4 ms·

I've been using computers for 4 decades. They have gotten no faster. The nuclear plant computer system we built in 1989 had to present selected screens in 1 sec

I've been using computers for 4 decades. They have gotten no faster. The nuclear plant computer system we built in 1989 had to present selected screens in 1 second. I don't think any apps I use today can do that.

paulhebert 2mo ago
It’s all incentives. I’ve worked on web projects where the people in charge cared about performance. It’s easy to get sub second speeds if you start with that goal. I’ve also worked on projects where the people in charge added 1mb client-side mapping libraries to render a static map and ignored my push back. Those website were slow
- gwd 2mo ago
  This. The author talks about the fact that now they can try far more experimental optimizations than they could before. But they already had an architecture with efficiency in mind, and were trying optimizations, to begin with. The kind of company that ships web UIs that take 5-10s to do some action 1) don't care or aren't capable of good architecture 2) don't care or aren't capable of doing the simplest low-hanging optimizations.
alightsoul 2mo ago
At some point, probably in the 1980s, people probably decided that computers could update UI fast enough, so any additional compute power or speed has been used for other things like making it prettier or reducing development effort or time, and now ai
- catdog 2mo ago
  The problem is that the UI speed largely was not kept at that level but considerably slowed down again despite exponentially growing compute power.
  - duskdozer 2mo ago
    I've heard it before and believe it that one reason is because many of the developers are working on new maxed-out machines and network connections both at work and home, so they don't notice problems for older or cheaper ones and/or can't justify it to management.
cyteeditor 2mo ago
[flagged]
locallost 2mo ago
What Andy giveth, Bill taketh away.
- intrasight 2mo ago
  In my case neither Andy nor Bill was involved. For that project we used Sun 3 workstations which were powered by Motorola 68020 I believe. So a more fair comparison would be that 1988 workstation against a modern Unix workstation. I bet the results would still be that a modern workstation would struggle to update the display in one second.
  - locallost 2mo ago
    Well I don't know about specific examples, but it's a phenomenon that has been observed in many areas over decades, thus the funny saying. After crossing 40 years of age, and working for a while now, I believe it's also because of politics. You might think the goal is to deliver the best possible product, but territory grabs within companies are important, and done by people that don't have enough skill other than territory grabs. E.g. look at Trump and his behavior. No skills other than having his way, and then he gets to decide. Of the technical reason, for sure we underestimate how much faster technology gets. Fred Brooks had this example in his Mythical Man Month book, how the os/360 got the option of a disk drive instead of mag tape, but the result was worse because everyone assumed it was much faster than it really was.

paulhebert 2mo ago

It’s all incentives. I’ve worked on web projects where the people in charge cared about performance. It’s easy to get sub second speeds if you start with that goal. I’ve also worked on projects where the people in charge added 1mb client-side mapping libraries to render a static map and ignored my push back. Those website were slow

gwd 2mo ago
This. The author talks about the fact that now they can try far more experimental optimizations than they could before. But they already had an architecture with efficiency in mind, and were trying optimizations, to begin with. The kind of company that ships web UIs that take 5-10s to do some action 1) don't care or aren't capable of good architecture 2) don't care or aren't capable of doing the simplest low-hanging optimizations.

alightsoul 2mo ago

At some point, probably in the 1980s, people probably decided that computers could update UI fast enough, so any additional compute power or speed has been used for other things like making it prettier or reducing development effort or time, and now ai

catdog 2mo ago
The problem is that the UI speed largely was not kept at that level but considerably slowed down again despite exponentially growing compute power.
- duskdozer 2mo ago
  I've heard it before and believe it that one reason is because many of the developers are working on new maxed-out machines and network connections both at work and home, so they don't notice problems for older or cheaper ones and/or can't justify it to management.

cyteeditor 2mo ago

[flagged]

locallost 2mo ago

What Andy giveth, Bill taketh away.

intrasight 2mo ago
In my case neither Andy nor Bill was involved. For that project we used Sun 3 workstations which were powered by Motorola 68020 I believe. So a more fair comparison would be that 1988 workstation against a modern Unix workstation. I bet the results would still be that a modern workstation would struggle to update the display in one second.
- locallost 2mo ago
  Well I don't know about specific examples, but it's a phenomenon that has been observed in many areas over decades, thus the funny saying. After crossing 40 years of age, and working for a while now, I believe it's also because of politics. You might think the goal is to deliver the best possible product, but territory grabs within companies are important, and done by people that don't have enough skill other than territory grabs. E.g. look at Trump and his behavior. No skills other than having his way, and then he gets to decide. Of the technical reason, for sure we underestimate how much faster technology gets. Fred Brooks had this example in his Mythical Man Month book, how the os/360 got the option of a disk drive instead of mag tape, but the result was worse because everyone assumed it was much faster than it really was.