm lucky. I also totally agree with his complaint about things disappearing when you try to click on them. Most of his rant is just about how crap Google Maps is, though.
- lwhi 7y agoLots of great points - but feels slightly ironic that he's decided to divide this into segments of 160 characters, and spread the words between the nomenclature of the Twitter UI.
- growlist 7y agoI miss how tight my Amiga used to feel, and in the electronic music sector some people still prefer dedicated hardware rather than PC/Mac for these types of reasons. Click a button and the device responds instantly. When you're doing something creative the aesthetic quality of your tools can genuinely affect the output, and a tight response just feels right, not to mention how fast your workflow can become over time using dedicated hardware that responds instantly.
- frankling_ 7y agoThis is one reason I prefer simple guitar pedals to VSTs and such. With their instant response and tight controls, pedals feel like solid tools you can build muscle memory on. When unzipping plugins and awkwardly dragging sliders with a touchpad, it feels like it's myself who's the tool.
- fuckwit 7y agoKnob-per-function with no menu dives is what make an instrument. I hate software.
- Cougher 7y agoSorry, but it's just a very dumb statement meant to be a hot take. So he has a select few examples that he's choosing as "everything on computers". I have to admit, I didn't start working on computers until 1985 when it took forever to load the program via floppy . . . as long as the drive wasn't drifting out of alignment; then it would either take even longer or it wouldn't load at all . . . so maybe his golden age of computers was just a year.
- jokoon 7y agoI despise the web. HTML was designed for static documents, it boggles my mind that things like nodejs were created. It's not a secret. HTML techs can't even run efficiently on a cheap smartphone, which is the reason apps are needed for smartphones to be usable. Every time I'm talking to someone for job offers, I state that I want to avoid web techs. No js, no web frameworks. I prefer industrial computing, to build things that are useful. I don't want to make another interface that will get thrown away for whatever reason. Today the computing industry has completely migrated towards making user interfaces, UX things, fancy shiny smoothy scrolly whatnots, just to employ people who can't write SQL. Companies only want to sell attention. This is exactly what the economy of attention is about. All I dream about is some OS, desktop or mobile, that lets the user write scripts directly. It's time you encourage users to write code. It's not that hard.
- mschuetz 7y ago> HTML techs can't even run efficiently on a cheap smartphone That's largely the fault of ads. Some well placed JS stuff is lightning fast, even on mobile.
- musicale 7y agoFortunately we now have webasm, which will allow developers to write customized web browsers that will recreate the same HTML/Javascript/DOM web runtime environment that we have now, only somewhat less efficiently.
- ActorNightly 7y ago>It's time you encourage users to write code. It's not that hard. It is. Try teaching coding to someone non technical, especially someone that doesn't want to learn, and by the time you get them to understand what a variable is, you will fully understand that coding is not for everyone.
- iteratorloopmap 7y agoThis. What he suggested wasn't viable in terms of productivity either. One may be programmer but don't want to spend time administering the insignificant parts of the system. I never understood the culture of elitism in system micro-administration by hobbyist crowd.
- zwaps 7y agoI can say that I have yet to see ANY web app, that is fast and snappy. ANY. At some point, they all have problems. Even many frameworks for iphone and android that are essentially web apps are terrible and make every app slow and miss clicks. On the latest and modt powerful iPhone no less. If you are creating a product as a web app only, you are telling me you do not care about UI enough. Programs never not had bugs or issues, but we never had the Situation that every app, even though it technically works, is either sluggish, breaks somehow or requires the user to learn intricate timings to use a simple UI. Developers took the easy way out and used these frameworks because its simple and, they feel, good enough. And here we are.
- nottorp 7y agoSadly it's not the "easy" way. It's the "cheap" way. So we're most likely stuck with the javascript garbage.
- wodenokoto 7y agoI feel like my 2017 mbp takes longer to log in than my 2009 mbp did. The old one broke, so I can't compare, but I remember it like wake up would be done by the time I open the lid. On my new one I can sit and wait for the screen to turn on.
- shrubble 7y agoConsider the precursor to current MacOS, NextStep v3.3. It ran very well on a 33mhz 68040 with 32 to 64 megabytes of RAM.
- fxtentacle 7y agoFinancials are to blame. Selling a software release is a one-time payment. Selling a support subscription is recurring revenue. And if you make your software horrible enough to use without the support subscription, it is automatically immune to piracy. As a practical example, I don't know anyone who uses the free open source WildFly release. Instead, everyone purchases JBoss with support. It's widely known that you just need the paid support if you want your company to be online more than half of the day. And as if they knew what pain they would be causing, their microservice deployment approach was named "thorn-tail".
- tpxl 7y agoAnecdotally, we used WildFly with great success on a project or two.
- DrScientist 7y agoThere are two problems with interfaces like google maps - and one exacerbates the other. - it's not bloody obvious how they work - randomly clicking on meaningless icons, try to uncover functionality. - then just as you get used to it, they change it! My biggest feature request would be a key stroke to hide all the floating crud that is obscuring my view of the map!
- EL_Loco 7y agoAnd he's not even talking about software bloat. The word processor I have on my early 90's Powerbook is more responsive, generally faster to use, than my current one running on a Core 2 duo processor. Oh, and by the way, I was once complaining about this to a friend who's in IT, and he told me how the speed in which a software runs doesn't mean anything regarding its quality. What I mean is, I was telling him how bad some new software was because it was quite slower than one 10 years older which did the same thing, and he tolde me that, in software engineering, this (speed) is never a measure of a program's quality. Is this universally accepted? Speed and responsiveness are not taken into account? I always meant to ask other people in this field, but always forgot.
- TeMPOraL 7y ago> Oh, and by the way, I was once complaining about this to a friend who's in IT, and he told me how the speed in which a software runs doesn't mean anything regarding its quality. Your friend is wrong. It's an imperfect proxy, but looking at programs that do work, speed is a good proxy for quality, because speed means someone gives a damn. There are good programs that are slow, but bad programs all tend to be bloated. Of course "speed" is something to be evaluated in context. In a group of e.g. 3D editors, a more responsive UI suggests a better editor. A more responsive UI in general suggests a better program in general. > this (speed) is never a measure of a program's quality. Is this universally accepted? Universally? No. It all depends on who you ask. Companies tend to say speed isn't, but the truth is, a lot of companies today don't care about quality at all - it's not what sells software. If you ask users, you'll get mixed answers, depending on whether the software they use often is slow enough to anger them regularly.
- PavlovsCat 7y ago> he tolde me that, in software engineering, this (speed) is never a measure of a program's quality Never? That's just wrong. It may not always matter that much, but generally, all else being equal, faster is always better, because "speed" in this context mostly means few wasted cycles. Consider two people going to the store. One runs to the store and back, the other person runs towards the store at the same speed, but halfway through, they remember they forgot something at home, and fetch it. They repeat that so often, it takes them 2 days to go to the store, or even weeks. A CPU will do whatever nonsense it is instructed to do, at breakneck pace, as long as there is electricity to do it with. There is no contest what is "better" in some cases, and devs cutting corners (ironically leading to slower programs) are externalizing the costs of that to their users. Sometimes that can be justified, but when people don't even know the trade-offs they are making, that is a problem.
- jtbayly 7y ago>how many times have i typed in a search box, seen what i wanted pop up as i was typing, go to click on it, then have it disappear Regardless of anything else, this is 100% happening to me on a regular basis. And the ironic thing is that I think it is caused by the attempt to speed up getting some results onscreen. But it’s always 500ms behind, so it “catches up” while I’m trying to move the mouse to click on something.
- baq 7y agofirefox is notoriously bad at this - type a bookmark name into the url bar, move mouse onto the bookmark, search results come in and you click something you didn't want. gets me all the time.
- mikorym 7y ago> twitter.com I found it funny that this appeared on Twitter, a website which always slows down my browser, especially in VMs.
- notacoward 7y agoComputers are perceptually slower because we've replaced CPU/memory slowness with remote latency. Every click, often every keypress (for autocomplete), sometimes even every mouse hover, generates requests to who knows how many services in how many different places around the world. No wonder it's slow. Speed of light. I see this even using my development tools at work, where actions I didn't really want or ask for are being taken "on my behalf" and slowing me down. I notice because I'm on a VPN from home. The developers don't notice - and don't care - because they're sitting right on a very high-speed network in the office. It's the modern equivalent of developers using much faster machines and much bigger monitors than most users are likely to have. Just as they need to think about users on tiny phone screens and virtual keyboards, developers need to think about users with poor network connectivity (or just low patience for frills and fluff).
- auiya 7y agoWhen dealing with web applications at least, people don't realize how many non-essential requests are being made peripheral to the action the user actually wants to accomplish. For instance, install NoScript and make a page fetch to cnn.com. There are 20+ external page requests being made to all kinds of tracking, advertising, and analytical domains which have fuck-all to do with the user's request to see content hosted by cnn.com. The page loads almost instantly when all these non-essential requests are filtered. It's a hilariously bad side effect of the web becoming as commercialized as it is.
- Allower 7y agowhy are you frequenting cnn.com? thats your problem
- musicale 7y agoInserting network and server latency into the local UI feedback loop is a terrible anti-pattern.
- dx7tnt 7y agoThis statement is just absolute nonsense. In 1983 it took me the best part of ten minutes to boot and load a game into my zx spectrum. If I wanted to change games, it was another five or six minutes.
- auiya 7y agoI blame two things. 1. The "release early, iterate often" culture - as it encourages half-assed software to flood the marketplace. 2. Poor or non-existent incentives for proper code maintenance.
- gchamonlive 7y ago> The "release early, iterate often" culture - as it encourages half-assed software to flood the marketplace. That is blaming the wrong aspect of agile development. Software should fail early. It is wasteful to go through a lengthy process only to find out the final product either is incompatible with the market or someone else made a tool that already dominates the niche market. The problem most of the time is not realising you are actually selling a prototype and what should be a proof of concept ends up in production.
- johnobrien1010 7y agoWhy do people keep writing essays on twitter instead of writing an essay and posting it as a blog post?
- moretai 7y agobecause it's cool
- dgellow 7y agoTwitter works quite well to captures some thoughts you just have on the moment. Though of course the reader experience is awful. The blog post format somehow implies more work and preparation, where you can just open twitter, start to write a short line, then continue message by message. I don't know why twitter doesn't even try to improve the reader experience, threads are just a complete mess.
- commandlinefan 7y agoTwitter essays are definitely perceptually worse than blog posts.
- Allower 7y agoBecause they are cognitive infants
- shantly 7y agoIt's where the audience is. It's working better for getting messages out & people actually reading them than any alternative, despite sucking.
- crazygringo 7y agoBut my computer is at least 1,000 times more valuable in what it can do for me, than it was in 1983. Probably even more. Seems like a pretty good tradeoff to me. I'll take a slow autocomplete box of all the world's knowledge over a lightning-fast lookup of my local files in a single directory any day.
- adatavizguy 7y agoI wonder if your computer is more valuable in 1983 running the first version of Lotus 123 compared to 36 years earlier in 1947 or more valuable now compared to 1983 with everything it can do? Not sure how to quantify that but it might be similar.
- toss1 7y agoIt is NOT just Web apps I'm here trying to write in LibreOfficea several-page document with minimal formatting, usinga high-spec CAD laptop/workstation -- and every damn keystroke is laggy! My muscle-memory arrow-keys & quick moving around to edit portions of sentences, merge/split lines -- all rendered useless - because I need to wait for the cursor to catch up. A part of my mind keeps wandering off to whether I should go setup another old DOS box and load XYWrite - which was feature-rich, always lightning-fast and never laggy and worked great. Of course, the lack of printer drivers... In every area, the software developers just squander more of the processing power than the incredible continuing hardware advances provide. Anyone have any advice on software that at least attempts to work closer to the metal and lets us see the performance that we should see from modern hardware (for all values of modern)? I got out of the software industry because of this trend to building on multiple layers of squishy software, instead of requiring efficiency - this framework compiles to that pcode, talking to the other API, which gets thunked down to the other ..... where the h*!? is the hardware that does some actual computing? It seems like it happened for the same reason that high-fire-rate rifles took over military use -- because they figured out that most troops couldn't actually shoot straight, so it worked better to just let them spray bullets in the general direction than to require & teach real skills. Similarly, this whole morass seems designed to make it easy for mediocre programmers, and programmers that learn something more serious like Haskell are considered exceptional, while the bulk of stuff is written for
- bullen 7y agoThere is going to be a major C64 revival when the average Joe realizes we have hit the peak in the last human invention: The most sold computer ever in history is still alive: New cases: https://shop.pixelwizard.eu/en/commodore-c64/cases/90/c64c-case-transparent https://shop.pixelwizard.eu/en/commodore-c64/cases/90/c64c-c... New keycaps: https://www.indiegogo.com/projects/keycaps-for-your-commodore-computer#/ https://www.indiegogo.com/projects/keycaps-for-your-commodor... New software: https://csdb.dk/ https://csdb.dk/ It's happening boys, back to the future!
- AtlasBarfed 7y ago"one of the things that makes me steaming mad is how the entire field of web apps ignores 100% of learned lessons from desktop apps" But dude, DESIGN. The design. Look at those rounded corners.
- daxorid 7y agoCasey Muratori and Jonathan Blow have been bitching about this for many years, now, and they're absolutely right. But it's not just UI latency - it's everything. Modern software is, technically and morally, a five alarm tire fire. The profession needs to actively fight Moore's law in order to keep our jobs relevant, and find more "work" to do - most of which is not only poorly engineered, but culturally destructive. If you care about this, there's a tiny community of developers that actually care about reversing it: https://handmade.network/ https://handmade.network/
- phendrenad2 7y agoI think us software developers are so used to doing inherently slow things ("find all" for some function name in a huge codebase, installing packages, compiling assets, starting the iOS simulator, making API calls, waiting for a unnecessary meeting to be over so I can get back to working), that we need a good UX team to tell us when to make things faster. We just don't notice slow things anymore.
- musicale 7y agoSome things that are drastically faster: email, copying files, booting a disk OS and/or waking instantly from sleep (though some 1983 laptops were instant-on), printing, GUIs (try using a Lisa from 1983), any kind of complex computer graphics, software downloads and installation.
- musicale 7y agoThe performance of Microsoft Word seems to be a universal constant across all known hardware.
- zzo38computer 7y agoIt is true. Many stupid programming design, and other stuff, results slowly. They say, type two words and push F3, well, you can implement a telnet (or SSH) service which provides such a program. Or, better may be, what I thought of "SQL Remote Virtual Table Protocol". You can access remote data using local SQL, allowing you do make cross-referencing data, both with the same and with different data sources. Of course, there is still going to be network latency regardless what you do. But many local programs are still slow (as many comments mention), also due to doing too many things, I think. (Maybe network latency may make it a bit slow even if you use telnet to implement the old interface now, but not as slow as with HTML, which is just bad for this kind of things.) Modern user interfaces I think are also bad, and makes it slow. I hate touch screens, and slightly less hate mouse. Command buttons and toolbar icons are bad and keyboard is better, I think. There are some uses for mouse, but it is way overused.
- tripzilch 7y agoHalf the people in this thread keep confusing latency and speed. The other half keep explaining it to them. It's a little repetitive here :)