3 ms·

Software was slow, crashes were common, interfaces sucked, UX was horrible. That’s my memory of the olden days. Sure, maybe it’s not 1000x faster, but many pro

Software was slow, crashes were common, interfaces sucked, UX was horrible. That’s my memory of the olden days. Sure, maybe it’s not 1000x faster, but many programs nowadays are very fast, very stable, and have a usable interface. Almost every program I regularly use has a search for its settings, back then I’d be happy if it even had all settings in a single location. A big part of that was paid by hardware improvements. And that’s okay with me. There are exceptions, like electron which (in almost all cases, a notable exception to the exception is VS Code with discord as a distant 2nd) is slow even on a very fast PC, but generally developing got easier and software got faster and better. But hey, I’m only 36, so maybe it was in the 80s when everything was as awesome as those articles paint it, and by the 90s everything already sucked.

flohofwoe 4y ago
It largely depended on what computers you had access to in the 90's, DOS and Windows PCs indeed felt medieval in the early and mid-90's compared to the Amigas, Ataris, Acorns, Apples, SGIs, Suns and NeXTs.
- ben_w 4y ago
  > Apples I dunno about that, I had a Performa 5200 in the late 90s[0], and I think I was getting at least one "System Error Type 11 [Restart]" per week. I think I still prefer the Classic MacOS UI over modern styles, but I'm not sure how much of that is "greymuzzle has rose-tinted memory of childhood" vs. "skeumorphism is genuinely useful as it makes it clear what things are buttons vs. labels". [0] bought with a combination of pocket money, skipping lunch to save the school lunch money, and even then only affordable because PC World discounted it by more than 50% as an ex-demo model
moring 4y ago
Let's take the c64 as an example. First, you had to pull the right diskette from your shelf that contains the program you wanted to use, because all the programs weren't in the same place. Let's hope you know where you put it. Then, enter one or more commands to load the program that, for purely technical reasons and lack of standardization, are different for each program (load first directory entry vs. load specific directory entry vs. load directory+list directory + load entry). Wait 10-20 seconds to load. Sometimes it was faster, IIRC because by default the 8-bit-parallel line to the drive had 7 lines unused and pushed bits in serial so there were "fast loaders" that just moved bits in parallel. Then, after loading the program, you had to start it (unless it was autostarting), again with an application-specific command (typically "run", but could be by calling a specific memory address like "sys 4096"). Many programs hat to load other stuff again and again because, well, 64k memory isn't a lot. Sometimes you had to flip the diskette over or swap it with another one. Let's face it: While today's software is sometimes ridiculously slow given the hardware it runs on, claiming that the 80s were better is pure nostalgia. Consoles of the time were better (I think the NES had 0,5 seconds from power switch to the game's first splash / title screen), but they used more costly ROMs instead of diskettes and were seriously hardware-feature-limited.
- contextfree 4y ago
  I remember playing the Hitchhiker's Guide text adventure on C64 where everything you typed took like 20 seconds to get a response.

flohofwoe 4y ago

It largely depended on what computers you had access to in the 90's, DOS and Windows PCs indeed felt medieval in the early and mid-90's compared to the Amigas, Ataris, Acorns, Apples, SGIs, Suns and NeXTs.

ben_w 4y ago
> Apples I dunno about that, I had a Performa 5200 in the late 90s[0], and I think I was getting at least one "System Error Type 11 [Restart]" per week. I think I still prefer the Classic MacOS UI over modern styles, but I'm not sure how much of that is "greymuzzle has rose-tinted memory of childhood" vs. "skeumorphism is genuinely useful as it makes it clear what things are buttons vs. labels". [0] bought with a combination of pocket money, skipping lunch to save the school lunch money, and even then only affordable because PC World discounted it by more than 50% as an ex-demo model

moring 4y ago

Let's take the c64 as an example. First, you had to pull the right diskette from your shelf that contains the program you wanted to use, because all the programs weren't in the same place. Let's hope you know where you put it. Then, enter one or more commands to load the program that, for purely technical reasons and lack of standardization, are different for each program (load first directory entry vs. load specific directory entry vs. load directory+list directory + load entry). Wait 10-20 seconds to load. Sometimes it was faster, IIRC because by default the 8-bit-parallel line to the drive had 7 lines unused and pushed bits in serial so there were "fast loaders" that just moved bits in parallel. Then, after loading the program, you had to start it (unless it was autostarting), again with an application-specific command (typically "run", but could be by calling a specific memory address like "sys 4096"). Many programs hat to load other stuff again and again because, well, 64k memory isn't a lot. Sometimes you had to flip the diskette over or swap it with another one. Let's face it: While today's software is sometimes ridiculously slow given the hardware it runs on, claiming that the 80s were better is pure nostalgia. Consoles of the time were better (I think the NES had 0,5 seconds from power switch to the game's first splash / title screen), but they used more costly ROMs instead of diskettes and were seriously hardware-feature-limited.

contextfree 4y ago
I remember playing the Hitchhiker's Guide text adventure on C64 where everything you typed took like 20 seconds to get a response.