4 ms·
Clearly this person never tried to load a program on a C64 with a tape drive. I could make myself lunch and the thing still wouldn't be done, and there was a no
by drchopchop 6y ago
Clearly this person never tried to load a program on a C64 with a tape drive. I could make myself lunch and the thing still wouldn't be done, and there was a non-zero chance it would screw up somehow and you'd have to rewind the tape and start it over. Upgrading to floppy wasn't much better, either, before the advent of fast load cartridges.
Contrast that with my current Win 10 install, which on a 3-year old computer goes from "off" to login screen in under 10 seconds.
- dijit 6y agoDepends on what the goal is of course. A c64 started and dropped you into the interpreter in under a second. Input latency being another absolutely astonishing difference. But modern computers have so much more computational throughput that they’re many orders of magnitude more useful as tools. I think the author is just saying that we lost the feel of immediacy for the common case, which I agree with, sometimes I press something and there’s either a sub second delay (text input) or a large pause (clicking an icon) before the machine seems to be doing anything. Back in the day, you press a key and your computer is displaying it before the key has risen; you press enter and your hard disk churns immediately and a flashing light would blink merrily indicating work. That’s what perception is. (Also, you could use a c64 with a floppy or Hard-disk which was obviously much faster than tape)
- TedDoesntTalk 6y agoHe’s not commenting on load times of software as far as I understand. He’s commenting about UI responsiveness.