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

I found recently that dragging the middle half of the screen on mobile street view now scrolls up and down the street instead of rotating the view. I don't know why companies obsessively break things that worked fine for years.

> almost everything on computers is perceptually slower than it was in 1983 .... amber-screen library computer in 1998: type in two words and hit F3. search results appear instantly. .... now: type in two words, wait for an AJAX popup. get a throbber for five seconds. oops you pressed a key, your results are erased

So we start with something 15 years AFTER the title as evidence of the "good" times, then make a vague anecdotal reference to something modern. I've seen POOR performances in places, but the majority of experiences I see now are faster than in 1998 and definitely than 1983. Faster AND more convenient.

> And it's worth noting that HYPERTEXT, specifically, is best with a mouse in a lot of cases. Wikipedia would suck on keyboard.

Um....no. It's less convenient than a mouse, but way better than the function key-based commands than the author lists.

I think there is a lot of room available to complain about terrible interfaces today, and in particular how choked everything is by the need to track and add advertising, but there's no actual evidence in this article, and it comes across as a rant and selective nostalgia.

Almost everything on computers is perceptually more rich, useful, and intuitive than it was in 1983.

I wouldn't generalise. Behind the scenes modern computer systems are of course processing billions of times more instructions than computers of old. Some portions of the UX do have noticeable delay and sometimes even inordinate delay. This is usually due to poor choice of algorithms and program logic, but sometimes it is the case that blazing speeds of modern hardware has trained most of us to expect every computation to be almost instant, but some algorithms are still pretty slow, no matter how fast the hardware and they are likely to remain that way. Of course the UI in particular doesn't fit into this algorithmic complexity constraint and there is little excuse for their perceptible slowness in recent years except for poor coding and feature creep.

Disagree. It looks prettier but its often not more intuitive.

Not 1983, but Windows 95 all the icons had text underneath them, so you knew what they did.

More recently it took me a couple of years of seeing hamburger menus to make the connection "it's an icon to give you a menu". Those are everywhere but are in no way intuitive.