Almost everything on computers is perceptually slower than it was in 1983

Ehhh?

* I remember spending hours, sitting on my new 2GB hard drive, formatting it to FAT32. Or defragmenting every week... because that disk format was rather subpar compared to modern file systems.

* I remember the 10+ Floppy Disks that needed to be manually swapped in and out to install... something. I think Microsoft Word. Or maybe it was Windows. In any case, Floppies were slow as all heck, and when CDs came out everyone was amazed by their speed.

* I remember being able to "see" the flood fill algorithm in "Paint" applications line-by-line fill up regions. Computers didn't have the memory to fill up those regions in one pass back then and had to resort to slower algorithms.

* I remember waiting multiple minutes to download a 5MB file in the 90s. 56kbps downloads 5MB in 11 minutes, for example. Even small pictures were unreasonable to distribute on the internet, let alone audio or movies. Flash was popular because a lot of it was rendered vector art and could fit into the ~3MB or 4MB size needed to be practical.

* I remember the dial-up sound. It took multiple minutes to CONNECT to the internet, and you couldn't use your phone while you were on the internet. To check your email took at least 5 minutes before you saw your first email. ~2 minutes dialing in, a few more minutes downloading the emails, and then finally you could begin reading them

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Seriously, did the author here ever use 90s technology? I remember searching through 3 CDs worth of information to write reports in the 90s.

Yes, CD-rom based encyclopedias. You'd juggle CD-roms constantly to do things that are as simple as "Wikipedia" or "Google" today.

We are way, way wayyyyy faster than the 90s. I can imagine that one would be jaded by the past, but... speed? Nah man, we're way faster today than back then. Its not even a close contest.

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I mean seriously, when did people stop using Floppies? It was like, 2004 or 2005 if I remember correctly. And there was a good chunk of time in there where we spent many minutes burning CD-ROMs (when our data was too big for Floppies: MS Word documents easily over the 1.44 MB limit...) but Flash Drives were way too expensive to be practically used.

I think some people used those "Jazz" and "Zip" drives as a "floppy replacement", but really it was burning CDs / DVDs (which had a significant delay to spin up and write). Modern Flash drives are instant. Modern cloud-storage is instant.

I cringe at the thought of returning to the 90s. I have a 30MB Powerpoint sitting on my desktop that I've been working on between my home and work. Do you have any idea of how much time it would have taken to transfer that back and forth in the 90s?

Does anyone know if you can do the same with iPhone?

Recently I discovered how well sapGUI works from the UX perspective. It is essentially an glorified graphical 3270 terminal emulator which runs applications that very often rely on user entering cryptic but human readable IDs (there is lookup functionality integrated in essentially all such fields, but frequent users typically do not use it that much).

Another interesting fact is that the 3270/sapGUI/dynpro model is almost perfect match to how HTML forms work (with the inline lookups and such stuff being the small part that would require some trivial JS/AJAX). I don't understand why today's web apps universaly try to reinvent the wheel by being "single page", emulating desktop WIMP interfaces and such things when simple HTML would work perfectly fine.

Edit to add another point: For our anime conventions I wrote our own online ticketing system. It has web interface for customers and general administration, but the on-site box office uses ncurses interface which intentionally has very ISPF-ish feeling to it, genral consensus of the staff seems to be that it is significantly more efficient and intuitive than web based systems used by other local conventions.

I thought the choice of medium was itself an ironic comment on the crappiness of modern computer usage. Tweetstorms are essentially unreadable, even with a tool like this thread aggregator.

Another thing I realized it's nonsense lately: object oriented programming.

It's often an over-engineered bloat that only works for trivial Programming 101 courses (yeah the famous Employee or Bike class). But in 10+ years of programming, I found that OOP is just a complete mess (you end up with awful classes in your code like Service, Manager, AbstractFactory, and so).

I wish we could just use variables and functions, that's all we need really. :)