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> More to the point, I grew up with early Windows XP computers and early 90s Internet He is talking about running local software before mainstream internet was

> More to the point, I grew up with early Windows XP computers and early 90s Internet He is talking about running local software before mainstream internet was a thing. That is, locally installed software without a single line of network code in them. MS Word started faster on my dads Motorola based Mac with a 7MHz CPU and super-slow spinning rust-drives than it does on my current PC with a 4GHz CPU and more L3 cache than the old Mac had RAM all together. Modern software really is immensely slow.

danShumway 7y ago
But is software getting worse or better? Even from a premise that the introduction of networking and graphical GUIs was a huge mistake that caused software quality to plummet dramatically, a lot of modern software today is still faster and better designed than the software I had as a kid. I can maybe accept that I got born at the wrong time and everything before that point was magical and wonderful. I never used early DOS word processors so I can't speak to whether the many features we have today are a worthwhile tradeoff for the startup speed. I'll have to take your word for it. But if people want to say that we're actively making stuff worse today, they're skipping over a massive chunk of history. If you look at the overall trend of how computers have changed since the 90's, I think literally the worst thing you could say is that we are still recovering from a software quality crash. People either forget or dismiss that a lot of early 90s software was really, really bad -- both in terms of performance and UX. From the original post: > 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 I'm still calling bull on this, because I also used 1998 Library computers and a lot of them were garbage. And I've used modern Library search engines, and while they're not great, a good many of them have substantially improved since then. This is a rose-colored view of history based off of individual/anecdotal experiences. I'm not wildly optimistic about everything in the software ecosystem today. I do wish some things were simpler, I do see systemic problems. But holy crap, HN is so universally cynical about computing right now, and I feel like there's a real loss of perspective. There are tons of reasons to be at least somewhat optimistic about the direction of computing.

danShumway 7y ago

But is software getting worse or better? Even from a premise that the introduction of networking and graphical GUIs was a huge mistake that caused software quality to plummet dramatically, a lot of modern software today is still faster and better designed than the software I had as a kid. I can maybe accept that I got born at the wrong time and everything before that point was magical and wonderful. I never used early DOS word processors so I can't speak to whether the many features we have today are a worthwhile tradeoff for the startup speed. I'll have to take your word for it. But if people want to say that we're actively making stuff worse today, they're skipping over a massive chunk of history. If you look at the overall trend of how computers have changed since the 90's, I think literally the worst thing you could say is that we are still recovering from a software quality crash. People either forget or dismiss that a lot of early 90s software was really, really bad -- both in terms of performance and UX. From the original post: > 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 I'm still calling bull on this, because I also used 1998 Library computers and a lot of them were garbage. And I've used modern Library search engines, and while they're not great, a good many of them have substantially improved since then. This is a rose-colored view of history based off of individual/anecdotal experiences. I'm not wildly optimistic about everything in the software ecosystem today. I do wish some things were simpler, I do see systemic problems. But holy crap, HN is so universally cynical about computing right now, and I feel like there's a real loss of perspective. There are tons of reasons to be at least somewhat optimistic about the direction of computing.