> he’s built a computer with almost zero latency—when you do something, the computer reacts instantly. Oh, the irony. It's Microsoft's own fault in the first place that we have an operating system that is so horribly unresponsive. And, now, umpteen years later, it's a BIG ADVANCE that we actually make computers do what we want, when we want. Just like before Microsoft.
That's almost laughably incorrect, although unfortunately popular amongst a certain segment of the tech set. The nearly-impossible-to-use computers that did very little very slowly back in the 80s (and earlier) were not nearly as amazing as your memory is fooling you into believing. Sure, nearly-bare-metal OSes don't soak up much in the way of resources, but that only works in very narrow market segments, and compute…
Re: Pens Are Making a High-Tech Comeback
#31Essentially, when people think back to how responsive computers were "before windows", they are recalling computers which had no networking, and disks which were so slow that you would never write software which depended in real-time on getting that data from disk. You'd pre-load all the data you needed into your meager RAM and then, yes, for doing the one thing that was loaded into memory, with the data that was already in memory, the computer would be very very responsive. But when it came to saving or loading, you could go and get a coffee.