3 ms·

I’d been doing some retro-mac’ing the past couple days, and one thing I noticed is how impossibly “tight” the mouse cursor movement always seems to the physical

I’d been doing some retro-mac’ing the past couple days, and one thing I noticed is how impossibly “tight” the mouse cursor movement always seems to the physical input. It’s probably just a few dozen instructions from taking the interrupt to scaling and placing the cursor for the next vbl task, but it’s like sticking a 10 point landing. Cursors on sun workstations (not just because of their optical grips mousepad) or windows boxes always felt like “oh there’s an abstraction between the physical hardware and the pointer, that’s just the way it is” - and nobody cared to make it better.

kitsunesoba 3y ago
It's been getting better in the past decade but similarly, one of the papercuts of the Linux desktop experience that used to bug me was how you could kinda feel the numerous layers it was composed of slipping around a bit. I think all modern OSes suffer this to at least a small extent today. That "tightness" you mention is quite tangible on my 500Mhz PowerBook G3 when it's booted into OS 9. It would be nice to get that back in its entirety somehow.
spongeb00b 3y ago
There's a related tale to this in Andy Hertzfeld's Macintosh Folklore book when demoing to Microsoft Bill Gates assumed it required specific hardware to draw the cursor (bonus outburst from Steve too) https://www.folklore.org/StoryView.py?project=Macintosh&story=Shut_Up.txt https://www.folklore.org/StoryView.py?project=Macintosh&stor...