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I call bullshit. The sort of attitude expressed in this thread is important, because it pushes us forward. The author identifies real UX shortcomings with curre

I call bullshit. The sort of attitude expressed in this thread is important, because it pushes us forward. The author identifies real UX shortcomings with current software. Nevertheless, the assertion that "almost everything on computers is perceptually slower than it was in 1983" is patently false, and the comparison between online maps and paper maps seems almost intentionally obtuse. Yes, online maps could have even more capability and better UX than they do today. No, it is not more difficult to conduct mapping activity today than it was in the 90s. (For instance, the example given about finding interesting places to stop along a route: the 90s equivalent of that would have been a book, separate from the map, not searchable, and full of things completely irrelevant to your interests. So yes, maybe putting a mark on a piece of paper is easier than doing it in online maps, but every other aspect of that process is way harder without the internet.)

marcinzm 6y ago
>So yes, maybe putting a mark on a piece of paper is easier than doing it in online maps, but every other aspect of that process is way harder without the internet. Only if you know where on the map the place is which you wouldn't since you found it in a book. In Google Maps, I click "Add Destination" and put in the address. Drag it to the right places and it's now part of my route. On a paper map, I need to spend 10 minutes finding the address, referring to the index on the back to find the right square.
- yaktubi 6y ago
  Yes but you’ll know and remember the route after plotting it yourself—and spatial awareness increases making you a better driver. Think of it this way: everything our phones/computers do for us reduces our ability to do the same task in the long and short term.
  - mosselman 6y ago
    This seems off-topic since the article is about perception of speed.
  - jjk166 6y ago
    Yes, and every time I go to the grocery store my ability to hunt mammoths is reduced. Anesthesia reduces my ability to just deal with the pain of surgery. A pen reduces my ability to chisel words into stone. Exposing us less to the challenges of the past is not a bug, it's a feature.
    - yaktubi 6y ago
      See your thoughts make no sense because you’re on the computer all day. Mammoths, anesthesia, and pens don’t do computations for people
  - marcinzm 6y ago
    Instead I can optimize my brain and time for other tasks which are either more useful or more enjoyable.
CodeWriter23 6y ago
Try servicing your neighbor’s P4 running XP machine, then review your position. (I recently had the pleasure of doing this) It’s not all the way back to 1983, but the snappiness compared to Win 10 or macOS on recent hardware is startling.
- bluedino 6y ago
  I don't miss the 2 minutes to boot up or 10 seconds to start Word and 60 seconds to start Adobe products.
  - a2tech 6y ago
    Adobe Photoshop 7 took literally seconds to open on my 500mhz Pentium 3. On my brand new SSD iMac, 31 seconds cold, 7 seconds from a warm start (which honestly is WAY better than I thought it was going to be).
  - mtgx 6y ago
    The speed-up for those is mostly about using a fast SSD today vs a slow HDD back then, not that much to do with the OS/software themselves. If anything 90's software would run circles around today's software if it was using today's hardware. And I think that's the point of the article.
  - usrnm 6y ago
    The progress in boot times has much more to do with SSDs than anything software-related.
    - coding123 6y ago
      Not if you go back far enough. Ultima 8 Pagan, whenever I switched "maps" on my 386 it literally took about a minute to load the next area. When I got my next computer it was a Pentium 100 Mhz. That thing loaded the next map area in about 1-2 seconds. Both of those computers did not use SSDs.
    - hedora 6y ago
      Linux booted faster on my Pentium 100 with a hard disk than with my i7 + SSD. The root cause is that when Linux moved to parallel “fast” boot and DBUS they didn’t add APIs to the kernel to work through all the race conditions around modules loading, etc. So, it has to sleep for a second here or there to let hardware stabilize. I first noticed this about 10 years ago (on a new, faster machine, X would fail to start because the video card kernel module hadn’t finished loading yet). It has gotten worse since. On one machine, I have an NFS mount over WiFi. Network manager wants mount to complete before it runs because they didn’t think before they implemented it. I eventually got that machine to boot, but it takes an extra 5 seconds.
shaan7 6y ago
The fact that online maps didn't even exist back then is not relevant. The point the author is making is that he feels that if it did exist then it would've had better UX (again, whether or not that is true is a different question).
- marcus_holmes 6y ago
  Again, not 1983, but I was using a DOS (iirc we didn't buy the Windows version because it was too slow) mapping tool to create routes for trucks around 1990/91. It was slow, awkward, and needed a few days' training to get up to speed with. Redrawing a map on the screen took a couple of seconds. Scrolling around to find stuff wasn't really possible. But give it a postcode and it knew where everything was. And give it a list of 10 postcodes and it would spit out the best route a few minutes later. Google's UX for everything except search is utter shite. I don't know what they think they're doing. Anyone here from Google who can explain why their UX is so crap?
  - marcosdumay 6y ago
    > I don't know what they think they're doing. They are doing search. Specifialy, the monetizable variety of it.
    - marcus_holmes 6y ago
      yeah, OK, but why make the rest of it so shit?
      - marcosdumay 6y ago
        If you look closely you'll see that Google Maps are not a shitty general purpose application specialized on search. It's a single purpose map application that people insist on using for things that aren't search. It's laser focused on generating revenue. The real question is why do people insist on using it? If people didn't, they would have to broaden their goals.
  - 6y ago
pcnix 6y ago
Dan Luu has some interesting metrics on this [1]. This strikes at a slightly different problem, the latency of actually showing things on screen, but points out that not all is going well. https://danluu.com/input-lag/ https://danluu.com/input-lag/
bJGVygG7MQVF8c 6y ago
> the assertion that "almost everything on computers is perceptually slower than it was in 1983" is patently false Excessively dismissive. It's not so patently false when you recall that applications on personal computers were designed to do much less in 1983 than they are now. The model gestured at in the assertion is (arguably) one in which perceptual speed is a function of an application's (1) proximity to the outer bounds of a machine's capabilities, and (2) the efficiency of its implementation. This is elucidating, and a useful contribution.
BFatts 6y ago
I'm not sure you can call bullshit on someone's "perception". It's an opinion - if he sees it as slower, then he sees it as slower. Nothing you can do will convince his brain to see it faster.
coding123 6y ago
Yes... spot on - bullshit. Also, if you some real fucking power, try this: https://ls2pac.lapl.org/?section=search&term=grapes%20of%20wrath https://ls2pac.lapl.org/?section=search&term=grapes%20of%20w... Yeah, NOT only can you check out an ebook of Grapes or Wrath FROM HOME, you can find out the exact number on the shelf in multiple libraries if you want the actual book. I bet they didn't have THAT in 1998.
FiatLuxDave 6y ago
Former 1990s pizza delivery driver here. I used paper maps extensively. He's right. He's right that speed matters. It matters when you are driving in traffic and you need to know where to take that left turn. I don't use Google Maps or any map app when I'm driving because it's too damn dangerous. Much better to take a screenshot of the map beforehand because jpgs don't take 45 seconds to load. Sure, you can pull over and wait a minute for the map to load (and sometimes I do this), but with a paper map you can just fold it so that the area you are driving in appears and with a glance you can see where that turn is. Load speed ~0.5 seconds. The issue, as far as I am concerned, is not with the UI of the apps, but with the OS. It strikes me as completely primitive that modern OS's (and I include browsers, because they are basically a one-abstraction-layer-higher OS) don't have a proper way of prioritizing the user's needs, instead leaving it to the applications. It's an abdication of responsibility IMHO. I'm sure there are challenges and reasons why it is that way. Maybe there are experimental OS's which do this properly or ways to tweak existing ones. I don't know enough about this. I'd be happy to learn more from those of you who do...
- 6510 6y ago
  > don't have a proper way of prioritizing the user's needs To me that means it is no longer my/your computer. > Maybe there are experimental OS's which do this properly https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RTLinux https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RTLinux Funny: In JS I tried to find the maximum number of http requests a system could make. Async operations have unpredictable response time. Parsing the payload when it is returned was not an option since you end up with more parse jobs than the system can deal with at that moment which freezes the UI. (Earlier requests may arrive late, later requests might arrive soon.) So I ended up de-async-ing the tasks an doing them with setInterval (which requires checking the time or it will cluster up the parse tasks again) and tuning down the number of requests if there are many unfinished parse jobs. Now, if the user clicks something everything waits except dumping the responses into an array. Previously I couldn't lower the number of requests far enough to completely avoid UI freezes. They only got less frequent. With everything synced properly I can push the rate of the requests 20 times higher without freezes than async with 1 freeze per minute.

marcinzm 6y ago

>So yes, maybe putting a mark on a piece of paper is easier than doing it in online maps, but every other aspect of that process is way harder without the internet. Only if you know where on the map the place is which you wouldn't since you found it in a book. In Google Maps, I click "Add Destination" and put in the address. Drag it to the right places and it's now part of my route. On a paper map, I need to spend 10 minutes finding the address, referring to the index on the back to find the right square.

yaktubi 6y ago
Yes but you’ll know and remember the route after plotting it yourself—and spatial awareness increases making you a better driver. Think of it this way: everything our phones/computers do for us reduces our ability to do the same task in the long and short term.
- mosselman 6y ago
  This seems off-topic since the article is about perception of speed.
- jjk166 6y ago
  Yes, and every time I go to the grocery store my ability to hunt mammoths is reduced. Anesthesia reduces my ability to just deal with the pain of surgery. A pen reduces my ability to chisel words into stone. Exposing us less to the challenges of the past is not a bug, it's a feature.
  - yaktubi 6y ago
    See your thoughts make no sense because you’re on the computer all day. Mammoths, anesthesia, and pens don’t do computations for people
- marcinzm 6y ago
  Instead I can optimize my brain and time for other tasks which are either more useful or more enjoyable.

CodeWriter23 6y ago

Try servicing your neighbor’s P4 running XP machine, then review your position. (I recently had the pleasure of doing this) It’s not all the way back to 1983, but the snappiness compared to Win 10 or macOS on recent hardware is startling.

bluedino 6y ago
I don't miss the 2 minutes to boot up or 10 seconds to start Word and 60 seconds to start Adobe products.
- a2tech 6y ago
  Adobe Photoshop 7 took literally seconds to open on my 500mhz Pentium 3. On my brand new SSD iMac, 31 seconds cold, 7 seconds from a warm start (which honestly is WAY better than I thought it was going to be).
- mtgx 6y ago
  The speed-up for those is mostly about using a fast SSD today vs a slow HDD back then, not that much to do with the OS/software themselves. If anything 90's software would run circles around today's software if it was using today's hardware. And I think that's the point of the article.
- usrnm 6y ago
  The progress in boot times has much more to do with SSDs than anything software-related.
  - coding123 6y ago
    Not if you go back far enough. Ultima 8 Pagan, whenever I switched "maps" on my 386 it literally took about a minute to load the next area. When I got my next computer it was a Pentium 100 Mhz. That thing loaded the next map area in about 1-2 seconds. Both of those computers did not use SSDs.
  - hedora 6y ago
    Linux booted faster on my Pentium 100 with a hard disk than with my i7 + SSD. The root cause is that when Linux moved to parallel “fast” boot and DBUS they didn’t add APIs to the kernel to work through all the race conditions around modules loading, etc. So, it has to sleep for a second here or there to let hardware stabilize. I first noticed this about 10 years ago (on a new, faster machine, X would fail to start because the video card kernel module hadn’t finished loading yet). It has gotten worse since. On one machine, I have an NFS mount over WiFi. Network manager wants mount to complete before it runs because they didn’t think before they implemented it. I eventually got that machine to boot, but it takes an extra 5 seconds.

shaan7 6y ago

The fact that online maps didn't even exist back then is not relevant. The point the author is making is that he feels that if it did exist then it would've had better UX (again, whether or not that is true is a different question).

marcus_holmes 6y ago
Again, not 1983, but I was using a DOS (iirc we didn't buy the Windows version because it was too slow) mapping tool to create routes for trucks around 1990/91. It was slow, awkward, and needed a few days' training to get up to speed with. Redrawing a map on the screen took a couple of seconds. Scrolling around to find stuff wasn't really possible. But give it a postcode and it knew where everything was. And give it a list of 10 postcodes and it would spit out the best route a few minutes later. Google's UX for everything except search is utter shite. I don't know what they think they're doing. Anyone here from Google who can explain why their UX is so crap?
- marcosdumay 6y ago
  > I don't know what they think they're doing. They are doing search. Specifialy, the monetizable variety of it.
  - marcus_holmes 6y ago
    yeah, OK, but why make the rest of it so shit?
    - marcosdumay 6y ago
      If you look closely you'll see that Google Maps are not a shitty general purpose application specialized on search. It's a single purpose map application that people insist on using for things that aren't search. It's laser focused on generating revenue. The real question is why do people insist on using it? If people didn't, they would have to broaden their goals.
- 6y ago

pcnix 6y ago

Dan Luu has some interesting metrics on this [1]. This strikes at a slightly different problem, the latency of actually showing things on screen, but points out that not all is going well. https://danluu.com/input-lag/ https://danluu.com/input-lag/

bJGVygG7MQVF8c 6y ago

> the assertion that "almost everything on computers is perceptually slower than it was in 1983" is patently false Excessively dismissive. It's not so patently false when you recall that applications on personal computers were designed to do much less in 1983 than they are now. The model gestured at in the assertion is (arguably) one in which perceptual speed is a function of an application's (1) proximity to the outer bounds of a machine's capabilities, and (2) the efficiency of its implementation. This is elucidating, and a useful contribution.

BFatts 6y ago

I'm not sure you can call bullshit on someone's "perception". It's an opinion - if he sees it as slower, then he sees it as slower. Nothing you can do will convince his brain to see it faster.

coding123 6y ago

Yes... spot on - bullshit. Also, if you some real fucking power, try this: https://ls2pac.lapl.org/?section=search&term=grapes%20of%20wrath https://ls2pac.lapl.org/?section=search&term=grapes%20of%20w... Yeah, NOT only can you check out an ebook of Grapes or Wrath FROM HOME, you can find out the exact number on the shelf in multiple libraries if you want the actual book. I bet they didn't have THAT in 1998.

FiatLuxDave 6y ago

Former 1990s pizza delivery driver here. I used paper maps extensively. He's right. He's right that speed matters. It matters when you are driving in traffic and you need to know where to take that left turn. I don't use Google Maps or any map app when I'm driving because it's too damn dangerous. Much better to take a screenshot of the map beforehand because jpgs don't take 45 seconds to load. Sure, you can pull over and wait a minute for the map to load (and sometimes I do this), but with a paper map you can just fold it so that the area you are driving in appears and with a glance you can see where that turn is. Load speed ~0.5 seconds. The issue, as far as I am concerned, is not with the UI of the apps, but with the OS. It strikes me as completely primitive that modern OS's (and I include browsers, because they are basically a one-abstraction-layer-higher OS) don't have a proper way of prioritizing the user's needs, instead leaving it to the applications. It's an abdication of responsibility IMHO. I'm sure there are challenges and reasons why it is that way. Maybe there are experimental OS's which do this properly or ways to tweak existing ones. I don't know enough about this. I'd be happy to learn more from those of you who do...

6510 6y ago
> don't have a proper way of prioritizing the user's needs To me that means it is no longer my/your computer. > Maybe there are experimental OS's which do this properly https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RTLinux https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RTLinux Funny: In JS I tried to find the maximum number of http requests a system could make. Async operations have unpredictable response time. Parsing the payload when it is returned was not an option since you end up with more parse jobs than the system can deal with at that moment which freezes the UI. (Earlier requests may arrive late, later requests might arrive soon.) So I ended up de-async-ing the tasks an doing them with setInterval (which requires checking the time or it will cluster up the parse tasks again) and tuning down the number of requests if there are many unfinished parse jobs. Now, if the user clicks something everything waits except dumping the responses into an array. Previously I couldn't lower the number of requests far enough to completely avoid UI freezes. They only got less frequent. With everything synced properly I can push the rate of the requests 20 times higher without freezes than async with 1 freeze per minute.