22 ms·

Almost everything on computers is perceptually slower than it was in 1983 (2017)

• Causality1 7y ago
  I found recently that dragging the middle half of the screen on mobile street view now scrolls up and down the street instead of rotating the view. I don't know why companies obsessively break things that worked fine for years.
• dsalzman 7y ago
  Previous discussion - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21835417 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21835417
  • kick 7y ago
    https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21831931 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21831931 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15643663 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15643663 And so on.
    • spookthesunset 7y ago
      I guess the old fuddy-duttys gotta fuddy-dutty somewhere, eh?
  • SilasX 7y ago
    Can the mods un-dupe this? That was 2 months ago, and it's generated fruitful discussion on a hacker-relevant matter. Certainly more relevant than the Atlas Obscura "look at this quirky history" articles that get upvoted so much.
    • erikbye 7y ago
      I appreciate re-posts when they receive new insightful comments, but 60ish days is perhaps a bit on the short side? However, this re-post now has 300+ comments and has justified its existence.
• ergothus 7y ago
  > almost everything on computers is perceptually slower than it was in 1983 .... amber-screen library computer in 1998: type in two words and hit F3. search results appear instantly. .... now: type in two words, wait for an AJAX popup. get a throbber for five seconds. oops you pressed a key, your results are erased So we start with something 15 years AFTER the title as evidence of the "good" times, then make a vague anecdotal reference to something modern. I've seen POOR performances in places, but the majority of experiences I see now are faster than in 1998 and definitely than 1983. Faster AND more convenient. > And it's worth noting that HYPERTEXT, specifically, is best with a mouse in a lot of cases. Wikipedia would suck on keyboard. Um....no. It's less convenient than a mouse, but way better than the function key-based commands than the author lists. I think there is a lot of room available to complain about terrible interfaces today, and in particular how choked everything is by the need to track and add advertising, but there's no actual evidence in this article, and it comes across as a rant and selective nostalgia.
  • pixl97 7y ago
    Also the amount of data we query in most cases is many orders of magnitude larger. Most of the 1980-1995 cases could fit the entire datasets in CPU cache and be insanely fast. Most things I query these days are in the gigabytes to terabytes range. Lastly, we have to make them secure,especially against malformed data attempting to attack the app, which eats a lot of CPU cycles.
    • ori_b 7y ago
      > Most of the 1980-1995 cases could fit the entire datasets in CPU cache and be insanely fast. How big do you think CPU caches were at the time? CPUs towards the start of the era didn't even have caches.
    • TeMPOraL 7y ago
      > Most of the 1980-1995 cases could fit the entire datasets in CPU cache and be insanely fast. They couldn't then. They had to fit it in RAM. > Most things I query these days are in the gigabytes to terabytes range. That still is in "fits in RAM on a typical PC" to "fits in SSD on a PC, fits in RAM on a server" range. There's little excuse for the slowness of the current searching interfaces, even if your data is in gigabytes-to-terabytes. That's where the whole "a bunch of Unix tools on a single server will be an order of magnitude more efficient than your Hadoop cluster" articles came from.
• stopads 7y ago
  It boggles my mind how terrible the web is becoming on lower end connections. I have about 200ms of delay to most servers and about 5Mbit of bandwidth, and many major web pages take over 30 seconds to load if I don't block most of the assets. It's insane that webpages are now loading megabytes of data across hundreds of http requests before the images even start downloading. I've completely given up on the mobile web since I can't block things the way I need to. It's just unusable. It's a platform that just flat out doesn't work anymore for lots of people in remote areas.
  • squiggleblaz 7y ago
    > I've completely given up on the mobile web since I can't block things the way I need to. Can't you just use uBlock Origin with Firefox Mobile and run it behind a localhost VPN like Blokada? It's not perfect but it seems enough for me. A different localhost VPN will probably give you even better results, if you customise it to your specific purpose.
    • OJFord 7y ago
      Not on iOS, I got one recently for while my Android phone's being repaired, and it was an unwelcome surprise that A) FF (or anything) can't be set as default browser instead of Safari; B) 'content blockers' only work in Safari, even though all browsers are forced to use it to render anyway.
      • magduf 7y ago
        You shouldn't be trying to set anything besides Safari as your default browser in iOS: Apple doesn't want you to. Your desires are not important if you're using an iOS device, and you're thinking wrongly to be wanting to do anything differently. If you want to do things your own way, Apple products are simply not for you; they've made this abundantly clear for decades now.
        • OJFord 7y ago
          I thought I'd try it out while my usual phone's being repaired (plus I'm sceptical it can even be repaired, so that two weeks might turn into four if a replacement isn't forthcoming) - since Android has its issues too. But yeah, I don't think it's for me. It may be a step forward on first-party privacy, but it's two steps back on third-party. And 20 steps back on 'platform freedom', no changing defaults, no file access for running apps like Syncthing, extremely limited customisation of the home screen (I like a simple alphabetical list of apps, nope, can't have that) or 'control centre' (not possible to put hotspot toggle there? Come on...) etc. Plus fonts and UI elements feel massive, on the lowest text size. The Slack 'sidebar' takes up almost the full width, and about five channel names fill the height. (On an SE. Larger models of course have more space, but it's the size of things that irritates me, that presumably wouldn't change, there's just be a few more of them.)
• TomBombadildoze 7y ago
  Almost everything on computers is perceptually more rich, useful, and intuitive than it was in 1983.
  • marcofiset 7y ago
    There's no reason we can't make rich, useful and intuitive software that's crazy fast with today's tools.
  • collyw 7y ago
    Disagree. It looks prettier but its often not more intuitive. Not 1983, but Windows 95 all the icons had text underneath them, so you knew what they did. More recently it took me a couple of years of seeing hamburger menus to make the connection "it's an icon to give you a menu". Those are everywhere but are in no way intuitive.
    • nimajneb 7y ago
      Google has been dropping the hamburger menu, now it's your face, lol. (Google Maps 10.34.4)
  • AlexandrB 7y ago
    Almost everything on computers is more deceptive, user-hostile, and tracked than in 1983.
    • thsealienbstrds 7y ago
      And increasingly, everything _with_ a computer too. I literally cannot use the laundry machines in my apartment building without an app I need to get from Google/Apple app store.
  • benrbray 7y ago
    That may have been true circa 2010, but in the past decade we've seen rich settings menus and compact, information dense interfaces stripped away in favor of "mobile first" designs. Typically, whenever a website / program I use gets a UI update, the only change is that all padding on buttons, text, etc. has been increased by 50% meaning I need to scroll in order to see a 5-item list! Windows 10 control panel is an example of this phenomenon.
• Santosh83 7y ago
  I wouldn't generalise. Behind the scenes modern computer systems are of course processing billions of times more instructions than computers of old. Some portions of the UX do have noticeable delay and sometimes even inordinate delay. This is usually due to poor choice of algorithms and program logic, but sometimes it is the case that blazing speeds of modern hardware has trained most of us to expect every computation to be almost instant, but some algorithms are still pretty slow, no matter how fast the hardware and they are likely to remain that way. Of course the UI in particular doesn't fit into this algorithmic complexity constraint and there is little excuse for their perceptible slowness in recent years except for poor coding and feature creep.
• dayvid 7y ago
  I remember turning on the computer and waiting for the motherboard company logo to finish flashing. After that was the Windows logo. I also remember waiting for the dial-up modem to connect to the internet and waiting hours for a video to download. Heck, last week I played a game streaming on GeForceNow and I was surprised by how seamless the whole experience was. Maybe some web apps are inconvenient, but you can easily setup a command line interface or Linux system and move blazing fast.
  • soulofmischief 7y ago
    > you can easily setup a command line interface or Linux system and move blazing fast Well... not really. Terminal response times are way slower than they used to be in the 80's. Sure, we have greater throughput, but we also have greater latency. https://danluu.com/term-latency/ https://danluu.com/term-latency/
    • GekkePrutser 7y ago
      Not really :) Consider a VT100. It could only go up to 19200 baud, and couldn't actually handle constant streams at that speed. However I do agree with the general message of the article. Current UX is a mess, websites are overblown by tons of javascript. There's no reason there should be loading spinners in this day and age with the power we have at our fingertips.
      • jws 7y ago
        Consider a VT100. It could only go up to 19200 baud… The VMS manuals suggested that system administrators may want to keep the hard wired terminals down to 2400 buad and hide the fact from users by turning on "smooth scroll" (which only scrolled about that fast anyway) in order to keep the interrupt load down on the Vax. Something about batching of interrupts on the multiport serial cards.
        • GekkePrutser 7y ago
          Yes there was that but it also just couldn't handle the full speed continuously. It depended a lot what kind of commands were sent. Full text was fairly OK but drawing commands took a while as far as I remember. In any case, flow control was a must-have in those days. Either CTS/RTS or at least XON/XOFF
• seapunk 7y ago
  Original source: https://twitter.com/gravislizard/status/927593460642615296 https://twitter.com/gravislizard/status/927593460642615296 Threader version (if you’d like to read the compiled version without ads & fake news recommendations): https://threader.app/thread/927593460642615296 https://threader.app/thread/927593460642615296
  • dahart 7y ago
    OH, thank you! This explains why the article is a wall of one-sentence paragraphs.
• lasermike026 7y ago
  The web is lightning fast when I turn off javascript.
  • Waterluvian 7y ago
    I heard people saying this a lot so I decided I'd give it a try. My experience is that this quote is actually, "The web is lightning fast when we don't use most of it." The number of features and websites that just wouldn't work was significant. However, some sites I visited that were informational only did get a bit faster which for some people with bad Internet connections might make a difference. This probably already exists, but what I want is an AdBlocker-style plugin that executes a community-curated list of "websites that need JavaScript to work." I can then get the best of both worlds: faster websites with less unnecessary JavaScript, but without crippling a large portion of the Internet for myself.
  • guggle 7y ago
    True. I get wicked fast blank pages.
• sproketboy 7y ago
  I built a lot of applications like this in Clipper back in the day. With the extended linker they ran light lightning. I have one still in use today.
• davidguda 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" Not perhaps 100% but sure, in the modern age of web apps for everything I miss having proper desktop apps. Even more so, programming web apps is nowhere near as convenient as developing desktop apps in late 90's with tools like Delphi.
  • fwsgonzo 7y ago
    I remember that. It was very easy.. I sort of have that same feeling with .NET, but I wonder if it's still going to be a layer on top of windows C system functions which might just be wrappers for system calls, which require an expensive context switch. One big difference between win95 and now is the security aspect. Another big difference is the tons of services running on Windows 10 now that is always there (such as YourPhone). On Android for some vendors you are forced to use FaceBook and it can't easily be removed.
• michaelfeathers 7y ago
  When an area of engineering is new we make products better than the market will eventually pay for. Over time, we learn how to make them just good enough to reach an equilibrium in a market. This is an idea that is explored in _The World Without Us_ by Alan Wiesman. The Roman Colosseum still stands, but buildings today don't need to be that durable. It would cost significantly more to make them that way, so we don't. The same could be said about supersonic travel. We could do it again, but enough of us are happy to not pay the premium, so that product has disappeared.
  • agumonkey 7y ago
    Thanks so much. I was curious about these things for a very long time now.
  • TeMPOraL 7y ago
    The problem is, the market equilibrium is usually the worst possible garbage that's still fit enough for purpose that it won't break (on average) before the warranty period ends. Some of the money you save on this isn't really saved, you just pay for it in having to replace the product sooner, or being constantly stressed and irritated with the quality and fragility of your tooling (it's essentially death by a thousand cuts for your psyche). So there is a reason to add some extra pressures to the market to raise the floor.
    • jeffdavis 7y ago
      Is that true or does it just seem that way? Cars today are pretty reliable. Random other stuff seems pretty decent as long as you don't buy the absolute cheapest stuff around. I'm working on a solid wood desk with no nails or screws (it's called a "puzzle" desk because it fits together in a stable configuration without any connectors). I'm looking at a backpack, which I assume is nylon, and it seems pretty tough and has lasted through a few adventures. I'm looking at my metal-framed bookcase, which has fake-wood shelves but it still seems pretty sturdy. There are certainly some things that seem worse. Furniture is probably worse overall, but that's because good wood is so much more scarce now. If you buy metal/glass furniture than it's fine. There are also some worrisome practices that are pretty widespread, like using plastic-threaded screw holes rather than metal; or just using really cheap metal that can be stripped or cross-threaded easily. On balance, where are we? I have a feeling that we're basically better off. We remember the old stuff that lasts, and forget about the stuff that breaks (unless it's still celebrated/historical, like the Liberty Bell).
• warrenmiller 7y ago
  I remember when all of this was trees.
• smkellat 7y ago
  A tweet thread where you complain about AJAX popups and other Javascript-based slow downs seems utterly ironic. Whatever happened to having your own blog? Even better is that these tweets were from 2017. This makes me yearn for building an ncurses-rooted non-GUI flavour of Ubuntu.
• hoorayimhelping 7y ago
  This post again with its ridiculous ranting examples. "This text searching program that searches text against text is way faster and simpler than a fully rendered, interactive map of the entire world with accurate roads and precision at the foot / meter level." No. Shit, really? Get out of town. Yes, some very popular apps have bad UX. But some apps have incredible UX. Cherry picking the bad ones while ignoring the good ones to prove a point is boring and not reflective of the actual industry. These posts fondly remember just the speed, but always seem to forget the frustrations, or re-imagine them to be something we treasured. Remember autoexec.bat files? Remember endless configuration to get one program working? Remember the computer just throwing its hands up and giving up when you gave it input that wasn't exactly what it expected? Remember hardware compatibility issues and how badly it affected system stability? Remember when building a computer required work and research and took hours? I do, and it wasn't fun then, it was a detriment to doing what you wanted. It wasn't a rite of passage, it was a huge pain in the ass. So yeah, things are slower now, and I wanna go fast. But I also don't need to spend an entire weekend setting up a PC and a printer for my mom anymore either. I don't need to teach her arcane commands to get basic functionality out of her machine. Plug and play and usability happened, and while things feel slower, computers are now open to a much wider audience and are much more usable now. These posts always have a slight stench of elitism disguised as disappointment.
  • lordleft 7y ago
    There's definitely some cherry-picking of history going on.
    • eggy 7y ago
      Really, because two co-workers have told me they spent weekends trying to configure a printer and downgrading a graphics driver to get their graphics working again. Yes, they are engineers (mechanical, not software), but I have had my share of issues like this, and I started programming in 1978 on a Commodore PET. I do prefer lightweight interfaces, and my wife can't get my Maps app working while I am driving because she has a Samsung and I have a Blackberrry (KeyOne). Things look prettier, and there are a lot of advertisements, but I relate to a lot of these "cherry picked" rants.
• jimhefferon 7y ago
  TeX is faster.
  • BlueTemplar 7y ago
    It tends to be compiled into PDF these days, which is computer-hostile.
• bovermyer 7y ago
  Related to this, is there a native desktop application for kanban? Essentially, a local version of Trello without input lag. I'm tired of web apps.
• ckastner 7y ago
  The author bemoans how everything has gotten (perceptually) slower, and then proceeds to communicate this not through a single letter or blog post, but instead through ninety-five (95) tweets. C'mon.
  • ThomasWinwood 7y ago
    Allow me to reply to your complaint about tweet threads with a tweet thread. https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1066547670477488128.html https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1066547670477488128.html
• deleted 7y ago
  [deleted]
• friedman23 7y ago
  I remember programming culture in the 2000s and it was so stupid. Every programmer whining 24/7 about 'bloat', they were complaining about Java though not electron. Thank God the whiners never got anything they wanted.
  • icedchai 7y ago
    It's even worse now. JavaScript, originally intended for form validation and image preloading, took over. And they decided to compile it (sorry, transpile), thus making front end work as tedious as back end.
  • modo_mario 7y ago
    Oh we still exist. I had this discussion not too long with a colleague about how some slowdown because of bloat he could have easily avoided was a very minor thing. Would require the dude that made it a day to change, would cost another half day to distribute, etc He found it really strange that i was so adamant about such a tiny bit of slowdown that nobody was probably bothered by until i after low-balling the amount of people using the software and amount of times they experienced that delay every workday over the past years calculated how much that had been in total and came out on months of lost time. Even if just a fraction of that ctime ould have been used it would have been worth it.
• dahart 7y ago
  There are indeed a lot of curious examples of computers seeming to go slower today than 20,30,40 years ago. But on the whole, I completely disagree with the summary. My laptop today is faster than anything I’ve ever used before today. It boots faster, it loads files faster, it responds faster, it does more simultaneous things, it crashes far less often. My first computer was an IBM PC jr, and using it was an exercise in patience at all times. Maybe the author never played Ultimate III on an IBM PC. It was sooooo slow. The exact same was true of the computers my friends had, C-64, Atari 800, IBM PC. It probably took a full minute to boot. Maybe the author never saw the memory test PCs used to do before even starting to boot, or how slow floppy drives were. My first modem was 110 baud... that’s a whopping 15 7-bit bytes per second. Downloading a 40x40 character image (picture made out of keyboard characters) took a minute and a half. Downloading games routinely took hours. The PCjr hard crashed and needed reboots all the time. Even my later 486 would do the same thing. Rebooting was something you just did constantly, multiple times per hour. Today, almost never. One thing this article completely avoids acknowledging is the general difference in functionality we have today than with computers in 1983. The database lookups and maps that were faster were faster precisely because they are 7 orders of magnitude smaller data. The article is comparing DBs and maps that fit in the main memory of a computer at the time to databases and maps that are out on the internet and don’t fit on any single computer. It’s amazing that we get the results as fast as we do.
  • rsecora 7y ago
    "Maybe the author never played Ultimate III on an IBM PC. It was sooooo slow." You nailed it.
• martco 7y ago
  Ok boomer
• chooseaname 7y ago
  I remember my BBS days, waiting minutes for stuff that happens instantly now. That being said, it is a bit of a shame that the faster computers get the more time the computer spends on fancy UI elements, etc.
  • geocrasher 7y ago
    "That being said, it is a bit of a shame that the faster computers get the more time the computer spends on fancy UI elements, etc." Isn't that the point of faster computers? ;-)
• blfr 7y ago
  Yes, for a good long while UIs were improving and the last few years I'm fighting most of my computers to stay as usable as they were a decade+ ago. And it's usually a losing battle wherever a terminal isn't available, most painfully on the phone. Online stores have less and less useful categories and filters. Ubuntu's take on Gnome is a weak version of their Unity DE and much less efficient on smaller screens. Google Maps mentioned in the OP in addition to all these problems slowed down significantly. And yes, others have it worse because they don't even have the escape hatches like command line apps and are cast to the webshit wasteland looking for a webapp to unlock their pdf or extract images or whatever. Joe should be offered incredible power by software that encourages him to use it with purpose-built interfaces optimized for him. I am upset by the way that computers disenfranchise non-nerds. I wish it was better for me; I wish it WORKED AT ALL for everyone else. https://twitter.com/gravislizard/status/927621687952076800 https://twitter.com/gravislizard/status/927621687952076800
  • mindcrime 7y ago
    Yes, for a good long while UIs were improving and the last few years I'm fighting most of my computers to stay as usable as they were a decade+ ago. I blame the advent of the "mobile era" and the much smaller screens, and differing I/O capabilities, of mobile devices. And the fact that, at some point, everybody decided "we need one UI that is applied for both desktop and mobile, despite them being completely different types of devices." And now UI design is all muddled up and nobody can (or will) optimize for large screens, keyboards, and mice, because "not everybody has a large screen, a keyboard, and a mouse." But on mobile, the pull remains to keep a UI metaphor that is basically a slight variation of the WIMP interface that originated on desktop. In the end, nobody wins.
  • marcosdumay 7y ago
    > Online stores have less and less useful categories and filters. Yes, I agree. But at the same time, F-Droid has only improved.
• ecpottinger 7y ago
  I use Haiku which is a fast responding OS. Yet I was able to double the speed of the text search program by writing a custom version of GREP, however I also knew the type of searches I did and got rid of a lot of the matching options that were in the original code. Result a far faster program, but far less options available to the user. I think you will find many of the older systems that are faster are also more limited in what options they offer to the users.
• dave_j 7y ago
  An article like this get posted every so often and it is normally absolute trite. When I was a kid I had a hand me down computer. Generally it took 20-30 minutes to load a game from cassette. There was no interchangeability between computer manufacturers. I had the choice of BASIC of Assembly to program in and the whole interface was BASIC. Today I can load up a web browser in a second or two, transfer files between machines with ease (for the most part) and I can download in minutes any language I want to program in.
• Mattasher 7y ago
  This is a major source of dissatisfaction for me as well. Especially latency related to keyboard input and program startup. Are there any resources out there specifically intended to help you speed up your (Mac) with these things?
• maxdo 7y ago
  Another version of “back in those days everything was so good”
• shp0ngle 7y ago
  This post must be 5 year old, nobody says “AJAX” in 2020
  • masswerk 7y ago
    Yes, we now have a few layers of abstractions on top of this. :-)
• geocrasher 7y ago
  I just wish the author used actual paragraphs. I find a string of 1-2 sentence "paragraphs" to be difficult to read. I glanced through it, thought "he's got a good point here and there but its not THAT big of a deal" and then closed it.
• dmead 7y ago
  mice become worse when they switched from ps/2 to usb. ask the quake community.
• dr-detroit 7y ago
  This is the typical CS undergrad way of looking at the world. You don't know why things are the way they are or how they work but you know you can nitpick things and always describe a "wasted" MB here or a "slow" CPU cycle there.
• vectorEQ 7y ago
  people went with HTTP and other shitty models. now we live with the pain. good for selling new hardware tho, so who really cares! There could be tons done to still have our modern looks, but have old skool performance. issue is mainly in how we store and subsequently use data. tons of people still use DOS era softwares just due to this very fact. their old programs they can perform the same work 1000 times faster due to how data is stored / presented. It generally doesn't go through 1000 layers of processing each click, and a lot of data is stored as a 'view', not some raw binary blob to be parsed out again on demand..
• miguelmota 7y ago
  A problem with a lot of web apps today is that they are designed by visual designers that put a lot of emphasis into aesthetics and animations to make it 'stand out' rather focusing on user experience and keeping it dead plain and simple. This is why I love TUIs because they make use of all the screen real estate and all the possible actions are laid out on the screen to easily navigate.
• B008L355 7y ago
  Caffeine be messing with your head boy
• tracerbulletx 7y ago
  rofl. no its not.
• pjungwir 7y ago
  I have a lot of sympathy for this article. (And all the comments about how much faster computers are today: I interpreted the article to be talking about the ease of UI, in other words how fast the interface lets you do things, not how fast the computer does things.) I have a private Rails app I've used as a freelancer for 7-8 years for time tracking, invoicing, expenses, and financial reports, and I've tried to make it very keyboard-focused, so that I can enter info without clicking around. I've always wanted to polish it enough to share and charge money for, and I've thought a nice niche would be to double down on the "keyboard productivity" theme. But making that work well in a browser is tricky. Do you mostly rely on browser-native functionality for keyboard nav/input? That's how it is today. It's fine for me, but it's not really "enough" I think. There are lots of other navigation moves I wish had keyboard shortcuts. But a lot of taste is required here. Usually when people override browser behavior it makes things worse (e.g. scrolling). But there are still things that would be actual improvements. So a couple years ago I rewrote the Invoices section in React+Redux, hoping that would make it easier to do some custom UI behavior. It made a couple small things better, but it's a lot more code, and it breaks some things the browser used to give me for free. For example if you add a new invoice and see it at the bottom of the list, then you click to a non-React part of the site, then click Back, the new invoice disappears from the list! I'm not even sure how to fix that, unless I want to add a spinner and Ajax call on page load. (Right now I pass the initial state as JSON in the rendered HTML.) Maybe I could use local storage, but then somehow when you click Back I have to decide whether to trust local storage or make an Ajax call. . . . Anyway, rather than complaining about the article, I'd be more interested in a conversation about how to build webapps with a keyboard focus, so that you can complete entire tasks without touching the mouse. What native browser features would you leverage? What frontend tech would help you? Can you imagine "standard" patterns you could encode in a JS lib, both for DRY code and for a more predictable UI? A "Bootstrap for keyboard-first webapps" would be really cool. In fact Bootstrap already does a lot for accessibility.
  • BlueTemplar 7y ago
    Stop. Making. Web. "Apps".
• pelasaco 7y ago
  Some 50 years old developer is angry because he must use "the web".. I'm 40, I was using PC XT/AT in 1988, and no, clipper, reading from floppy disk A and rendering it, Wordstar and Lotus weren't faster. You are just older.
• nvesp 7y ago
  Whoa no need to attack the poor mouse. It has its place. Especially in a generation of PC gamers that came up with optical mice. Me personally the muscle memory I have from PC gaming for some reasons or other seem to have made navigating ui with a mouse that much more intuitive to me over the last 2 decades and some odd years. To the point it actually feels really good and extremely proficient to me. I feel like I'm faster using a mouse than just pure kb shortcuts. Although I do use a combination of keyboard short cuts and my mouse. Guess it just depends on the task/work flow.
  • mike_ivanov 7y ago
    "Whoa no need to attack the poor mouse." Did you actually read the article?
    • nvesp 7y ago
      I think I responded to the wrong comment.
  • BlueTemplar 7y ago
    As a PC gamer I can only say : O_o
• jungletime 7y ago
  The problem is human memory! People forget all the features, and dependencies software has. Since the natural direction of the Universe is entropy. As time goes on, software is developed, dependencies are broken, and features quietly stop working. When you look into fixing it, you notice that its this giant hairball of dependencies which nobody can unwind. So then the next best thing is to put another layer of abstraction on the hairball, and you build on. The price of this is things will get slower. My Commodore 64 had a more responsive terminal than my macbook, since it was thin layer over hardware, only one or two abstractions deep. HTML/CSS and Javascript are garbage technologies for making responsive UI, they are so so many levels deep, with so many dependencies and constraints. The way forward is start fresh with something new, but no idea what it is.
  • BlueTemplar 7y ago
    Rust/Vulkan?
• Godel_unicode 7y ago
  What about color-grading video? Photos? Backing up all of your family slides, negatives, and portraits? Learning to program for free on your own time? Get out of here with this spotlight-y maga-esque ridiculousness.
  • erikbye 7y ago
    > Learning to program for free on your own time? We have been doing this for many decades.
    • Godel_unicode 7y ago
      Maybe a small select group have been. Do you really believe that the resources available in 1983 are even in the same category as the current ones? Come on.
      • erikbye 7y ago
        > Do you really believe that the resources available in 1983 are even in the same category as the current ones? No, I never wrote anything remotely close to suggest so, if by "in the same category" you mean volume. If you implied quality, well, that is another matter. There is so much low-quality content online; you could argue it makes enough noise to drown out the high-quality content. The first search results are rarely the best. However, people should stop disseminating distorted realities. People learned things before the Internet. I would even suggest many learned better before the Internet. You did not need a superficial Medium blog post on a subject or a hand-holding tutorial. You reverse engineered the binary. Besides, there's been a ton of books on programming for a long time. I have a great one from '78, The C Programming Language.
        • Godel_unicode 7y ago
          > you could argue it makes enough noise to drown out the high-quality content > I would even suggest many learned better before the Internet. Ok Boomer.
• strictnein 7y ago
  LOAD"*",8,1 Go get a snack and a drink, walk back to the computer bzz bzzzztttzzzt bzzzz Oh, great, I recognize that noise from the disk drive, it means the game is almost loaded. Just another 30 more seconds.
  • rsecora 7y ago
    Right... or it can be even slooooower, you can watch a full "V" episode if you have a Datasette. As you point out, the waiting times were not in the seconds but in the two digit minutes.
    • strictnein 7y ago
      Yep. PRESS PLAY ON TAPE Might as well go walk the dog.
• StreamBright 7y ago
  I think it has something to do with the 30M lines of code problem. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kZRE7HIO3vk&feature=youtu.be https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kZRE7HIO3vk&feature=youtu.be
• dagaci 7y ago
  For the web users if a user spends more time clicking and browsing, this contributes to the interactive usage statistics of the web app. Apps like facebook, twitter, linkedin, instagram often feel like your wading through mud. The drive to have users spend more time in your web app overrides and has a higher priority over efficiency of the user experience.
• stiray 7y ago
  I am just stepping away from web topic as it is irelevant. Slow VM, huge text files, lasignas of code stacked one on another. Comparison here just isnt fair, I do understand that people who never expirienced MFC 6 application cant compare it to browser. As they know only browser/electron/... But just last weekend I have installed Windows 7 on modern i7 computer (with SSD). Sure, half of drivers didnt work etc. but it did boot. Everything I have started was instantanious. The dreaded decompressing stage at end of installation? 5-10 seconds. Then I have installed Windows 10 with office, I am so sorry I didnt install Office 97 (I didnt have installation) to the Windows 7, as I did install 356 to the machine, so I cant compare here (and for my usage they are both more than enough). But. The Windows 7 was much faster in everything while not offering major improvement in features. Bottom line. The software was optimized for what the hardware speed was at that time. On new computers it is lightning fast. When the hardware become faster, no one cared to optimize anything and layers of bloat added to it. Sure, the production of software is cheaper, everyone could code today ("omg, i need to free allocated memory, the horror"). Instead of improving on features, performance, we have optimized on production costs. And major improvements on hardware processing power are lost in more bloat in code and adding endless layers of abstractions, virtual machines, wastefull protocols, languages. It is sad.
  • nonbirithm 7y ago
    I think if something is possible to do given better hardware, no matter how bloated or useless, developers at large will end up doing it. I don't think RAM usage or performance are concerns for the people that go straight to Electron because in the present it's easy develop for and nobody has the right to force them to chose otherwise. Electron isn't going away; the only ways it improves are Chrome getting more performant or computers getting even faster. Either one is nontrivial to work on as an outsider - there are only two significant browser engines in the present age because they've become so complex and accumulated so many features that they require the support of well-funded corporations to maintain them, and computer processors can only become so small. Browsers on the whole will not lose features. The web is ubiqutous and cutting down the number of features to maintain would break existing webpages. The resulting web standard establishes a hard baseline on the amount of complexity needed to engineer a standards-compliant browser. That in turn means a hard baseline on the amount of processing power required to run it acceptably, save for more performance gains that will surely be buried immediately under even more features. I once tried using Firefox 1.0 and found it was impossible since it has no understanding of modern security protocols. The web as viewed by Firefox 1.0 in 2003 no longer exists. You can't practically divorce the features necessary to use the web such as new protocol compatibility with the extra features like Pocket in the code changes. And trying to do so anyway leads to Pale Moon where a scant few contributors are responsible for merging in dozens of security patches - which themselves come about due to the growing complexity of the web platform. Numerous people have called using it irresponsible from a security standpoint. In the end the endless growth of web standards and the code needed to support them has made that fact a necessary one. For all practical purposes, you either use one of the two major browsers or get left behind by coders and organizations that have orders of magnitude more resources than you. Society and the economy don't incentivize creators with being happy with a modest amount of features if there's a glaring increment in performance that ought to be seized on. It's about growth and innovation. Finding new ways to reinvent the wheel and get further away from the hardware, because it's now easy to. Sometimes I wish we could undo growth. It would be nice if Electron and the like fall out of favor and we have a renaissance of software like it was designed in 2004. But enough developers have decided that the performance tradeoff is worth it, and average users have become desensitized to SPAs and their expectations are low enough that they would rather put up with it all in order to do what they need to instead of demanding better. I feel like it can only keep growing. That's one thing the collaborative nature of software pushes forward. More features. It's just that some are better at limiting the scope of projects than others.
• rsecora 7y ago
  The experience of the 80s was really slowness, things were so slow that now It's unimaginable now. So unimaginable that we don’t remember any more common actions by 1983. The experience was so slow, that you can play another game while loading [1]. Namco even patented "playing games during load” by 1987 [2]. As an example, I have fond memories of my C64 tape loading Hunchback [3] ... while watching "V". A single tape can take one hour if it fails in the middle and you need retries. All those waiting times were order of magnitude of what a common toddler will expect today. We were so relieved when the fast loaders appears [4] or when a 1541 arrived home [5]. And then we were so frustrated when the 1541 was only 300bytes/s instead of the 300bits/s of the Datasette. The scenario in Xenix or PC-DOS loading from 8" floppies was similar. I'm not arguing that now are better times, I’m arguing that in the 80s we have the best for the time, and those were good times to remember. [1] Mini Games: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Invade-a-Load https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Invade-a-Load [2] Nanco patent: https://patents.google.com/patent/US5718632A/en https://patents.google.com/patent/US5718632A/en [3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hunchback_(video_game) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hunchback_(video_game) [4] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fast_loader https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fast_loader [5] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Commodore_1541 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Commodore_1541 (edited link formats)
  • rahuldottech 7y ago
    Links formatted as code sorta defeat the point, right?
    • rsecora 7y ago
      Right, edited
      • rahuldottech 7y ago
        All good :)
• jp57 7y ago
  Opening a web browser is way faster now. In 1983 it took ten years.
• shadowgovt 7y ago
  Useful to know: the 'past' link underneath a headline on HN will show you past instances of the same URL being shared as news. This is our 6th time discussing this topic, and we have become exceedingly efficient at it.
• crazygringo 7y ago
  Even if true, our computers are able to access many, many, many orders of magnitude of information than my computer could in 1983. What my computer can do for me today is probably 1,000 times more valuable to me than what my computer could do in 1983. If it takes being slower, I'll take that tradeoff in a heartbeat. (But I also remember it taking up to a couple minutes to load a program from a floppy, so there's also that.)
• excerionsforte 7y ago
  Google Maps is great for A to B. I love it. Use it even if I know the route since traffic can be a pain. It appears fast for me. I'm very much disconnected from what the post says. I've used DOS, Windows 3.1, Windows 95 and so on. Now I'm on Mac and Fedora. Never will look back. Let's remember here that most operations were executed against a cache of data on the local system. That cache is way too big to store on the local system nowadays, so of course we are going contact a server to perform the operations and we will experience network latency that will vary. US internet speed has stagnated. Some time in the future, if typical ISPs don't get their way and we get faster and faster connection speed then these latency complaints will be irrelevant. Developers could do better in sending less data in general, but that will take more time. Does product management care much about latency if they are not given the mandate? We seem to all want features and more features, but less of the cruft that follows as a result of development, which is weird. Best way to vote in the end is to just build your own application however you can. Waze's features would have never made it into Google Maps if users were not using them instead of Google Maps.
• ixtli 7y ago
  I hate to be this guy but there are good points in here so why is there a newline after every sentence? This is not how written english is supposed to work :( EDIT: Apparently its output from a twitter thread unroller. My point still stands and, ironically, its another example of how randomly smashing a bunch of applications together is broadly a degradation on the status quo.
  • arathore 7y ago
    The original content was a series of tweets and the link is a website that summarizes long twitter threads, so each newline indicates a follow-up tweet.
• zwaps 7y ago
  This may be related to my bad hardware (which is, albeit, not bad on paper). However, there used to be a time when websites were fast. Like HN is now. Now, most "apps" and websites are slow. Some are downright sluggish and unusable. Maybe I am doing something wrong.
  • rahuldottech 7y ago
    I wish all websites were as lightweight and fast as HN. I sorta want to use New Reddit (because I like having smaller windows for multitasking and responsiveness makes that much more convenient) but boy is it painfully slow even on a 100+ mbps connection
• ThaJay 7y ago
  Google maps is actually bloody good at just being a map. It's extremely convenient to zoom in and out, click around, view locations, add them to your route, etc. Yes you can up the productivity by using more tabs and that is the standard nowadays because we humans are being trained to be multitasking monsters. Forgive me for ending my read there because to me it just sounds like a rant from a bitter old person that doesn't understand this brave new world any more.
• lunias 7y ago
  Computers of the past were undoubtably slower on average; both in terms of physical performance as well as their UX. The software of now, when compared to the software of then, is slow relative to the hardware that it runs on. Before we used to strive to do more with less. Today we strive to do more with more. In an attempt to do more, faster and easier; we've made trade offs. I wish we would circle back and remember the https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unix_philosophy https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unix_philosophy. Not every app needs every feature rolled out by FAANG in the last decade. JavaScript is not the best choice for every part of every application stack. It seems important to me that programs become focused and composable again.
• dragonsh 7y ago
  Google maps is a bad example in tours rant. Used it to explore many cities, not only turn by turn direction. It worked get although personally like openstreet maps, because I feel one company s shouldn’t control so many aspects of life and like open source nature of it. Indeed able to discover a onsen built by community in Hokkaido. That’s based on a lake I saw by just zoom in out of the map to do exploration and saw it built by Ainu community living there. In that turn by turn map helped quite a lot to reach there subsequently just by click and dropping a pin there. Submitted a text describing it and subsequently visited by many people. Took a journey through treacherous mountain and went up to 2500 meters high and crossed it via a tiny off-road designed for motorcycles. That too did based on exploration of map on phone. Paper maps didn’t provide such convenience. Yes POS is slow, but then it has different expectations today. Try integrating old POS with 10 payment network working under milliseconds to authorise transactions. Worked enough since 1990 with dos based POS and also wrote IBM MQ C++ code for integration. Don’t want to go back there. I think today is a step forward. Like always there will be good and bad as it was in 1980 or 1990. But largely today we do much more with computers than we ever did in those days. So not everything is perceptually slow on computers. Apple Watch, iphone, androids are responsive and usually fast. Windows 10 for certain tasks might be slow but then overall it’s not that bad either. As far as exploration goes you can do the same or even more today than before. I can discover planets. Built3D model in physical form, use CNC on desktop, do laser cutting in my home. Built a computer like BBC micro, raspberry pi, fly a computer using fly by wire and test it using real physical model plane. Can do farming on a small scale using hydroponics at home. Can just go on and on about it. All possible thanks to advancement in speed and reduction of size in computing devices and peripherals. So I feel it’s not slow, just the work we do with old computers is very different from what we do with modern one’s.
• bonestormii_ 7y ago
  To me, this the major paradigm shift is away from native clients to a model that, at the very least, allows for the entire client to be re-downloaded every time the application is loaded, which is the case in the current web app landscape. Even if the entire application is stored locally, the goal is frequently on code reuse with systems like React, so it is still baked into the design. We talk about function keys being missed--but the fact is, one of the main issues is that your web browser already makes use of many of these keys. This is not a problem with the web app you are using, but with the fact that you are using a web app, which is a client running within your browser, itself a native client. Simply returning to native desktop clients for productivity software would be a huge step in the right direction. There are economic incentives not to accommodate this user need, however. Developers need to offer cloud-based, app-based access to their services in order to remain competitive. For many companies, it is built into their SaaS business model! If you develop a productivity application professionally, you would need to believe that the existence of the native client (and all of the resources and man hours it consumes) will give you a meaningful competitive edge. The benefits to users are obvious to developers who have time to reflect on it, and to the users running a POS system, but not to the people several levels above the POS operator who are making decisions. For them, a cloud system that centralizes access, control, and supervision works better for them. I had a job recently where I had to do data entry for a lot of invoices into a intranet cloud system. The system was slow; fields had bugs that literally caused the text to be entered backwards for some reason (seriously)... and it sucked for me. But for our business partner who was a majority owner of our main asset, it affords them control, centralization, and remote administration. I actually agree with the OP aesthetically, but it dwells on the POS operator and forgets the hidden user-- POS operator's managers and business ownership. I will also say that to those of you who feel anti-javascript--an SPA is much better at managing stateful applications than dynamically pages generated by the server, and I'd much prefer to minimize chat between client and server where possible, which SPA frameworks do afford. I think the whole thing could be improved by better support for native-style applications in the browser, possibly running in some "native mode". The last thing all say is that windows are nice for multitasking, but they do represent a significant cognitive load to manage, and you can't usually do it from muscle memory. I remember teaching my grandparents to use AOL in around ~2000, and I literally had to make exercises for them to try to establish "object permanence" with windows that were hidden. The interface appeared flat to them, and they didn't intuitively grasp that another window jutting out behind another was a part of a separate interface altogether. They got it eventually, but it is the type of thing that is easy to forget when we live our lives enmeshed in window based operating systems. But look at phones--they don't have window-like functionality even after all this time, with bigger and better screens, multi-core processors, etc. Why? Because we still consider a phone to be a "device". It's capable of multitasking, but we subdue that aspect of the interface in favor of focus and usability. Terminal applications are similar in that respect, and I think that's why people find them attractive in some contexts. To anyone who feels strongly about this, I'd say: Develop a beautiful productivity app for native desktop usage. Market it. Make people fall in love with it. A deluge of such apps may promote a reversal of this trend.
• gravislizard 7y ago
  As the OP who wrote this while drunk two years ago and thinks that about 30-50% of it is objectively wrong, it's extremely funny to me that every five months someone reposts it here and everyone gets in a fight about it again. Many of the details are wrong - the thesis is still completely valid, and it's Computer Person Thinking that wants to attack the details while refusing to stand back and look at the overall picture, which is that using computers is now an incredibly messy experience where nothing quite does what you want, nothing can be predicted, nothing can be learned. I hypothesize that this is because programmers and other various Computer People consider "being on the computer" to be a satisfying goal in itself that sometimes has positive side effects in the real world, while everyone else simply has stockholm syndrome.
  • drbawb 7y ago
    >I hypothesize that this is because programmers and other various Computer People consider "being on the computer" to be a satisfying goal in itself that sometimes has positive side effects in the real world, while everyone else simply has stockholm syndrome. Oh believe me, as much as I love being on the computer for the sake of it, I don't enjoy having that screen time utterly wasted by shit software. There's only so many hours in a day after all. I work w/ ERP software, so I see people still using text-mode UIs on a daily basis (hell I track my time w/ one), and I also support a "modern" ERP that is GUI based and can "run inside a browser." (Which nobody actually does, because it sucks, doesn't support all features, and swallows up tons of keyboard shortcuts.) One of these packages can be run comfortably from a $5 Linux VPS. The other package asks for two _very fast_ SAS storage arrays, 32GB of RAM, minimum of 6 CPU cores, etc. Of course you've gotta license Windows for all of that, which thankfully is not my job. (That or you spin it up in "the cloud" I guess, and pay thousands of dollars annually to rent somebody else's computer, since this software is not "cloud native" at all, no matter what their sales people say.) I try to leave the software better/faster/more usable than I found it, but it's hard when the upstream vendor is just piling shit on the fire so they can pitch their half-implemented features on the sales brochure: with absolute no regard for the added operational overhead of the garbage code.
• gravislizard 7y ago
  As the OP who wrote this while drunk two years ago and thinks that about 30-50% of it is objectively wrong, it's extremely funny to me that every five months someone reposts it here and everyone gets in a fight about it again. Many of the details are entirely inaccurate - the thesis is still completely valid, and it's Computer Person Thinking that wants to attack the details while refusing to stand back and look at the overall picture, which is that using computers is now an incredibly messy experience where nothing quite does what you want, nothing can be predicted, nothing can be learned. I hypothesize that this is because programmers and other various Computer People consider "being on the computer" to be a satisfying goal in itself that sometimes has positive side effects in the real world, while everyone else simply has stockholm syndrome and has long since given up on even imagining a better experience.
  • dhconnelly 7y ago
    I've been working on Google Maps for close to five years now. I somehow missed the previous postings of this thread, but a little hyperbole never hurt anyone :) Your larger point about the inability in our profession to take a step back and consider the overall situation is spot-on. The mindset I most commonly encounter among other engineers when discussing any kind of systemic problems in our practices is a kind of "it's $CURRENT_YEAR, of course things are the best they've ever been and we've solved all known problems. Also what is $KNOWN_SINCE_DECADES_TRIVIAL_SOLUTION_TO_MAJOR_PROBLEM?"
    • scottlocklin 7y ago
      hey did you ever use the old Verizon map app that came with their pre-Android phones? That was really, really good.
      • dhconnelly 7y ago
        No, didn't know about it. Interesting!
      • prostheticvamp 7y ago
        Huh. I did, and thought it was atrocious. Its only benefit at the time was live re-routing: the competition at the time, short of buying an actual GPS, was printing out directions from mapquest and hoping you don’t make a wrong turn. I recall a few times driving out of state where I’d miss an exit, be unable to figure out my way to where I needed, pull over at a phone booth or public business, and start calling to see who was home and could run mapquest for me to get me back on the road. Don’t miss that.
• rboes2 7y ago
  Sorry this seemed like a terrible article to me. Pure bs.
• carapace 7y ago
  This kills me. Everything from waiting for the machine to boot (WTF ARE YOU DOING IN THERE???) to waiting for the machine to shut down. Oberon on a twenty-year-old thinkpad is a better faster OS. Go try it for yourself: https://schierlm.github.io/OberonEmulator/emu.html?image=FullDiskImageWithSource&width=1024&height=576 https://schierlm.github.io/OberonEmulator/emu.html?image=Ful... This is faster in your browser than your whole computer can run the current bloated crap. Click "reset" in the gear menu and watch it reboot. OOoooo so fast. Oberon OS plus "Gadgets" has never yet been equaled or exceeded by any other UI, anywhere. If you haven't used it you can't know. Just the separation of selection and (text, not mouse) cursor is so useful, let alone the built-in cut/copy/paste with mouse chords. Don't get me started on the Gadgets system... But enough about the greatest OS+UI ever made... (And my computer freezes for a full second when I scrolled down to the broken (on my machine) image. The fuck Firefox Y U so slow!? Junk. It's all junk. Made out of junk, fractal dimensions of over-wrought crap. Redundant computations that burn energy to do nothing but fail to be better than decades-old versions of itself, the fires of a digital hell.)
• fortran77 7y ago
  I'm old enough to have done applications that were meant to run on IBM 3270 terminals. Applications that dealt with text and filling out forms were probably better on the 3270-style interface than they are on most web applications, for no good reason. Several times a week I get bitten by a bad form. Forget to put in my Country, hit submit, and the entire form gets erased with an error message, etc. That being said, for graphical applications his hated mouse is better than what we had in the late 70s. Doing CAD on Tektronics 4010 light-pen terminals wasn't fun. People still went back to T-squares and drafting tables because of this. https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/6/62/Computervision_piping.agr.jpg https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/6/62/Computer...
• anonnyj 7y ago
  I hate when games do something like have their main menu be a webpage. All I care about is the start button and it takes a good 10 seconds some time just for it to pop up.
• arminiusreturns 7y ago
  I would say it doesn't have to be like this. I have made a whole thing out of stripping complexity out of things, which includes favoring cli tools over gui counterparts, etc, and most of my daily stack is nice and fast and not suffering from this. Webpages with good adblocking and scriptblocking start to seem functional again, but are still the main sticking point since I am doing a whitelist approach (and sometimes forget to commit my rule changes). If a program is written in electron it's an automatic "won't install" for example. The same for npm. If one can learn to be more discerning in their tooling they can avoid many of these pitfalls. I would also say; go on a pid hunt sometime. Does that process really need to be running? No, like really? systemctl list-units --all --type=service systemctl disable $service.service systemctl mask $service.service
• Covzire 7y ago
  The only slowness I feel running off an NVMe SSD is iTunes on Windows. For some reason Apple made every basic click in iTunes have a built in delay. Doing almost anything has 300-5000ms of delay. Playing video and seeking ahead or back freezes for about 5 seconds for me, while VLC, MPC-BE or Power DVD are nearly instant for 60GB 4K UHD files played off a NAS.
• downerending 7y ago
  One of the things that drew me to Linux in '93 was running 'find /' on the console. This was blindingly fast versus the same on a SparcStation 4 (a far more expensive and generally superior platform). This was sort of an accident, in that SparcStation consoles were slow partly because they weren't meant to be used. But still, it was impressive as hell at the time.
• Mikeb85 7y ago
  > When you're all done, you go back to your plotted trip and start laying out the chosen locations and optimizing your path. > You can do this with a paper map. You can't do this with gmaps. So you just don't do it. Has this guy never used Google Maps? You can definitely plot out a trip with multiple points and pick specific routes for each leg along the way. I know because I take a lot of road trips. Anyhow, computers might be perceptually slower but do so, so much more and are more pleasant to use. Being able to save all my documents to the cloud and use them from any browser is massive. Google Maps has changed the way I travel. The fact I can control my TV from my browser while using HN and planning a route on Gmaps at the same time. The fact I can plug anything into my laptop and have it just work (even my Linux laptop!). And if you really, really miss that 80's era text-only interface, well, you can still have that. Again though, the sheer amount of data you have access to nowadays and the way computers can visualise it is mind-boggling. Staying on the maps theme, the fact you can find any location on earth, get a satellite image of it and a whole bunch of info in it just by dragging a map around is insane, and I grew up in the early internet era.
• aforwardslash 7y ago
  Vaguely related, someone measured keyboard latency and it does seem slower https://www.extremetech.com/computing/261148-modern-computers-struggle-match-input-latency-apple-iie https://www.extremetech.com/computing/261148-modern-computer...
• fourzs 7y ago
  It was really nice of this guy to take time out of his busy day at the retirement home to write this.
• kavi87 7y ago
  The author does not own a smartphone apparently.
• hackpert 7y ago
  A use case where I see this issue very often and would love to see pure text based interfaces is healthcare. Half of providers’ and nurses’ time is spent clicking on tiny things in drop down boxes before scanning a barcode, which to me is pretty silly. Hitting F4 or something and entering whatever, and then scanning would make it so much faster.
• cathames 7y ago
  thanks for writing what I've been thinking for so long
• kfarr 7y ago
  Dan Luu's post on computer latency is my favorite data driven approach to this topic: https://danluu.com/input-lag/ https://danluu.com/input-lag/
• mseepgood 7y ago
  Is a 1982 Commodore 64 faster than a new MacBook Pro? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nI3C9yLVsVE https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nI3C9yLVsVE
• Semiapies 7y ago
  My problem is that I remember hard drives randomly and audibly grinding for several seconds, making me unable to do anything else. I remember old word processors lagging behind my typing. I remember waiting for greenscreen systems to pull down results from a search on a remote server. When everything was great and optimized (and optimal), many things could be instant, back in the day. Funnily enough, the same is true now.
• root_axis 7y ago
  This is just totally untrue. Even my Windows 10 computer boots from BIOS screen to login screen in under 8 seconds. I remember what it was like running windows in 1994, even after waiting 40 seconds for windows to start up, I'd wait upwards of an additional 3 minutes before the computer was actually usable. I remember with keen frustration waiting for the churning disk noise to die down as a signal that the computer was no usable. Since the mid 2000s or so this has just never been a problem.
• seemslegit 7y ago
  Wasn't around computing in 1983 but phone and web app latency are still way behind the average early 2000s office or line-of-business app. Also ironic is the act that the most significant improvement in responsiveness during the last 20 years was afforded not by better software or even faster CPUs but by the move to SSDs for OS, data and swap space.
• agumonkey 7y ago
  Said this already but worth repeating: the best computer application I interacted with was an AS400 era tax filling system. It was a superb tool in the prettiest meaning. It was a care free, lag free, pedagogy free thing. Fill out data as it comes (the only smart key you needed was tab and shift-tab), smarter than the average web app form validation checks and suggestions. Think instant Elm typecheck where you enjoy the computer assisting work. I was in 4th year in college and blown away how this thing beat anything we'd see or studied in school yet it was antique pre-OO pre-UML (maybe an ancestor of modeling hygiene though). I wish I could have a talk with the team who wrote that. Of course it was about to be replaced by a web2.0 variant which was a resource hog, required constant scrolling, didn't do half of the old work but was full colored css.