3 ms·

What this guy needs to do is gain some perspective, travel back in time and notice how responsive native Windows 98 / Windows XP style GUIs were (when the syste

by j1elo 4y ago

What this guy needs to do is gain some perspective, travel back in time and notice how responsive native Windows 98 / Windows XP style GUIs were (when the system wasn't crashing), and then compare snappiness of a full fledged video editor, or word processor, or photoshop-style app of the time, with the typical slugginess of the average note taking or text chat app of nowadays. But new people get born every day, and they won't get to know what was possible in terms of low latencies compared to web-based UIs (not saying this particular author is very young, I have no idea, but clearly somehow they are not considering the full picture to realize how bad modern UIs are)

nyarlathotep_ 4y ago
> "I have been involved with software development for nearly 30 years now" Apparently not. You'd think the author would clearly recall the scenario you described.
crazygringo 4y ago
I can't quite tell what point you're trying to make. Because fully-fledged apps on Win98/XP were horribly slow compared to today. Loading Photoshop took a couple minutes, while today it takes a few seconds. Just regular user interface dialogs in Word sometimes took noticeable time to display. The main factor of course was spinning hard drive speeds, and swapping memory or loading code pages from disk. While note taking and chat apps today are pretty instantaneous. The UX latency of software running on my M1 MacBook is faster than any other computer I've had over the past 30 years. Sometimes when people talk about how XP was fast, I can only imagine they're running it in a VM on modern hardware. Because sure, in that situation it's blazing.
- MayeulC 4y ago
  It's more about responsiveness when clicking buttons, opening menus, navigaing folders, etc. Most actions were ~sub-10ms even on crappy computers, which provided a nice "hardware" feeling which I don't really get from websites or electron apps.
- rbanffy 4y ago
  > Because fully-fledged apps on Win98/XP were horribly slow compared to today. Not really my experience - it's obvious the GUI is doing a lot of work to take what Windows XP would require and redraw it the way Windows 11 thinks it should. They don't feel faster, but now they have animated transitions and transparencies, while the CPU does 10x more work (which becomes more or less the same amount of time for a CPU with 1/10 of its clock). This is one reason why a lot of Unix graphics applications feel so responsive on modern Linux boxes - they are doing the same amount of time they did 20 or 30 years ago while the computer is 10x as fast.
  - paxhax 4y ago
    > This is one reason why a lot of Unix graphics applications feel so responsive on modern Linux boxes - they are doing the same amount of time they did 20 or 30 years ago while the computer is 10x as fast. Yep. Hardware wise, we're in the wonderful position where Lisp and Smalltalk systems, once regarded as too slow to be useful on commodity hardware, are open and ready for action before you can even blink.
- genocidicbunny 4y ago
  It's about proportionality to me. Sure the UI was slow because of the HDD speeds, swap, etc, but it wasn't slower proportionally to how much faster those things have gotten now. My first Windows 98 PC was probably hundreds of times slower than what I have now, but the modern experience hasn't gotten hundreds of times better. There was a brief magical period when SSDs first became widely available that they seemed to have a huge impact because most software was still written for a HDD-based PC.
- j1elo 4y ago
  > I can't quite tell what point you're trying to make. Easy. Use a high-framerate camera to measure the time it takes for an IRC client to change between channels. Thanks to being written in technologies decently close to the bare metal, every application in the Windows XP era was in the same ballpark of response times, when you disregard disk access times. We're only talking here about raw latency between a click and a graphical response. Now compare it to the time it takes to switch channels in Slack, which is the 27$ billion company mentioned in the parent comment. Spoiler: you won't even need the camera for the latter, because the web stack is so horribly inefficient that the GUI reaction is perfectly noticeable and I'd even say closer to a whole second. "but apps do more thing nowadays" is a fair point but it gets cancelled with the fact that memory, cpu and disks have improved immensely since the older systems that are being compared here. Every time a product owner decides to make a web UI, god kills a kitten. But with a lot of delay, so maybe we can still save it between keystrokes.
  - deafpolygon 4y ago
    Anecdata; mIRC is fast, snappy and uses barely any RAM compared to Slack.
    - j1elo 4y ago
      The point is precisely that mIRC was already fast in old machines; meanwhile, a big reason for Slack not being fast, snappy and using barely any RAM is that it's been written with web technologies, which have eaten out any potential benefit of modern increased performance.

by j1elo 4y ago

nyarlathotep_ 4y ago

> "I have been involved with software development for nearly 30 years now" Apparently not. You'd think the author would clearly recall the scenario you described.

crazygringo 4y ago

I can't quite tell what point you're trying to make. Because fully-fledged apps on Win98/XP were horribly slow compared to today. Loading Photoshop took a couple minutes, while today it takes a few seconds. Just regular user interface dialogs in Word sometimes took noticeable time to display. The main factor of course was spinning hard drive speeds, and swapping memory or loading code pages from disk. While note taking and chat apps today are pretty instantaneous. The UX latency of software running on my M1 MacBook is faster than any other computer I've had over the past 30 years. Sometimes when people talk about how XP was fast, I can only imagine they're running it in a VM on modern hardware. Because sure, in that situation it's blazing.

MayeulC 4y ago
It's more about responsiveness when clicking buttons, opening menus, navigaing folders, etc. Most actions were ~sub-10ms even on crappy computers, which provided a nice "hardware" feeling which I don't really get from websites or electron apps.
rbanffy 4y ago
> Because fully-fledged apps on Win98/XP were horribly slow compared to today. Not really my experience - it's obvious the GUI is doing a lot of work to take what Windows XP would require and redraw it the way Windows 11 thinks it should. They don't feel faster, but now they have animated transitions and transparencies, while the CPU does 10x more work (which becomes more or less the same amount of time for a CPU with 1/10 of its clock). This is one reason why a lot of Unix graphics applications feel so responsive on modern Linux boxes - they are doing the same amount of time they did 20 or 30 years ago while the computer is 10x as fast.
- paxhax 4y ago
  > This is one reason why a lot of Unix graphics applications feel so responsive on modern Linux boxes - they are doing the same amount of time they did 20 or 30 years ago while the computer is 10x as fast. Yep. Hardware wise, we're in the wonderful position where Lisp and Smalltalk systems, once regarded as too slow to be useful on commodity hardware, are open and ready for action before you can even blink.
genocidicbunny 4y ago
It's about proportionality to me. Sure the UI was slow because of the HDD speeds, swap, etc, but it wasn't slower proportionally to how much faster those things have gotten now. My first Windows 98 PC was probably hundreds of times slower than what I have now, but the modern experience hasn't gotten hundreds of times better. There was a brief magical period when SSDs first became widely available that they seemed to have a huge impact because most software was still written for a HDD-based PC.
j1elo 4y ago
> I can't quite tell what point you're trying to make. Easy. Use a high-framerate camera to measure the time it takes for an IRC client to change between channels. Thanks to being written in technologies decently close to the bare metal, every application in the Windows XP era was in the same ballpark of response times, when you disregard disk access times. We're only talking here about raw latency between a click and a graphical response. Now compare it to the time it takes to switch channels in Slack, which is the 27$ billion company mentioned in the parent comment. Spoiler: you won't even need the camera for the latter, because the web stack is so horribly inefficient that the GUI reaction is perfectly noticeable and I'd even say closer to a whole second. "but apps do more thing nowadays" is a fair point but it gets cancelled with the fact that memory, cpu and disks have improved immensely since the older systems that are being compared here. Every time a product owner decides to make a web UI, god kills a kitten. But with a lot of delay, so maybe we can still save it between keystrokes.
- deafpolygon 4y ago
  Anecdata; mIRC is fast, snappy and uses barely any RAM compared to Slack.
  - j1elo 4y ago
    The point is precisely that mIRC was already fast in old machines; meanwhile, a big reason for Slack not being fast, snappy and using barely any RAM is that it's been written with web technologies, which have eaten out any potential benefit of modern increased performance.