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Hello, doctor. I am only 22 years old, but I think computers used to be faster. As someone who has been using a computer almost daily since the mid 80s, I don'

Hello, doctor. I am only 22 years old, but I think computers used to be faster. As someone who has been using a computer almost daily since the mid 80s, I don't relate to this whatsoever. I remember waiting for programs to load for minutes in the 80s and numerous seconds even in the late 90s. Even fast DOS apps would hang for seconds to save something to disk. I remember even early, simple versions of Photoshop taking a minute to load and then forever to run simple effects.. now it's about 2 seconds to load from scratch (and then milliseconds once in cache) and almost everything I do in the app feels instant despite being significantly more complex. Even software operating way lower down the abstraction tree decades ago felt and acted slower to me than most JavaScript apps today.. things are only getting better IMHO, about the only limit on today's app seems to be network speed which in some cases is not much slower than disk speeds just over a decade ago..

SixSigma 12y ago
Hang on, I just need to load my browser from this C60 cassette tape.
sliverstorm 12y ago
I agree that everything has gotten faster than 30, 20, or even 10 years ago. But I am a little annoyed in the past year or two that web pages seem to have gotten slower. I suspect with the explosion in large complicated web pages, rendering overhead outpaced hardware development for a couple years.
_delirium 12y ago
Some stuff feels faster to me, especially compute-heavy stuff like you mention (waiting forever for a Photoshop filter to complete while it chews up your RAM and starts swapping). But quite a few things feel slower, particularly anything where latency for normal, lightweight interactions is the most noticeable aspect. For example Gmail feels quite sluggish to me compared to what I used to use for years, Pegasus Mail, at least for basic operations like opening a mail, opening a reply window, etc. (Gmail probably does scale to large number of messages better, and its search is faster). Anything that involves serious text manipulation in a browser also feels just high-latency enough to be painful, at least on my connection; I spent much of today writing in writeLaTeX and the experience was somewhat frustrating. It's not unprecedented slowness, but a lot of things about webapps remind me of running remote X apps on an underpowered X terminal connected to a powerful server: compute-heavy stuff is generally handled nicely, but clicking on anything at all has a little bit of latency attached to it.
kalleboo 12y ago
I remember when there was a hack to enable so when dragging windows the whole window contents would move instead of just a black and white outline. If the window was bigger than 1/4th of the screen it would lag to death but it was so cool. Now we have live 60fps web page content relayouting when you resize the window, and people are saying computers are slower?

SixSigma 12y ago

Hang on, I just need to load my browser from this C60 cassette tape.

sliverstorm 12y ago

I agree that everything has gotten faster than 30, 20, or even 10 years ago. But I am a little annoyed in the past year or two that web pages seem to have gotten slower. I suspect with the explosion in large complicated web pages, rendering overhead outpaced hardware development for a couple years.

_delirium 12y ago

Some stuff feels faster to me, especially compute-heavy stuff like you mention (waiting forever for a Photoshop filter to complete while it chews up your RAM and starts swapping). But quite a few things feel slower, particularly anything where latency for normal, lightweight interactions is the most noticeable aspect. For example Gmail feels quite sluggish to me compared to what I used to use for years, Pegasus Mail, at least for basic operations like opening a mail, opening a reply window, etc. (Gmail probably does scale to large number of messages better, and its search is faster). Anything that involves serious text manipulation in a browser also feels just high-latency enough to be painful, at least on my connection; I spent much of today writing in writeLaTeX and the experience was somewhat frustrating. It's not unprecedented slowness, but a lot of things about webapps remind me of running remote X apps on an underpowered X terminal connected to a powerful server: compute-heavy stuff is generally handled nicely, but clicking on anything at all has a little bit of latency attached to it.

kalleboo 12y ago

I remember when there was a hack to enable so when dragging windows the whole window contents would move instead of just a black and white outline. If the window was bigger than 1/4th of the screen it would lag to death but it was so cool. Now we have live 60fps web page content relayouting when you resize the window, and people are saying computers are slower?