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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

#71

Post by M95D »

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 remember using Corel 8 on a 486 with 8MB of memory. I would write the text in notepad and paste it into Corel, otherwise it would take 2s for each letter to appear.

I still find it amaizing that it worked. A 486 is something like half the speed of a single core ESP32 today...

Re: Maybe people do care about performance and reliability

#72

Post by doubled112 »

kayodelycaon wrote: post #60
capableweb wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah, sometimes there are literally no alternatives or no alternatives "that have it all". Jira comes to mind as one example, where it seems almost universally hated by developers but loved by others, yet everyone (including others) complain it's slow, but damn if you cannot model near every single process in Jira if you'd like to. Wordpress is another where performance is atrocious and security is usually lacking, b…

I guess I'm one of the few developers that like Jira. If you can keep management from going wild with permissions and workflows, it isn't unpleasant to use. Granted, since it needs to serve everyone, it's not going to be amazing for anybody. Amazing solutions tend to have narrower focus. They tend to exclude complex workflows, forcing simplification. And there's an added bonus. The more admin tools you lack, the less…

I've always felt that Jira's (and similarly Wordpress's) biggest pro is its biggest con.

It will let you do whatever you want.

Re: Maybe people do care about performance and reliability

#73

Post by Waterluvian »

amalcon wrote: post #15
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…

> MS Word in the 90s and 00s would regularly crash and take your file with you, It's an old joke at this point that you can tell when a person first became a serious computer user based on how frequently they save their work. My muscle memory for ctrl+s is so ingrained that I type it every minute or two in things like Google Docs that literally ignore it.

I still have this total distrust about closing Google documents without any sort of save operation.

Re: Maybe people do care about performance and reliability

#74

Post by j_leboulanger »

crazygringo wrote: post #44
j_leboulanger wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

I'm pretty sure you're exaggerating quite a bit. Anyone can watch this video [1] to see how long it actually took to boot up or launch Word. But bootup seems to take 20 seconds, and launching Word took 7 seconds. Which roughly matches my memory. So about an order of magnitude slower than you're describing. (The SE/30 had a clock speed twice that of the SE, but launching things is mostly bound by the hard drive speed.…

On the video you sent Photoshop takes 6 seconds to start and it seems like it is stored on an external disk which could explain why it's slower.

I'll try to make a video on real hardware once I have time to show that I'm not exaggerating. And remember that the SE/30 is a computer from 89, so not even early 90s.

Re: Maybe people do care about performance and reliability

#75

Post by ROTMetro »

agentultra wrote: post #33
0xdeadbeefbabe wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 w…

And probably broke their MRP/ERP systems. But the IT departments probably came up with workaround to get data out of the system and feed the ERP/MRP system just enough to keep things going but probably way less efficiently than they would have ultimately been if pain points would have been addressed in the existing system instead of the virus of your software injected inappropriately. And then you probably badmouthed the MRP/ERP system for it's failings (that were partly related to the damage done from using your system). Weak sauce man. In a different life I wrote best of breed department level software too but at least I very much understood why enterprise systems were preferred outside the department so that I COULD ADDRESS THAT CORE ISSUE THAT NEEDED TO BE ADDRESSED AS PART OF MY SOFTWARE. But yea, IT department bad, me good.

Re: Maybe people do care about performance and reliability

#76

Post by crazygringo »

j_leboulanger wrote: post #74
crazygringo wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm pretty sure you're exaggerating quite a bit. Anyone can watch this video [1] to see how long it actually took to boot up or launch Word. But bootup seems to take 20 seconds, and launching Word took 7 seconds. Which roughly matches my memory. So about an order of magnitude slower than you're describing. (The SE/30 had a clock speed twice that of the SE, but launching things is mostly bound by the hard drive speed.…

On the video you sent Photoshop takes 6 seconds to start and it seems like it is stored on an external disk which could explain why it's slower. I'll try to make a video on real hardware once I have time to show that I'm not exaggerating. And remember that the SE/30 is a computer from 89, so not even early 90s.

I checked again. He double-clicks the icon at 16:28 and the watch cursor ends at 16:55. That's 27 seconds. I might be off by a second or two, it's hard to measure exactly.

But this matches my memory as well -- Photoshop was by far the slowest program I had at the time to start up. I remember being bored waiting because it just took forever to load. While applications like Word definitely took several seconds to load, but that wasn't such a big deal.

Of course, all of this was a vast improvement over the several minutes it would take loading programs on my Commodore 64 a few years prior... from cassette tape! ;)

Re: Maybe people do care about performance and reliability

#77

Post by quicklime »

prmph wrote: post #36
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…

> VSCode and Visual Studio are two completely different products, one is a code editor, and the other is a full blown IDE

What does Visual Studio from around 2000 have that VSCode doesn't? I get that VSCode offloads a lot of work to the language server and extensions, but it offers IDE-like features including auto-completion, code navigation, and the UI is more than just code editing - it integrates version control, a test runner, debugging, etc. What is it missing that makes it not a full blown IDE?

Re: Maybe people do care about performance and reliability

#78

Post by kevinventullo »

harry8 wrote: post #54
crazygringo wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm pretty sure you're exaggerating quite a bit. Anyone can watch this video [1] to see how long it actually took to boot up or launch Word. But bootup seems to take 20 seconds, and launching Word took 7 seconds. Which roughly matches my memory. So about an order of magnitude slower than you're describing. (The SE/30 had a clock speed twice that of the SE, but launching things is mostly bound by the hard drive speed.…

>but launching things is mostly bound by the hard drive speed. which got slower and slower taking swap speed with it, which slowed down everything you were actually using. You'd defrag the drive regularly and that wouldn't do it so you'd have to wipe and reinstall from scratch. And that was some hours of work but like having a brand new machine again when you were done. You couldn't believe how bad it had degraded to…

Oh man, I forgot about defragging. There was something quite satisfying about knowing your computer was “tidying things up” behind the scenes.

Re: Maybe people do care about performance and reliability

#79

Post by faxmeyourcode »

Michelangelo11 wrote: post #45

"apex predator of grug is complexity complexity bad say again: complexity very bad you say now: complexity very, very bad" https://grugbrain.dev/ No really -- I would bet that the single greatest contribution comes from the massive growth in complexity, in all relevant areas, over the last 20+ years.

Every time I see this posted somewhere it's been long enough for me to forget about it, so I go through and read it again and glean something new from it.

Re: Maybe people do care about performance and reliability

#80

Post by fmajid »

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…

No. MS Word 5.1 on my 1990 vintage Mac Plus felt subjectively faster than the current version, and it had all the features I needed.
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