12 ms·
I came here looking for this. It's an old idea, from the days when spinning rust was the limiting factor - precache the binaries. If you ever tried Office 97 o
by barrkel 1y ago
I came here looking for this. It's an old idea, from the days when spinning rust was the limiting factor - precache the binaries.
If you ever tried Office 97 on a PC of 10+ years later, it's amazing how fast and lightweight it was. Instant startup, super snappy. And those apps were not lacking in features. 95% of what you need out of a desktop word processor was in Word 97.
- alliao 1y agosome of the modern software is slower because someone made a poor decision to fetch something from the network on the critical path of main functionality... kills me
- amiga386 1y agoExample: https://old.reddit.com/r/libreoffice/comments/upf8nw/fixed_opening_documents_too_slow/ https://old.reddit.com/r/libreoffice/comments/upf8nw/fixed_o... Opening a spreadsheet, even if you don't want to print it, will hang for 30 seconds doing nothing, because LibreOffice will load the printer settings for the document, which means asking the printer, which if the printer is network-based and turned off, means a 30 second wait for a timeout. Reported in 2011, still not fixed: https://bugs.documentfoundation.org/show_bug.cgi?id=42673 https://bugs.documentfoundation.org/show_bug.cgi?id=42673
- ramshanker 1y agoThis... 100 times. Everyday wastes my few minutes. 5 figure commercial application, state of art in it's domain, but somehow It has to wait for that unresponsive network printer and hang the startup UI.
- HideousKojima 1y agoBest workaround (still ridiculous that it hasn't been fixed) is to set a PDF printer as your default printer.
- hedora 1y agoI frequently have to do this for a different reason on MacOS/iOS. Printing directly sends bad PCL to my printer and makes it spew garbage pages. "Print to PDF -> print the PDF" is much more reliable. sigh
- Twirrim 1y agoI don't recall spreadsheets ever having any visible printer formatting until the point at which you print them? So surely it's not even a case of "even if you don't want to print it"?
- buovjaga 1y ago> Reported in 2011, still not fixed: https://bugs.documentfoundation.org/show_bug.cgi?id=42673 https://bugs.documentfoundation.org/show_bug.cgi?id=42673 Perhaps spurred by this comment, there was new discussion in the report and it turned out Microsoft has fixed the issue in Windows 11: https://bugs.documentfoundation.org/show_bug.cgi?id=42673#c88 https://bugs.documentfoundation.org/show_bug.cgi?id=42673#c8... Quote: "I was one of the many who reported this problem in one from or another. The problem is Windows-specific. I have found out that the problem actually comes from the Windows print system. There is no way to check that a printer is actually active or working or even present without incurring a long time-out in case the printer is not present or powered. Trying to check the defualt printer will incur the same time-out. Calc apparently wants to check the printer to know how to construct its layout, and has to wait for the time-out to continue. Some of the comments that claim that Calc hangs and never returns have probably not waited long enough for the timeout. On my new Windows 11 computer, this printer system behavior has been changed and I no longer experience a delay while opening Calc."
- sgarland 1y agoIt’s because modern devs by and large have zero concept of latency differences. I had to explain to people yesterday why an on-disk temporary table in MySQL was slower than an in-memory one. “But the disk is an SSD,” was an actual rebuttal I got. Never mind the fact that this was Aurora, so the “disk” is a slice of (multiple) SSDs exposed over a SAN…
- jonhohle 1y agohttps://gist.github.com/jboner/2841832 https://gist.github.com/jboner/2841832
- hedora 1y agoThat really should include "sync write 4KB to an SSD". People don't realize it's purely in-RAM on the disk these days (you pay a PCIe round trip, and that's about it).
- 101008 1y agoThat is what happens when your dev learnt it from an online course instead of going to college or through proper education. "Anyone can code!"
- dns_snek 1y agoAnd I thought we were past this sort of gatekeeping and elitism. I've worked with people who had a master's degree in CS who couldn't code their way out of a wet paper bag. In my experience there's very little correlation between how someone learned programming and how deep their understanding of the entire stack is.
- bsrkf 1y agoHope this doesn't come off as disrespectful, as in that I don't believe you, but out of personal interest, would you consider expanding on that? I'd love to hear about the particular example you were thinking of, or in what ways self-taught coders surprised you over academically-taught ones, if you've had experience working with both over a meaningful span of time. Also, if the case, in what ways self-taught coders were/are maybe lacking on average. If you've ever given answers to that in another comments on HN or elsewhere, feel free to link.
- deeThrow94 1y agoThis is also a classic emacs mistake, so I wouldn't put it all on age.
- mjmas 1y agoOpening any ms office app with the network disconnected opens up almost instantly...
- qwerty456127 1y agoWhat I am glad to leave behind and forget like a nightmare is Windows local networking with shared folders etc - these never worked nice and the last time anybody I know used these was pre-2010. Today we just use NextCloud, Matrix, email and Git for all our collaboration needs.
- vladvasiliu 1y agoWho's "we"? I work for a company who drank the MS cool-aid, so running Windows on laptops, using Office365 for e-mail, word processing, spreadsheets, teams for chat, sharepoint / onedrive for shared ressources. Have you tried launching a local app by typing in the start menu on a default win11 install with limited / slow internet access? Good times. How about doing some operation (say delete an e-mail) in one window of "new" outlook and having the others refresh? I have never understood how some otherwise reasonable people are able to consider this absolute shitshow of a work environment good enough.
- Cthulhu_ 1y agoI wish companies would go back to building fast apps, but alas. Everything is feature-packed and requires you to download half the internet. My intellij license just expired so today I'm back using Sublime Text, and honestly it's a breath of fresh air / relief - and it's not even the fastest editor, iirc it uses Python under the hood. I've installed Zed but getting plugins and keyboard shortcuts all lined up is always challenging. That one took ~2-3 seconds to cold start.
- tremon 1y agoI don't think these apps were ever built to be fast, they were built with the resource constraints of the time. Moore's law is what's making these apps fast.
- deleted 1y ago[deleted]
- formerly_proven 1y agoWord 2000 definitely was not very quick on a contemporary office PC (Pentium II or III), though I'm pretty certain it was much, much faster than desktop O365 is on a contemporary office PC today, despite those being >100x faster. So Fermi would estimate modern office to probably require at least 1000x more resources than Office 2000.
- deleted 1y ago[deleted]
- rollcat 1y agoIntel giveth, Microsoft taketh. This is even more sad with Apple. My M1 Mac felt incredibly snappy with Big Sur, but is getting ever so slightly slower with each update. My iPhone SE2 is a complete disaster.
- mleo 1y agoThey used no networking services either. Now, I open a shared PowerPoint and am stuck waiting for a couple of minutes while it is syncing or doing who knows what. People have no sense of what templates they copy from other documents causing the size of the file and load times to bloat.
- gymbeaux 1y agoMan you can still get by with Photoshop CS3 as far as features go.
- erkt 1y agoLightroom 5 is miles better than what they offer today. Lightroom Creative Cloud is steaming dog shit. Adobe seriously gets to extort over $120 a year out of me simply for the privilege of reading raw files from a new camera. They provide zero positive contribution these days. All of these incumbent tech companies extract rents on algorithms written decades ago. This needs to end. I am very excited for AI to get advanced enough to whip up replacement programs for everything these companies maintain monopolies over.
- mrguyorama 1y ago> I am very excited for AI to get advanced enough to whip up replacement programs for everything these companies maintain monopolies over. You are wildly off base. The algorithms aren't difficult or special. They were written by people reading text books for the most part. They are able to sit on an on old algorithm for decades because the DMCA made interoperability and selling cheaper tools like that basically illegal. Because of the DMCA, the work that was done to make IBM PC clones would have been close enough to illegal to kill all the businesses that tried it. They still tried with the liberal IP laws at the time.
- erkt 1y agoWell that's a bit disappointing but i am aware that their are gaps in my knowledge. I had assumed it was the feasibility of competing with an entrenched firm, not lack of access to research texts. I will chat with Chat to learn more about how DMCA applies, thank you.
- deleted 1y ago[deleted]
- SoftTalker 1y agoYeah that era of Office, pre-ribbon, was pretty nice as Office goes.
- Illotus 1y agoRibbon was better for most people who didn't have all the shortcuts in muscle memory. It is much more discoverable.
- hedora 1y agoThat might have been true for the first five minutes of using the software (assuming the person had not yet used a CUA application before the first time they used office). After that, it was strictly worse. CUA ~= "standard menus + keyboard shortcuts for dos and windows": https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IBM_Common_User_Access https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IBM_Common_User_Access
- Illotus 1y agoNot really, it is much more discoverable for most people. If interested, MS UI lead has a blog about lot of the reasons for ribbon and on the research backing it https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/archive/blogs/jensenh https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/archive/blogs/jensenh
- hedora 1y agoThe problem with it was that it constantly moved the buttons around. So, you had to constantly rediscover it.
- hedora 1y agoSadly, none of the links I tried work anymore. (Though the conversation in the comments where they have to explain how to open a ppt in powerpoint is internet gold!) I was hoping to figure out what led to design incompetence so spectacular that people would still be discussing it after 17 years. I think there’s a clue in the abstract: The author claims they made 25,000 mock UI screenshots, but doesn’t mention user studies or even internally prototyping some of the concepts to see how they feel.
- MisterTea 1y ago> from the days when spinning rust was the limiting factor How did we get back to this though? We have gigabytes/sec with NVMe and stupid fast CPU's with at least 4 cores in even low end models. Yet a text editor takes so long to load we need to load it up on boot... Such a frustrating field to work in.
- bigmattystyles 1y agoTelemetry, syncing to the cloud by default…
- dagmx 1y agoNeither of which contribute significantly to size though. The size aspect is what these new preloaders would help with.
- deleted 1y ago[deleted]
- afavour 1y agoI know this is such a stereotypical "get off my lawn" statement but we've lost the art of software engineering. It's all about stuffing as many features in as quickly as we can and pushing it out to as many people as possible. Performance is always secondary. Not that I'm that nostalgic for the old days, we would have been doing the exact same thing if we were able to get away with it. But performance restrictions meant you had no choice but to care. Modern tech has "freed" us from that concern.
- trealira 1y agoNiklaus Wirth wrote about this in 1995, in his essay A Plea for Lean Software. About 25 years ago, an interactive text editor could be designed with as little as 8,000 bytes of storage. (Modern program editors request 100 times that much). An operating system had to manage with 8,000 bytes, and a compiler had to fit into 32 Kbytes, whereas their modern descendants require megabytes. Has all this inflated software become any faster? On the contrary, were it not for a thousand times faster hardware, modern software would be utterly unusable. https://www.computer.org/csdl/magazine/co/1995/02/r2064/13rRUwInv7E https://www.computer.org/csdl/magazine/co/1995/02/r2064/13rR... That said, as someone fairly young, I still don't think that makes it wrong or something only an old man would think. Software seems to perform exactly as well as it needs to and no more, which is why hardware advances don't make our computers run software much faster.
- jonhohle 1y agoI always think the same thing. 486s could run real-time spell check and do wisiwig layouts and came on floppy disks. Now we have screen recording apps that require 256MB downloads every 5 minutes (yesterday’s story). I have a small utility app that I sell and make great pains to keep it small and resource light. I really appreciate when other devs do the same.
- donny2018 1y agoWhere is that guy who coded RollerCoaster Tycoon in Assembly?
- hedora 1y ago486's were way past when that became practical. I remember using Prodigy on a 286. Screenshots are rare, since you can't fire it up in an emulator unless you have a modem that can make phone calls to the 1980's. Also, machines from back then didn't really have room to store screenshots: https://www.vintagecomputing.com/index.php/archives/1063 https://www.vintagecomputing.com/index.php/archives/1063 Their service used vector art to render interactive pages like that over <= 2400 baud modems. Other than it being proprietary and stuff, I'm guessing the web would be a much cooler place if HTML hadn't eaten their lunch. SVG is a decent consolation prize, I guess.
- ralphc 1y agoLet me point you to Prodigy Reloaded, https://github.com/ProdigyReloaded https://github.com/ProdigyReloaded. We're reviving the Prodigy server and as many cache files as we can find, using Elixir as the backend language. It's not merged yet but I've written an Elixir library that writes graphics files in Prodigy's graphics format, NAPLPS. I'm using it to get current weather and creating weather maps that are displayed in Prodigy. https://github.com/rrcook/naplps_writer https://github.com/rrcook/naplps_writer You can run Prodigy in DOSBox and get screenshots.
- bluedino 1y agoA lifetime ago when I was doing MSP work, our law office clients were using the DOS versions of WordPerfect because the Windows version was too slow. They refused to store files in directories and use good file names (although they were limited to 8.3), so they just scrolled through all their files until they found the right one. But they could open them so fast they didn't care. In windows you had to use the mouse, click three times, wait for the document to load and render....it was instant under DOS character mode.
- layer8 1y agoI agree with the point about the immediacy of TUIs, but I use MS Office (and Windows in general) almost exclusively by keyboard, so the point about having to use a mouse isn’t completely accurate.
- bluedino 1y agoRight, but you could just hit up/down to scroll through the files in the directory listing. Very simple
- layer8 1y agoYou can still do that? I mean, there are certainly places where the interaction happens to be more cumbersome than it is in a TUI, because the relevant piece was designed mouse-first. However, one reason I prefer Windows as a desktop UI is that it was designed to be fully operable by keyboard as well.
- bluedino 1y agoYou could see the files as you scrolled through them. I don't think you understood how it works, I didn't do a great job explaining it. You can see the content of the files instantly on the screen as you go through them. Similar to how preview works on Mac
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- josephernest 1y agoI still use Office 2007 on my computer. Super super snappy, I think Word or Excel starts and finishes loading in 0.5 second after clicking the icon. It has 99% of the features I need compared to the newest Office version.
- benjiro 1y agoSame ... Office 2007 for the win. Frankly, i do not even use 90% of Office 2007 feature, so why do i even need more? For AI ... no. And funny thing, barely uses any memory! Makes todays apps look like monsters. Even my music player uses 5x more memory while paused, then freaking Excel with multiple pages open.
- ajolly 1y agoDo you have a good way to run multiple versions of office? I do sometimes need some of the newer features but I'd like to default to using the older versions.
- mcswell 1y agoAnd 100% of what you don't need--the Ribbon--was not in Word 97.
- lizknope 1y agoI remember a laptop in the early 1990's that had Microsoft Office in ROM to load faster. I can't find a reference to it right now.
- Lammy 1y agoHP Omnibook 300? https://www.hpmuseum.net/display_item.php?hw=123 https://www.hpmuseum.net/display_item.php?hw=123 `Omnibook300Intro-5091-6270-6pages-May93.pdf` https://www.hpmuseum.net/exhibit.php?hwdoc=123 https://www.hpmuseum.net/exhibit.php?hwdoc=123 sez: > Built-in ROM applications don't use up disk space - Microsoft Windows - Microsoft Word for Windows - Microsoft Excel - Appointment Book - Phone Book - HP Calculator - Microsoft File Manager - LapLink Remote Access™
- lizknope 1y agoThat looks like it. I didn't have one but I remember the magazine ads for it.
- psunavy03 1y agoThe worst thing Office ever did was effectively kill WordPerfect, and I will die on this hill. Reveal Codes was an order of magnitude more useful than whatever crap MS continues to pass off as formatting notation to this day 20+ years later, and that's before we even get into Word being over-helpful and getting ahead of you by doing things with autoformat you never wanted to have happen. Yes, I know WordPerfect is still around, but fat chance being able to conveniently use it anymore.
- sh34r 1y agoIgnoring the serious memory safety and security problems that were exploited to get acceptable performance on contemporary hardware, I’d point to shared document editing, automatic backups via OneDrive, and version history as rather significant features in that missing 5%. I think rosy recollection is tainting your memory here. How often docs would get corrupted due to those aforementioned memory safety issues, even if that Win95/98 box was never connected to the internet. Of course it’s gonna be super snappy. It was designed to run on any Doom-compatible hardware. Which includes some toasters now. Edit: it’s also worth noting that 1997 was right around the time where Moore’s law succumbed to the laws of physics for improving single-core CPU performance via clock speed alone.