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

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

#251

Post by gowld »

zaarn wrote: post #4

The core point of the entire thread can be summed up by one of the tweets; "I believe well designed keyboard interfaces and well designed GUI interfaces have exactly the same learning curve." I agree with this. A properly and well designed keyboard interface is faster than any mouse. On the other hand, a properly designed mouse interface can be fast too. Both need to be applied when it makes sense. I can also resonat…

A good GUI can be navigated with the mouse, and a good CLI can be navigated with aid from teh mouse, so the dichotomy just doesn't make sense.

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

#252

Post by PeachPlum »

marbletiles wrote: post #183
Declanomous wrote: post #29

This could be a copy-paste of rants I have written. I think marketing has ruined pretty much everything. Everything has a subscription now, and it's in the cloud . My experience is that everything is slower than when I first started using computers as a child in the 90's, and it does it worse. You don't own anything anymore, upgrades routinely take away features, and nothing interfaces with anything else. There are a…

We've even managed to slow down things like Excel 97. I played with a 486 laptop recently, and was completely amazed at how fast things like Word felt (once they'd loaded off the ancient hard disk). The most immediately notable part was the typing, which felt completely instantaneous. I haven't found out exactly why, but the switch from serial to USB keyboard interfaces (and the lag therein) as well as the various wi…

The Word processor on my 8 Bit Computer (BBC Micro) is ready to type into about 2 seconds from when I switch the power on.

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

#253

Post by freyir »

marbletiles wrote: post #183
Declanomous wrote: post #29

This could be a copy-paste of rants I have written. I think marketing has ruined pretty much everything. Everything has a subscription now, and it's in the cloud . My experience is that everything is slower than when I first started using computers as a child in the 90's, and it does it worse. You don't own anything anymore, upgrades routinely take away features, and nothing interfaces with anything else. There are a…

We've even managed to slow down things like Excel 97. I played with a 486 laptop recently, and was completely amazed at how fast things like Word felt (once they'd loaded off the ancient hard disk). The most immediately notable part was the typing, which felt completely instantaneous. I haven't found out exactly why, but the switch from serial to USB keyboard interfaces (and the lag therein) as well as the various wi…

Relevant post on keyboard latency here: https://danluu.com/keyboard-latency/

Takeaway: today’s keyboards are slow. Even gaming keyboards marketed as fast are slow. There’s more latency just in today’s keyboards than the entire end-to-end latency in an Apple II system from 1977.

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

#254

Post by j_s »

I'm still thankful for https://tinyapps.org even well after it has gone nearly read-only!

To qualify for TinyApps, a program must:

1. Not exceed 1.44mb

2. Not be adware

3. Not require the VB/MFC/.NET runtimes. Also, preference is given to apps which are 100% self-contained, requiring no installation, registry changes, etc.

4. Preferably be free, and ideally offer source code. Shareware will only be listed if there is no freeware alternative.

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

#255

Post by eli_gottlieb »

Declanomous wrote: post #29

This could be a copy-paste of rants I have written. I think marketing has ruined pretty much everything. Everything has a subscription now, and it's in the cloud . My experience is that everything is slower than when I first started using computers as a child in the 90's, and it does it worse. You don't own anything anymore, upgrades routinely take away features, and nothing interfaces with anything else. There are a…

> This could be a copy-paste of rants I have written. I think marketing has ruined pretty much everything. Everything has a subscription now, and it's in the cloud.

Well, shrink-wrapped software only needed to be purchased once to have something, and it was amenable to piracy. It also didn't let companies collect, expropriate, and sell off your private data. Hell, once upon a time, people even wanted to take EULA provisions to court as illegitimate, since you couldn't use a product you'd already paid for if you didn't "agree" to a post-purchase "contract".

Something had to be done to make profits sustainable!

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

#256

Post by vinw »

kuon wrote: post #228

About the google maps things. Anybody knows an alternative where I can measure things (like the length of a named road or the width of a building) and count things (for example, I draw a polygon, and I want to know the number of houses within it).

OsmAnd is pretty good for measurements and stuff.

http://osmand.net/

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

#257

Post by ryandrake »

michrassena wrote: post #177

Last year, in a fit of nostalgia I finally bought an Apple IIe, a system I had wanted 30 years ago, at a garage sale. Somehow in moving it back to my house, I dislodged the floppy controller card, leaving the system to boot from ROM. I turned it on, it beeped, and there was the prompt. I perceived it as instantaneous. I know that from that point I could have written a BASIC program and saved it to a cassette tape. Th…

> Developer time has outstripped hardware costs, and somehow an hour of developer time is worth the same as wasting a million hours of the users' time

Key point here. It's hard to get the biz guys and product managers to agree with spending developer hours on performance improvements, because it's hard to measure the effect it has on business metrics. Does making your application take 750ms to launch rather than 8 seconds really bring in more sales? Who knows? Nobody tries to measure it either, so we'll never fix the problem.

Feature cram, on the other hand, is easier to justify, which is why every application eventually ends up with a plug-in interface, theme-able, skin-able, able to read E-mail, and able to interact with Facebook and Twitter.

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

#258

Post by manmal »

tome wrote: post #104
kgwxd wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Just last week I discovered I could disable animations in Android through the hidden developer options. It's fabulous. The only initial quirk was no visual feedback when a picture is successfully taken, so it felt like i missed the button, but I've gotten used to it already.

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

Completely disabling animations would break many apps, because a lot is going on in completion blocks of animations. Setting animation durations to a very low value would work though (that’s also what you have to do for UI tests).

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

#259

Post by crankylinuxuser »

gugagore wrote: post #207
marbletiles wrote: post #183

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We've even managed to slow down things like Excel 97. I played with a 486 laptop recently, and was completely amazed at how fast things like Word felt (once they'd loaded off the ancient hard disk). The most immediately notable part was the typing, which felt completely instantaneous. I haven't found out exactly why, but the switch from serial to USB keyboard interfaces (and the lag therein) as well as the various wi…

on PCs, keyboards were never "serial" as in "the serial port"(mice were), but they were always "serial" in the same way that the USB port is "serial". Perhaps it's better said that the switch from a special-purpose interface to USB is what introduced lag.

I know on microcontrollers, if you want to reduce jitter (by sometimes up to a magnitude), you disable USB. Ive noticed my interrupt loops on ARMs go way down when the micro doesn't have to service USB.

But then you have to use an STLink to upload programs.

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

#260

Post by grandalf »

grandalf wrote: post #82

My terminal responds more quickly than it did in 1983. In every other way computers have subsumed televisions as entertainment devices, and have performance characteristics appropriate to their main uses. Because of Moore's law advances, the industry has learned to design for the next generation CPU. Before Moore's law was understood, industry designed for the current hardware and everything was extremely fast. In a…

Wow this comment is getting a lot of downvotes. I'm curious what I said that offended.
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