3 ms·

You hear this all the time "software on old machines used to be blazing fast and now software on new machines are slow". I was there for most of the old machin

You hear this all the time "software on old machines used to be blazing fast and now software on new machines are slow". I was there for most of the old machines and my recollection is they were always slow, which is why there was a relentless race to upgrade to a faster machine and why for a very long time people replaced their computer once a year. If software and old machines were so snappy then there would have been no reason to buy a new computer, and the industry would have stalled in 1984. This trope of "how did things get so slow, they were fast in ye olde dayes" is just an incorrect blurred memory of they way things were. AND if the software was faster in Ye Olde Dayes, it is because it did less. Of course it's not possible to generalise, but for the most part this is true - old software did less than modern software. The pervasive experience of using old computers was waiting. My M1 Mac running 2 IDEs, 3 web browsers, email, terminals and several other apps is ridiculously, mind blowingly, insanely fast - so fast that anyone back in 1990 would have drooled themselves dry to have that speed.

asdff 3y ago
Sure computers are faster today, but I think the point is that with all of this available horsepower that we have gotten quite lazy about having performant software. These GUI apps really only feel slightly faster than they did 20 years ago, but you'd think given the orders of magnitude more computing performance, the time it takes to do things like open applications, files, save, etc, would also progress at such a pace. Clearly there are inefficiencies when it takes over 10 seconds to open microsoft word on a blazingly powerful M1 cpu. using the cli on an m1, sure, everything follows as expected with lightning quick tooling at that level, but its in the gui software, the software most people use day to day, that the inefficiencies are exposed.
throw__away7391 3y ago
That's true, I remember starting applications and running to grab a snack from the fridge while they loaded. It was not unusual to have to be careful while using certain applications to not overwhelm them with work or they'd run out of memory and crash or freeze. I recall reading a discussion specifically on this point, suggesting ways that software should elegantly handle user input to avoid this problem instead of blaming the user for being too aggressive.
pandaman 3y ago
There was stuff that was always slow, stuff that involved processing a whole lot of data. Like building, or archiving, or generating reports etc. People wanted faster computers for that. UI was not slow, text editing was not slow, networking was not slow (WWW was, of course, because loading GIFs on dialup took time, but telnet connections into a box with less compute and less memory than my home router has nowadays were snappy). User interaction used to be real-time, non-interactive data-crunching tasks were really slow.
Eddy_Viscosity2 3y ago
Anecdote Alert: I remember using winamp in the olden days and everything about it was instant, no hint of lag. Then it died. Then it was resurrected and is as laggy as everything else is these days.
glimshe 3y ago
This isn't my experience. I just went to a Computer museum and they had a TRS-80 from the 1980s. The keyboard latency was incredibly low, and text editing (typing programs in Basic) felt a lot more responsive than using Google Docs, Microsoft Word 365 or a modern IDE. A lot of things used to be slow, but they involved doing a lot of math or loading data from external storage. The computer "staples" of simple spreadsheets, text editing, using a calculator etc had a faster user experience than today's computers. But you are actually right that software "did less". The thing is that most applications don't need to "do a lot". What a lot of users need from computers changed little, but we added a ridiculous amount of overhead to it.
mcculley 3y ago
Modern computers have more bandwidth and more latency. They are faster and also feel slower. http://danluu.com/input-lag/ http://danluu.com/input-lag/
- IshKebab 3y ago
  Those results show no clear correlation with age at all. It that low latency was possible in the 80s and it's still possible now. But throughout computer history there have been plenty of terrible high latency devices. I agree with OP. Generally computers today are much faster than they were in the 90s.
  - mcculley 3y ago
    Indeed. As I pointed out, they are faster at compiling code and slower at processing keystrokes.
- andrewstuart 3y ago
  A computer is a sophisticated machine. Of course you are going to be able to point to here or there where it is true that input lag is worse or whatever, but the general concept that "older was faster" is wrong.
  - mcculley 3y ago
    I am fully aware that my MacBook Pro is overall faster at compiling code than my Commodore 64 was ever capable of. I am also aware that getting a keystroke from a polled USB keyboard up through the many layers and context switches to get it to a screen takes more time than it took a much older system.
khqc 3y ago
Probably because old software (e.g. emacs) feels a lot faster than new software (e.g. vscode) on the same hardware, that and nostalgia
- jabradoodle 3y ago
  Honestly vscode is quite snappy and I often seem to run into issues with Emacs performance. For a long time printing a largeish string to a buffer would crash Emacs, and it still lags vscode in opening large files in my experience.
zdragnar 3y ago
Reduce your screen resolution to 640x480 and most software will feel a whole lot snappier, I bet. Pushing all those extra pixels to a 4k monitor adds a lot of overhead.
- hutzlibu 3y ago
  Not if GPU accelerated. If software rendered(or bad GPU), then yes, you should see a big difference.
- ClumsyPilot 3y ago
  Not at all, I went from 1080p to 4k and back, and there is no effect: teams still takes the same amount of time to load. It takes me 25 minutes to scroll back 3 years in large chat in what’s app desktop client It takes me like 2 minutes to scroll back same amount in telegram desktop client
don-code 3y ago
My first computer had a 33MHz CPU and 16MB of RAM, and I believe the disk spun at a paltry 4200rpm. My pipe out to the Internet was provided via a 56k modem, attached to the serial port. This machine had a physical power switch. You could not put it to sleep, so it required a cold boot every time. At boot, it would run a _very slow_ self test of all 16MB of memory, after which it would spend another minute loading drivers under DOS before spending another minute booting Windows. If you wanted to go online, you spent another minute waiting for the modem to dial out, and 10-15sec for a well-optimized page to load in Netscape. In many cases, like wanting to look up information on some subject, it was faster to put the Encarta CD in the drive, wait for it to spin up and for the program to launch, and search from that. If you wanted to do _both at the same time_, you could do that! But be prepared for the machine to become slow as molasses as it swapped out to that 4200rpm drive. Fast forward to today. My laptop is in standby 80% of the time. It's usually reconnected to Wi-Fi before I can enter my password, and I can look up an article on Wikipedia in under 15 seconds of having picked the laptop up. I disagree wholeheartedly that computing has become slower. I can achieve the same results in a fraction of the time it used to take.
- makingstuffs 3y ago
  Jesus Christ, Encarta, now there’s something which was deeply nested in the cache of my mind
- dkga 3y ago
  I share your observations on the evolution of specs and of user experience. But I disagree with the conclusion. My observation is that the more powerful experience today is not proportional to the compute, memory and storage resources we are deploying. Looking at the bigger picture, just having a lot of OSS nowadays having apps hiding in the background rather than being killed; constant updates and pinging of servers by apps; etc means that we now have a much bigger, bloated footprint.
rapnie 3y ago
They were slow, yet now they should be fast theoretically, not in practice though.

asdff 3y ago

Sure computers are faster today, but I think the point is that with all of this available horsepower that we have gotten quite lazy about having performant software. These GUI apps really only feel slightly faster than they did 20 years ago, but you'd think given the orders of magnitude more computing performance, the time it takes to do things like open applications, files, save, etc, would also progress at such a pace. Clearly there are inefficiencies when it takes over 10 seconds to open microsoft word on a blazingly powerful M1 cpu. using the cli on an m1, sure, everything follows as expected with lightning quick tooling at that level, but its in the gui software, the software most people use day to day, that the inefficiencies are exposed.

throw__away7391 3y ago

That's true, I remember starting applications and running to grab a snack from the fridge while they loaded. It was not unusual to have to be careful while using certain applications to not overwhelm them with work or they'd run out of memory and crash or freeze. I recall reading a discussion specifically on this point, suggesting ways that software should elegantly handle user input to avoid this problem instead of blaming the user for being too aggressive.

pandaman 3y ago

There was stuff that was always slow, stuff that involved processing a whole lot of data. Like building, or archiving, or generating reports etc. People wanted faster computers for that. UI was not slow, text editing was not slow, networking was not slow (WWW was, of course, because loading GIFs on dialup took time, but telnet connections into a box with less compute and less memory than my home router has nowadays were snappy). User interaction used to be real-time, non-interactive data-crunching tasks were really slow.

Eddy_Viscosity2 3y ago

Anecdote Alert: I remember using winamp in the olden days and everything about it was instant, no hint of lag. Then it died. Then it was resurrected and is as laggy as everything else is these days.

glimshe 3y ago

This isn't my experience. I just went to a Computer museum and they had a TRS-80 from the 1980s. The keyboard latency was incredibly low, and text editing (typing programs in Basic) felt a lot more responsive than using Google Docs, Microsoft Word 365 or a modern IDE. A lot of things used to be slow, but they involved doing a lot of math or loading data from external storage. The computer "staples" of simple spreadsheets, text editing, using a calculator etc had a faster user experience than today's computers. But you are actually right that software "did less". The thing is that most applications don't need to "do a lot". What a lot of users need from computers changed little, but we added a ridiculous amount of overhead to it.

mcculley 3y ago

Modern computers have more bandwidth and more latency. They are faster and also feel slower. http://danluu.com/input-lag/ http://danluu.com/input-lag/

IshKebab 3y ago
Those results show no clear correlation with age at all. It that low latency was possible in the 80s and it's still possible now. But throughout computer history there have been plenty of terrible high latency devices. I agree with OP. Generally computers today are much faster than they were in the 90s.
- mcculley 3y ago
  Indeed. As I pointed out, they are faster at compiling code and slower at processing keystrokes.
andrewstuart 3y ago
A computer is a sophisticated machine. Of course you are going to be able to point to here or there where it is true that input lag is worse or whatever, but the general concept that "older was faster" is wrong.
- mcculley 3y ago
  I am fully aware that my MacBook Pro is overall faster at compiling code than my Commodore 64 was ever capable of. I am also aware that getting a keystroke from a polled USB keyboard up through the many layers and context switches to get it to a screen takes more time than it took a much older system.

khqc 3y ago

Probably because old software (e.g. emacs) feels a lot faster than new software (e.g. vscode) on the same hardware, that and nostalgia

jabradoodle 3y ago
Honestly vscode is quite snappy and I often seem to run into issues with Emacs performance. For a long time printing a largeish string to a buffer would crash Emacs, and it still lags vscode in opening large files in my experience.

zdragnar 3y ago

Reduce your screen resolution to 640x480 and most software will feel a whole lot snappier, I bet. Pushing all those extra pixels to a 4k monitor adds a lot of overhead.

hutzlibu 3y ago
Not if GPU accelerated. If software rendered(or bad GPU), then yes, you should see a big difference.
ClumsyPilot 3y ago
Not at all, I went from 1080p to 4k and back, and there is no effect: teams still takes the same amount of time to load. It takes me 25 minutes to scroll back 3 years in large chat in what’s app desktop client It takes me like 2 minutes to scroll back same amount in telegram desktop client

don-code 3y ago

My first computer had a 33MHz CPU and 16MB of RAM, and I believe the disk spun at a paltry 4200rpm. My pipe out to the Internet was provided via a 56k modem, attached to the serial port. This machine had a physical power switch. You could not put it to sleep, so it required a cold boot every time. At boot, it would run a _very slow_ self test of all 16MB of memory, after which it would spend another minute loading drivers under DOS before spending another minute booting Windows. If you wanted to go online, you spent another minute waiting for the modem to dial out, and 10-15sec for a well-optimized page to load in Netscape. In many cases, like wanting to look up information on some subject, it was faster to put the Encarta CD in the drive, wait for it to spin up and for the program to launch, and search from that. If you wanted to do _both at the same time_, you could do that! But be prepared for the machine to become slow as molasses as it swapped out to that 4200rpm drive. Fast forward to today. My laptop is in standby 80% of the time. It's usually reconnected to Wi-Fi before I can enter my password, and I can look up an article on Wikipedia in under 15 seconds of having picked the laptop up. I disagree wholeheartedly that computing has become slower. I can achieve the same results in a fraction of the time it used to take.

makingstuffs 3y ago
Jesus Christ, Encarta, now there’s something which was deeply nested in the cache of my mind
dkga 3y ago
I share your observations on the evolution of specs and of user experience. But I disagree with the conclusion. My observation is that the more powerful experience today is not proportional to the compute, memory and storage resources we are deploying. Looking at the bigger picture, just having a lot of OSS nowadays having apps hiding in the background rather than being killed; constant updates and pinging of servers by apps; etc means that we now have a much bigger, bloated footprint.

rapnie 3y ago

They were slow, yet now they should be fast theoretically, not in practice though.