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Why did moving the mouse cursor cause Windows 95 to run more quickly?

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Re: Why did moving the mouse cursor cause Windows 95 to run more quickly?

#111

Post by michrassena »

_trampeltier wrote: post #16

From a comment: Try opening a large file with Notepad on a contemporary machine. The window must not be full screen. When loaded, mark all text using the mouse (the keyboard works as well, it just needs more manual skill). While still holding the button down (and marking) move the mouse down, so the text gets marked and scrolled. Now compare the scroll speed while holding the mouse still versus wiggling it. Depending…

I don't know the reason for that, but like the cursor to mark the progress bar method above, I do this trick to this day. You don't have to highlight first, you can just highlight as you go, wiggle the mouse outside of the bounds of the window, and then deselect when you get where you're going. And it's not just in Notepad, I do this in a programmers editor too.

Isn't it funny that many of us learned these sames ways of interacting with computers without being explicitly taught. If this were on the Internet, I would say it's a way to gauge whether you're a robot, but otherwise, it's just a measure of my impatience. Maybe it's just an acquired skill from growing up playing video games.

Re: Why did moving the mouse cursor cause Windows 95 to run more quickly?

#113

Post by alexjm »

DonHopkins wrote: post #46
TeMPOraL wrote: post #18

Ah, the operant conditioning of software. To this day, when waiting for some long or compute-intensive operation, I tend to instinctively move the mouse around. I guess this may be why. Ironically, even though I grew up on Windows, I don't remember any actual case of "moving the mouse speeds thing up" on this OS - I only remember the infamous Linux cases (mouse move regenerates entropy, unblocking processes that got…

While running emacs over a modem to arpanet or dialup, I got into the habit of regularly typing ^A ^E to pace my cursor back and forth across the current line, to keep the connection and emacs warm. (Like a caged leopard or mad scientist pacing back and forth.) I could feel how responsive the connection and emacs were over time by the delay between typing and seeing the cursor move. Both the network and emacs contrib…

The ^T command is actually still around in Unix/Linux, but only when the program is reading input using canonical/cooked/non-raw mode. That's pretty uncommon these days, since input tends to be wrapped in readline or similar to allow for editing.

You can test it by running `ed`:

    ed scratch.txt
    2096
    ^T
    load: 0.57  cmd: ed 74469 waiting 0.00u 0.00s
    q
Running `stty -a` lists all of the characters that have special meaning when the TTY driver handles input this way, before the program sees it.

Re: Why did moving the mouse cursor cause Windows 95 to run more quickly?

#114

Post by kazinator »

In 1986, some computer graphics researchers in California (namely Conrad Huang, Ken Arnold, and Greg Couch at U. of California, San Francisco, Computer Graphics Lab) wrote a multi-player TTY game called hunt.

The game of hunt is clocked by the arrival of events. So that is to say, the arrival of packets from the game clients into the server drives the game forward. The more furiously people play and the more players there are, the more rapid is the movement of automatic objects, like shots traversing through the maze.

I last played this in 1995. I had a WYSE 50 terminal hooked up to a Linux box and played with a friend. One of us was on the console, one on the terminal.

I remember I had to patch something socket-related in the source code to get it working.

Re: Why did moving the mouse cursor cause Windows 95 to run more quickly?

#115

Post by layoutIfNeeded »

Stratoscope wrote: post #99
dTal wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think you'll find that Shift + Page Down is the fastest way to mark a lot of text, since you're doing it page by page instead of character by character.

Or, since GP said "mark all text", use Ctrl/Command+A. Of course neither of these would demonstrate the effect they were talking about.

    ggVG

Re: Why did moving the mouse cursor cause Windows 95 to run more quickly?

#116

Post by inlined »

woodrowbarlow wrote: post #90
Swenrekcah wrote: post #85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I do this all the time too, but unfortunately many processes today only go around in circls instead of showing the actual progress.

to be fair, "actual progress" is almost always a misnomer anyway.

True! I know some of the people involved in the windows update bar. Since cpu and dusk are so different across devices it’s hard to know actual time it will take. Instead teams divided their packages into theoretical weights and the progress bar showed the percent of total “weights”. That’s why it can be choppy is packages with few subdivisions have little to interpolate.

Re: Why did moving the mouse cursor cause Windows 95 to run more quickly?

#117

Post by jaggednad »

Wow, I remember doing this as a kid and thinking to myself that I was being stupid because surely wiggling the mouse would make the computer have to process more input and actually slow down whatever I was impatiently waiting for. I still did it though, because I _felt_ like it made things go faster. Turns out that intuition was right. Funny how we can learn to do things that actually work even when our conscious mind doesn’t believe they do.

Re: Why did moving the mouse cursor cause Windows 95 to run more quickly?

#118

Post by saagarjha »

DonHopkins wrote: post #46
TeMPOraL wrote: post #18

Ah, the operant conditioning of software. To this day, when waiting for some long or compute-intensive operation, I tend to instinctively move the mouse around. I guess this may be why. Ironically, even though I grew up on Windows, I don't remember any actual case of "moving the mouse speeds thing up" on this OS - I only remember the infamous Linux cases (mouse move regenerates entropy, unblocking processes that got…

While running emacs over a modem to arpanet or dialup, I got into the habit of regularly typing ^A ^E to pace my cursor back and forth across the current line, to keep the connection and emacs warm. (Like a caged leopard or mad scientist pacing back and forth.) I could feel how responsive the connection and emacs were over time by the delay between typing and seeing the cursor move. Both the network and emacs contrib…

> Somebody at the university implemented ^T to 4.2 BSD on the cs department's busy VAX 11/780, by modifying the tty driver.

macOS has this too!

Re: Why did moving the mouse cursor cause Windows 95 to run more quickly?

#119

Post by asveikau »

the-dude wrote: post #80
achandlerwhite wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Note he said 100hz not mhz. Essentially 100 times per second the message queue would process but if you moved the mouse it would process faster.

And the BSDs and Linux also have the HZ parameter for scheduling and for a long time the default has been as low as 100 Hz. Not sure what the current status quo is.

Some guides for better battery life on FreeBSD recommend setting it to 100 Hz.

Re: Why did moving the mouse cursor cause Windows 95 to run more quickly?

#120

Post by brandmeyer »

the-dude wrote: post #80
achandlerwhite wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Note he said 100hz not mhz. Essentially 100 times per second the message queue would process but if you moved the mouse it would process faster.

And the BSDs and Linux also have the HZ parameter for scheduling and for a long time the default has been as low as 100 Hz. Not sure what the current status quo is.

Tickless
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