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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)

#301

Post by MadWombat »

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…

> and didn't have to write CSS hacks for electronics stores

could you explain that?

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

#302

Post by themacguffinman »

gameswithgo wrote: post #76
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…

>But I also don't need to spend an entire weekend setting up a PC and a printer for my mom anymore either. I don't need to teach her arcane commands to get basic functionality out of her machine. Plug and play and usability happened The slowness is orthogonal to all those things that have improved. We can put the fast back just fine while keeping those things.

I don't think you can, not really. Practically all the slowdown you see comes from increasing levels of abstractions, and basically all good abstractions have a performance cost.

Abstractions in general buy you faster development and more reliable/stable software. UI abstractions buy you intuitive and easy to use UX. All of these benefits define the modern era of software that has spawned countless valuable software programs, and it's naive to think you can skip the bill.

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

#303

Post by Semiapies »

My problem is that I remember hard drives randomly and audibly grinding for several seconds, making me unable to do anything else.

I remember old word processors lagging behind my typing.

I remember waiting for greenscreen systems to pull down results from a search on a remote server.

When everything was great and optimized (and optimal), many things could be instant, back in the day. Funnily enough, the same is true now.

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

#304

Post by pgcj_poster »

dageshi wrote: post #244
TeMPOraL wrote: post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

You can never really make a map for "exploring" because what people want to explore is domain specific. Do you want to explore mountains? Do you want to explore museums, do you want to explore beaches? There is too much stuff in the world to present on a map without absolutely overwhelming people, in the same way that the internet is too vast to "explore". You can't explore the internet from google search you've got…

> There is too much stuff in the world to present on a map without absolutely overwhelming people

Nevertheless, I think that Google Maps et al. typically show far too little on the screen. My Dad tells me that he still prefers paper maps because he doesn't have to fiddle around with the zoom level to get things to show up. While I'm sure that Google has more data on most places than it could fit in a small window, when I look at my location in Google Maps, it looks very barren: in fact, it seems to prioritize showing me little 3d models of buildings over things that I care about, like street and place names. Paper maps are typically much denser, but I don't think that people 30 years ago were constantly "overwhelmed" by them.

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

#305

Post by root_axis »

This is just totally untrue. Even my Windows 10 computer boots from BIOS screen to login screen in under 8 seconds.

I remember what it was like running windows in 1994, even after waiting 40 seconds for windows to start up, I'd wait upwards of an additional 3 minutes before the computer was actually usable. I remember with keen frustration waiting for the churning disk noise to die down as a signal that the computer was no usable. Since the mid 2000s or so this has just never been a problem.

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

#306

Post by onceUponADime »

gravislizard wrote: post #217

As the OP who wrote this while drunk two years ago and thinks that about 30-50% of it is objectively wrong, it's extremely funny to me that every five months someone reposts it here and everyone gets in a fight about it again. Many of the details are entirely inaccurate - the thesis is still completely valid, and it's Computer Person Thinking that wants to attack the details while refusing to stand back and look at t…

We still have a generation of programers who never learned the whole stack, because St.Moore would save them from the sin of sloppyness forever.

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

#307

Post by pwthornton »

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…

In no way shape or form does DOS-era UX beat current-era UX (there may be specific programs that do so, but writ large this is incorrect). Getting away from command lines is one of the core reasons that computing exploded. Getting farther away from abstraction with touch is another reason that computing is exploding further.

Command-line systems simply do not map well to a lot of users' mental models. In particular, they suffer from very poor discoverability.

It is true that if you are trained up on a command-line system you can often do specific actions and commands quickly but without training and documentation, it is often quite hard to know what to do and why. Command-line systems also provide feedback that is hard for many people to understand.

Here are some guidelines for thoughtful product designs. DOS-era systems often violate quite a few of these: https://uxdesign.cc/guidelines-for-thoughtful-product-design...

Yes, it is true that many current-era systems violate these guidelines as well. This is because UX has become too visual design focused in recent years, but that's a symptom of execs not understanding the true value of design.

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

#308

Post by seemslegit »

Wasn't around computing in 1983 but phone and web app latency are still way behind the average early 2000s office or line-of-business app.

Also ironic is the act that the most significant improvement in responsiveness during the last 20 years was afforded not by better software or even faster CPUs but by the move to SSDs for OS, data and swap space.

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

#309

Post by LudwigNagasena »

Enginerrrd wrote: post #226
blfr wrote: post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 tou…

Microsoft Teams has one of the worse UX I've had experienced. It's amazing that a company can't make an app for its own platform that feels native.

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

#310

Post by dragontamer »

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…

> Remember autoexec.bat files?

I don't know if autoexec.bat was the most annoying thing from the 90s. (Although it was certainly annoying...)

My example of choice would be ISA, specifically configuring IRQs.

That's why UARTs back in the day are faster than USB: because your CPU would INSTANTLY software interrupt as soon as that ISA voltage changed. While today, USB 2.0 is poll-only, so the CPU effectively only asks USB once-per millisecond if "any data has arrived". (I think USB 3.0 has some bidirectional travel, but I bet most mice remain to be USB 2.0)

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For the most part, today's systems have far worse latency than the systems of the 80s. But two points:

1. Turns out that absolute maximum latency wasn't very useful in all circumstances. The mouse updated far quicker in the 80s through the Serial port than today... but the difference between a microsecond delay from a 80s-style Serial port and a modern-style USB millisecond update routine (traversing an incredibly complicated, multilayered protocol) is still imperceptible.

2. The benefits of the USB stack cannot be understated. Back in ISA days, you'd have to move jumper pins to configure IRQs. Put two different hardware on IRQ5 and your computer WILL NOT BOOT. Today, USB auto-negotiates all those details, so the user only has to plug the damn thing in, and everything autoworks magically. No jumper pins, no IRQ charts, no nothing. It just works. Heck, you don't even have to turn off your computer to add hardware anymore, thanks to the magic of modern USB.

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Adding hardware, like soundcards, new Serial Ports (to support mice/gamepads), parallel ports (printers), etc. etc. before plug-and-play was a nightmare. PCI and USB made life exponentially easier and opened up the world of computers to far more people.

Every now and then when I visit my parents... I find my dad's old drawer of serial-port gender-changers, null modems, baud-rate charts, 7n1 / 8n1 configuration details and say... "thank goodness computers aren't like that anymore".

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