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Maybe people do care about performance and reliability

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Re: Maybe people do care about performance and reliability

#31

Post by j_leboulanger »

gilbetron wrote: post #9

The idea that software wasn't bloated and slow 20,30+ years ago is just myth. Everything was bloated and slow. MS Word in the 90s and 00s would regularly crash and take your file with you, and it often took minutes to start up. Yes, there were some brilliant counterexamples, just as there are today. But most software today is far more enjoyable and rapid to use than that from previous eras. While the software isn't a…

I would tend to disagree. In the 1990s System 7 would start in a few seconds from hard disk on a Mac SE/30.

Word would start in less than a second (not sure which version it was), and most features we use today were available. Adobe Photoshop 3.0 would start in less than 3 seconds, and same with Premiere 1.0.

Of course you lacked some memory protection features which could make the whole computer crash because of a single program failure, but daily experience was much better on old systems. They felt way faster because they have less input lag and because UI was less bloated.

I'm not saying 1990s computer and software were better, but they were way faster than what we use today.

Re: Maybe people do care about performance and reliability

#32

Post by jvans »

I like how this article highlights the complexity of many competing factors. We like to understand things by boiling them down to simple rules and catch phrases that make us feel like we understand the world but that is almost never how things work.

As devs we need to take pride in our work, even when it feels like there's a lot of pressure to cut corners and ship trash. Take a few extra cycles to make your system just a little bit more resilient and give positive feedback to your peers who do the same.

Re: Maybe people do care about performance and reliability

#33

Post by agentultra »

0xdeadbeefbabe wrote: post #23
agentultra wrote: post #7

I worked at a hole-in-the-wall-you've-never-heard-of software company that landed big contracts with large multinationals consistently that, from the customers' perspective, came down to one reason: it wasn't SAP. The licensing model of large, enterprise software does have ramifications for users on the floor. In this case it's because the software had a per-seat license and required expensive consultants to modify y…

Was it the German company SAP? How did the end-users even find your software especially when the IT folks hated it?

Our sales people had connections in the industry that led us into various "approved vendor" lists. This eventually allowed us to worm our way into getting demos with floor managers who could use some of their budget to buy our software. Word of mouth spread from there and within a couple of years we were driving their IT department up the wall. It was grass-roots and the end-users, the people on the floor doing the work, loved it so much that it spread.

Re: Maybe people do care about performance and reliability

#34

Post by mananaysiempre »

radicalbyte wrote: post #22
gilbetron wrote: post #9

The idea that software wasn't bloated and slow 20,30+ years ago is just myth. Everything was bloated and slow. MS Word in the 90s and 00s would regularly crash and take your file with you, and it often took minutes to start up. Yes, there were some brilliant counterexamples, just as there are today. But most software today is far more enjoyable and rapid to use than that from previous eras. While the software isn't a…

That is only partially true. Office 2000 and 2003 were great releases, the main applications (Word, Excel, Access, PowerPoint and Outlook) were fast and stable as long as you weren't running some weird corporate domain deployment. Earlier and later versions were worse, and Outlook was horrible if you were stuck on a domain. Excel always had issues if you were doing something stupid like using it as a database and all…

> Office 2000 and 2003 were great releases, the main applications (Word, Excel, Access, PowerPoint and Outlook) were fast and stable as long as you weren't running some weird corporate domain deployment.

Or tried to use Microsoft Equation more than a couple of times inside a single document. The thing was ridiculously prone to crashing on top of producing butt-ugly typesetting.

Of course, that falls under “using OLE”, but IIRC so does using WordArt, which was rock solid (albeit much simpler and in particular incapable of in-place editing).

Re: Maybe people do care about performance and reliability

#35

Post by citrin_ru »

gilbetron wrote: post #9

The idea that software wasn't bloated and slow 20,30+ years ago is just myth. Everything was bloated and slow. MS Word in the 90s and 00s would regularly crash and take your file with you, and it often took minutes to start up. Yes, there were some brilliant counterexamples, just as there are today. But most software today is far more enjoyable and rapid to use than that from previous eras. While the software isn't a…

How bloated software can become is limited by available hardware resources. 20-30 years ago typical RAM size / CPU core count where much smaller than nowadays. If you run desktop software written 20 years ago on modern hardware it would work much faster than modern desktop software with comparable functions (not always, but quite often). But I'd agree that there was plenty bloated software which run slow on hardware most people afforded at that time. May be this happens because software is typically developed on top of the line hardware but users on average spend less on hardware then developers.

Re: Maybe people do care about performance and reliability

#36

Post by prmph »

gilbetron wrote: post #9

The idea that software wasn't bloated and slow 20,30+ years ago is just myth. Everything was bloated and slow. MS Word in the 90s and 00s would regularly crash and take your file with you, and it often took minutes to start up. Yes, there were some brilliant counterexamples, just as there are today. But most software today is far more enjoyable and rapid to use than that from previous eras. While the software isn't a…

Really disagree on this one.

It's true lots of software were unreliable back in the day. But: - Crashes sometimes != Slow, bloated, and unreliable. I'd rather have something simple and responsive that crashes every now and then, than something that is aggravating to use all the time. - With the massive increase in hardware performance, there's just no excuse at all for slow unresponsive software now, especially from the big vendors. The reasons are not even usually technical; the bloat is from ads and tracking and more

> I'd rather have a search take a second or two longer if it is able to handle synonyms and different word forms.

I'm not sure people are complaining abut search being slow. Most complaints about search is that is lower quality than it used to be.

> VS Code is so much better than Visual Studio from around 2000.

VSCode and Visual Studio are two completely different products, one is a code editor, and the other is a full blown IDE. There were very good editors back in the day. And VSCode has started showing signs of a decrease in quality.

Re: Maybe people do care about performance and reliability

#37

Post by anonymouskimmer »

radicalbyte wrote: post #22
gilbetron wrote: post #9

The idea that software wasn't bloated and slow 20,30+ years ago is just myth. Everything was bloated and slow. MS Word in the 90s and 00s would regularly crash and take your file with you, and it often took minutes to start up. Yes, there were some brilliant counterexamples, just as there are today. But most software today is far more enjoyable and rapid to use than that from previous eras. While the software isn't a…

That is only partially true. Office 2000 and 2003 were great releases, the main applications (Word, Excel, Access, PowerPoint and Outlook) were fast and stable as long as you weren't running some weird corporate domain deployment. Earlier and later versions were worse, and Outlook was horrible if you were stuck on a domain. Excel always had issues if you were doing something stupid like using it as a database and all…

> Excel always had issues if you were doing something stupid like using it as a database

I remember a long, long time ago firing up Access. I quickly closed it and continued to use Excel as a database. As it was only for personal use this wasn't an issue.

Re: Maybe people do care about performance and reliability

#38

Post by [deleted] »

j_leboulanger wrote: post #31
gilbetron wrote: post #9

The idea that software wasn't bloated and slow 20,30+ years ago is just myth. Everything was bloated and slow. MS Word in the 90s and 00s would regularly crash and take your file with you, and it often took minutes to start up. Yes, there were some brilliant counterexamples, just as there are today. But most software today is far more enjoyable and rapid to use than that from previous eras. While the software isn't a…

I would tend to disagree. In the 1990s System 7 would start in a few seconds from hard disk on a Mac SE/30. Word would start in less than a second (not sure which version it was), and most features we use today were available. Adobe Photoshop 3.0 would start in less than 3 seconds, and same with Premiere 1.0. Of course you lacked some memory protection features which could make the whole computer crash because of a s…

[deleted]

Re: Maybe people do care about performance and reliability

#40

Post by ChrisMarshallNY »

citrin_ru wrote: post #35
gilbetron wrote: post #9

The idea that software wasn't bloated and slow 20,30+ years ago is just myth. Everything was bloated and slow. MS Word in the 90s and 00s would regularly crash and take your file with you, and it often took minutes to start up. Yes, there were some brilliant counterexamples, just as there are today. But most software today is far more enjoyable and rapid to use than that from previous eras. While the software isn't a…

How bloated software can become is limited by available hardware resources. 20-30 years ago typical RAM size / CPU core count where much smaller than nowadays. If you run desktop software written 20 years ago on modern hardware it would work much faster than modern desktop software with comparable functions (not always, but quite often). But I'd agree that there was plenty bloated software which run slow on hardware…

That reminds me of the old @bruised_blood comic: https://twitter.com/iamdevloper/status/926458505355235328
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