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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)

#221

Post by solidasparagus »

reaperducer wrote: post #144
ncallaway wrote: post #100

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> It also doesn't change the fact that Google Maps is very bad at being a map. It's entire UI flow is oriented for giving turn-by-turn directions for people who know where they are and where they are going; As it turns out, that is probably the most popular use case for maps in the world. Note also that for most smartphone users of Google Maps the use-case is actually much broader than that. The UI flow also totally…

As it turns out, that is probably the most popular use case for maps in the world. Your sentence starts out like you're stating a fact, but then peters out with "probably." Do you have data on this? I'd posit the opposite: That exploration is far more used in online maps. Aside from Uber drivers, SV types, and wannabe road warrior squinters, nobody uses maps for their daily activities. People know where they're going…

I think this isn't true at all. The vast majority of people I know use maps solely find something like an ATM/gas station/coffee shop/etc and then figuring out how to get there or how long it would take to get there.

We don't have data, but the only people that do are Google and they have designed their UX around this use case. And it has become one of the most used tools on Earth. If we are going to play the 'your comment is bad because you don't have data' game, I think the onus is really on you to prove that the company with all the data is getting it wrong.

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

#223

Post by _bxg1 »

hoorayimhelping wrote: post #35

This post again with its ridiculous ranting examples. "This text searching program that searches text against text is way faster and simpler than a fully rendered, interactive map of the entire world with accurate roads and precision at the foot / meter level." No. Shit, really? Get out of town. Yes, some very popular apps have bad UX. But some apps have incredible UX. Cherry picking the bad ones while ignoring the g…

Agreed. Comparing UI responsiveness to yesteryear can be an interesting case study - examining precisely why things feel slower, to see whether they can be made better - but more often than not the answer is, "because we traded a bit of efficiency for an enormous wealth of usability, and iterability, and compatibility, that people never could have dreamed of back then".

Rants like this post are willfully ignorant of the benefits that a technological shift can have for millions of actual humans, simply because it offends the author's personal sensibilities.

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

#224

Post by simonskoog »

mrdatawolf wrote: post #212
soulofmischief wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> you can easily setup a command line interface or Linux system and move blazing fast Well... not really. Terminal response times are way slower than they used to be in the 80's. Sure, we have greater throughput, but we also have greater latency. https://danluu.com/term-latency/

"Terminal response times are way slower than they used to be in the 80's." In 1983 the top selling computers were the TRS-80, Apple II and IBM PC (among others). I started on those computers. And what you said is crap... straight out BS. Any person from that era should remember what happened when you typed dir (or equivalent) into a folder with a couple hundred items. It was time to go make some coffee while each...i…

That still happens though, and it's not because it actually took 50ms for your computer to read a filename and 500 ms for it to read 10.

It depends on how fast you allow items to be written (pixels per unit of time) on your display and if you force writing of everything or allow line skips. If you want to experiment I think putty has pretty fine-grain control options.

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

#225

Post by carapace »

This kills me. Everything from waiting for the machine to boot (WTF ARE YOU DOING IN THERE???) to waiting for the machine to shut down.

Oberon on a twenty-year-old thinkpad is a better faster OS.

Go try it for yourself:

https://schierlm.github.io/OberonEmulator/emu.html?image=Ful...

This is faster in your browser than your whole computer can run the current bloated crap. Click "reset" in the gear menu and watch it reboot. OOoooo so fast.

Oberon OS plus "Gadgets" has never yet been equaled or exceeded by any other UI, anywhere. If you haven't used it you can't know.

Just the separation of selection and (text, not mouse) cursor is so useful, let alone the built-in cut/copy/paste with mouse chords. Don't get me started on the Gadgets system...

But enough about the greatest OS+UI ever made...

(And my computer freezes for a full second when I scrolled down to the broken (on my machine) image. The fuck Firefox Y U so slow!? Junk. It's all junk. Made out of junk, fractal dimensions of over-wrought crap. Redundant computations that burn energy to do nothing but fail to be better than decades-old versions of itself, the fires of a digital hell.)

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

#226

Post by Enginerrrd »

blfr wrote: post #80
hoorayimhelping wrote: post #35

This post again with its ridiculous ranting examples. "This text searching program that searches text against text is way faster and simpler than a fully rendered, interactive map of the entire world with accurate roads and precision at the foot / meter level." No. Shit, really? Get out of town. Yes, some very popular apps have bad UX. But some apps have incredible UX. Cherry picking the bad ones while ignoring the g…

Yes, some very popular apps have bad UX. But some apps have incredible UX. OP gave examples. Could you provide a couple of examples as well?

I would actually say that Microsoft Office suite was really good (up until recently when they started trying to funnel you into their cloud storage). But even with that blemish, the UX is still pretty good. Hitting the alt key let's you access any menu with just a few keystrokes that show up when you hit the alt key so they don't have to be memorized. I can also work a hell of a lot of magic in Excel without ever touching my mouse, and not needing to memorize every keyboard shortcut I need. I wish every app and desktop in every OS followed a similar standard for keyboard shortcuts.

Macros/VBA is still awful, but overall, despite the horrifying computational abuse I put office suite through, it's actually very stable!

And, it's fast enough once it loads. It's still pretty slow to load though.

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

#227

Post by fortran77 »

I'm old enough to have done applications that were meant to run on IBM 3270 terminals.

Applications that dealt with text and filling out forms were probably better on the 3270-style interface than they are on most web applications, for no good reason. Several times a week I get bitten by a bad form. Forget to put in my Country, hit submit, and the entire form gets erased with an error message, etc.

That being said, for graphical applications his hated mouse is better than what we had in the late 70s. Doing CAD on Tektronics 4010 light-pen terminals wasn't fun. People still went back to T-squares and drafting tables because of this.

https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/6/62/Computer...

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

#228

Post by carapace »

mrdatawolf wrote: post #212
soulofmischief wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> you can easily setup a command line interface or Linux system and move blazing fast Well... not really. Terminal response times are way slower than they used to be in the 80's. Sure, we have greater throughput, but we also have greater latency. https://danluu.com/term-latency/

"Terminal response times are way slower than they used to be in the 80's." In 1983 the top selling computers were the TRS-80, Apple II and IBM PC (among others). I started on those computers. And what you said is crap... straight out BS. Any person from that era should remember what happened when you typed dir (or equivalent) into a folder with a couple hundred items. It was time to go make some coffee while each...i…

Right, I can recall the first time I saw my friend's parent's 486.

I remember doing 'dir' on a large directory, it scrolled so fast, so fast. I said to my friend, "The next generation will be so fast it will have finished scrolling before you finish typing the command."

Sadly, it was not to be. DOS on a 486 is as fast as computers have ever gotten, perceptually.

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

#229

Post by ehsankia »

TeMPOraL wrote: post #66
hoorayimhelping wrote: post #35

This post again with its ridiculous ranting examples. "This text searching program that searches text against text is way faster and simpler than a fully rendered, interactive map of the entire world with accurate roads and precision at the foot / meter level." No. Shit, really? Get out of town. Yes, some very popular apps have bad UX. But some apps have incredible UX. Cherry picking the bad ones while ignoring the g…

Huh. I'd say the examples are perfectly good and on-point. While dealing with autoexec.bat and random BSODs wasn't fun, it's entirely orthogonal to the fact that a DOS-era POS still offers orders of magnitude better UX than current-era browser POSes, or than most web apps for that matter. It also doesn't change the fact that Google Maps is very bad at being a map . It's entire UI flow is oriented for giving turn-by-t…

> offers orders of magnitude better UX than current-era browser

And they also did orders of magnitude less. If you've ever done UX, you would know that it gets exponentially harder as you add more features. People love to complain, but not a single person would realistically give up on all the new features they've got for the slightly better UX in certain edge cases.

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

#230

Post by rsecora »

rahuldottech wrote: post #203
rsecora wrote: post #171

The experience of the 80s was really slowness, things were so slow that now It's unimaginable now. So unimaginable that we don’t remember any more common actions by 1983. The experience was so slow, that you can play another game while loading [1]. Namco even patented "playing games during load” by 1987 [2]. As an example, I have fond memories of my C64 tape loading Hunchback [3] ... while watching "V". A single tape…

Links formatted as code sorta defeat the point, right?

Right, edited
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