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Almost everything on computers is perceptually slower than it was in 1983 (2017)

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Re: Almost everything on computers is perceptually slower than it was in 1983 (2017)

#421

Post by feanaro »

ptx wrote: post #407
feanaro wrote: post #92

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I feel like a large part of the unintuitiveness of keyboard interfaces is not actually an intrinsic quality of keyboard interfaces since they're so often conflated with command-line or TUI interfaces. There might be an alternative but yet undiscovered paradigm which combines the best of both worlds: keyboard control and intuitive, beautiful, graphical widgets. To motivate this with a somewhat blunt example, what if w…

I'm not sure if you're aware that standard GUIs (common 90s-style GUIs based on IBM's CUA[1] design) already do this. Every control can be assigned an access key[2] that allows you to access it with alt + some letter, with the letter indicated using an underscore. The trend lately seems to be to hide the underscore until you hold down alt for a while, which makes the feature much more difficult to use when you don't…

I was aware of this as a thing that programs often did but wasn't aware that this was a standard. Thanks!

That said, I find that even when programs support this for accessing menus, they often do not support clicking buttons and focusing text boxes using it, so it could be taken further.

Re: Almost everything on computers is perceptually slower than it was in 1983 (2017)

#422

Post by efdee »

pmarin wrote: post #340
efdee wrote: post #333

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Weird to compare an IDE and a text editor, though.

VS CODE [1] is a text editor. Visual Studio [2] is the IDE. [1] https://code.visualstudio.com/ [2] https://visualstudio.microsoft.com/vs/

VS Code has Intellisense, an integrated debugger, and much more. What makes it not an IDE?

Re: Almost everything on computers is perceptually slower than it was in 1983 (2017)

#423

Post by efdee »

SAI_Peregrinus wrote: post #344
efdee wrote: post #333

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Weird to compare an IDE and a text editor, though.

VS Code ~= VS. It's a text editor, not an IDE (unless you consider things like VIM to be IDEs because you can use plugins to do IDE-like stuff with them.)

What makes it not an IDE to you? VS Code has first class Intellisense, an integrated debugger, ...

Re: Almost everything on computers is perceptually slower than it was in 1983 (2017)

#424

Post by cmrdporcupine »

kabdib wrote: post #416
cmrdporcupine wrote: post #401

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Hah, I didn't notice it was you who I was responding to. How nice of me to tell you the size of the OS you helped write ;-)

That deserves a story, too. Why not? [Note: this is the early 80s. A computer with a large amount of memory might have 64K in this period. I think a 64K ROM cost about four dollars, and 64K of RAM was about fifty bucks] The Atari ST's operating system (TOS, and no I don't want to talk about what that stands for) was written in C and assembly language. Initially the ST was going to have 128K of ROM; we wanted to one-u…

Funny, the EmuTOS guys are _still_ finding stuff in the original DRI sources to clean up. They've managed to stay within the 192KB budget as well.

It's interesting that the original plan was to get a BASIC in there, because IMHO that really was a weak point of the ST for its target market -- which I guess included my 13 year old self. At least for the first couple years.

Re: Almost everything on computers is perceptually slower than it was in 1983 (2017)

#425

Post by dddddaviddddd »

rayiner wrote: post #263

Computers jumped the shark in 1998. I remember dual-booting NT4 and BeOS on a PII 300 MHz with 64MB of RAM. Connected to a 256 kbps SDSL modem, it’s the best computing experience I’ve ever had. You could do everything you can on a modern machine. Indeed, even more, because the modern versions of software like OneNote and Word are neutered compared to the ‘97 versions. It feels like all of this effort has been spent m…

I've considered using a PowerBook G3 as my main computer, but there are two practical limitations: can't get new batteries, and no support for modern cyphers/encryption.

Re: Almost everything on computers is perceptually slower than it was in 1983 (2017)

#427

Post by bayindirh »

diamondo25 wrote: post #304
the8472 wrote: post #170

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Corporate windows installations are unnecessarily slow because they run antivirus and all kinds of domain membership stuff in the boot and logon path. A clean install with fast boot and without that gunk takes seconds. A headless linux can come up in seconds (UEFI fast boot + EFI stub) or even less than a second if you're in a VM and don't have to deal with the firmware startup. Booting to a lightweight window manage…

If your host machine is a real server (eg poweredge), itll do a selftest. This already takes tens of seconds. If you want fast bootup times, you need to be the BIOS. The example in the top post is stuff that either loads data off a flash chip (like a bios works) or a disk (requires some bootstrapping).

Some of the companies' servers (e.g. Dell) can boot pretty fast in these days. If you want see something that boots slowly, try an IBM HS22 blade (3+ minutes self-initialization after insert, 2.5+ minutes to pass initial BIOS screen to storage initialization and boot-start).

IBM's QPI-linked dual servers boots even slower as one technician explained to me. Presumably you can make coffee during the wait.

Re: Almost everything on computers is perceptually slower than it was in 1983 (2017)

#428

Post by NicoJuicy »

bobcostas55 wrote: post #206
kabdib wrote: post #72

I had an Atari ST in a closet, and decided to get rid of it a while back. I pulled it out to test it. The boot sequence, all the way to a desktop with a mouse that moves, takes less than one second. If you boot from a hard drive, maybe another second. For a while I just kept hitting the reset button, marveling at the speed at which the ST came up. Most machines I work with these days take minutes to get rolling. Okay…

The latest AMD CPUs are particularly bad at this, I got a 3600 and for half a year now there are known problems with extremely slow booting. The latest BIOS update made them a bit better but it's still at completely unacceptable levels.

BIOS update makes me think that it's a motherboard problem.

My Ryzen boots within 8 seconds on a b450 Pro motherboard.

Re: Almost everything on computers is perceptually slower than it was in 1983 (2017)

#429

Post by maccard »

Retric wrote: post #323
maccard wrote: post #205

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Most machines I work with these days take minutes to get rolling. My current Windows 10 machine boots faster than my monitor turns on (<5 seconds from power on to login screen).

Login screen is hardly the end of the boot up process. I have had work laptops where I would login then go get a water because it’s going to take several minutes to finish loading.

My machine definitely doesn't take multiple minutes after login to load fully. I didn't count after that point because it's really the user (or administrators) fault after that point, and because I have a password which means I'd need to actually time startup, pause, and time login. Also, when do you consider "done"? How can I accurately measure that?

Re: Almost everything on computers is perceptually slower than it was in 1983 (2017)

#430

Post by Shorel »

tibbon wrote: post #203
dexen wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>but I do think Windows seems to do a little better software-wise too Windows 10 does a little trick to speed up boot - when you perform a shutdown, Windows 10 saves a mini-hibernation image to the hibernation file. When you perform normal boot, it can start up quite fast[1]. This gives noticeably shorter boot time especially on spinning rust drives (i know, i know, $CURRENT_YEAR). However if you perform a "reboot" i…

I feel that (partially due to this hibernation file, partially due to SSDs) that Windows boots are actually faster than ever now. Even a reboot seems to take under 30 seconds. I remember just the RAM test on my Pentium 1 was several minutes, and the boot time was a few more often

May be, but Ubuntu still boots faster in the same hardware, doing a full boot sequence.
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