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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)

#171

Post by rsecora »

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 can take one hour if it fails in the middle and you need retries. All those waiting times were order of magnitude of what a common toddler will expect today. We were so relieved when the fast loaders appears [4] or when a 1541 arrived home [5]. And then we were so frustrated when the 1541 was only 300bytes/s instead of the 300bits/s of the Datasette.

The scenario in Xenix or PC-DOS loading from 8" floppies was similar.

I'm not arguing that now are better times, I’m arguing that in the 80s we have the best for the time, and those were good times to remember.

[1] Mini Games: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Invade-a-Load

[2] Nanco patent: https://patents.google.com/patent/US5718632A/en

[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hunchback_(video_game)

[4] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fast_loader

[5] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Commodore_1541

(edited link formats)

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

#174

Post by blattimwind »

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…

> 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.

I know of an ERP system that somehow manages to take about 15 seconds to search an inventory of ~100k items. If you export all those items to CSV, with all their attributes (most of which are not searched), the resulting file is about 15 MB.

It is boggling how they managed to implement search this slowly (in a C++ application using MS SQL as the backend). 3.5 GHz computers, performing plain text string search at about 1 MB/s.

It is even more surprising that users feel this is not an completely unreasonable speed.

(They managed to pull this stunt off by completely not using the SQL database in the intended way, i.e. all tables are essentially (id, blob) tuples, where the blob is a zlib compressed piece of custom TLV encoded data. All data access goes through a bunch of stored procedures, which return data in accordance to a sort of "data extraction string". Search works by re-implementing inverted indices in tables of (word, offset, blob), where blob contains a zlib compressed list of matching IDs; again processed by stored procedures. The client then is wisely implemented using MS SQL's flavour of LIMIT queries which effectively cause a classic quadratic slowdown because the database engine literally has no way to fetch result rows n...m except by constructing the entire result set up to m.

Unsurprisingly the developers of this abomination claim to be competent. They also invented a funny data exchange format involving fixed field lengths and ASCII separators - some time in the 2010s.)

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

#175

Post by shepardrtc »

sandyarmstrong wrote: post #138
shepardrtc wrote: post #116

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. What are you talking about? How in the world is a DOS that can only run a single app at a time better than a system that can run…

> What are you talking about? How in the world is a DOS that can only run a single app at a time better than a system that can run dozens of apps at once? How is non-multitasking a better experience? The person you were replying to was specifically talking about POS (Point of Sale) systems. Retail workers use these systems to do repetitive tasks as quickly as possible. Legacy systems tend to be a lot faster (and more…

My mistake. I thought they meant Piece-Of-Shit.

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

#176

Post by welly »

kungtotte wrote: post #150
Arnt wrote: post #113

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have several atlases and IMO they have considerable advantages over Google Maps. As does Google Maps over them. But none of that is relevant to the matter at hand: "Almost everything on computers is perceptually slower than in 1983".

Thus far in this thread nobody has offered any counterpoint to the speed argument. The first PC we bought at home was a 133MHz Pentium. My current box is a Ryzen 3700 at 16*3.6GHz. It doesn't feel like I have that much more power at my disposal doing everyday things. Web browsers aren't 400 times faster today than Internet Explorer was in 1995. They should be. Even if you account for all the extra stuff that's going…

Try running Google Maps on your 133Mhz Pentium.

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

#177

Post by pilsetnieks »

wazanator wrote: post #93
magduf wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>But I also don't need to spend an entire weekend setting up a PC and a printer for my mom anymore either. You still have to waste a lot of time doing this crap. Last time I set up a printer for my mom, it was a PITA: I had to download drivers, install some giant pile of crap software, go through a bunch of screens of garbage, etc. Needless to say, her computer runs Windows 10. By contrast, when I wanted to print to…

Personally I would recommend Brother every time for a printer. They're not fancy but they are well built and don't require you to install a software suite. Roommate and I are still using the same laser printer from college. It's not wireless but if we really wanted to we could attach a pi and setup a printer pool but for now a long cable serves us just fine for the few times we need to print.

A tangent but still - what does make a printer fancy? Brother has models with every bell and whistle everything else has as well - color LCDs, wifi, airprint. What else is there that would make it fancier?

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

#178

Post by rsecora »

dahart wrote: post #57

There are indeed a lot of curious examples of computers seeming to go slower today than 20,30,40 years ago. But on the whole, I completely disagree with the summary. My laptop today is faster than anything I’ve ever used before today. It boots faster, it loads files faster, it responds faster, it does more simultaneous things, it crashes far less often. My first computer was an IBM PC jr, and using it was an exercise…

"Maybe the author never played Ultimate III on an IBM PC. It was sooooo slow."

You nailed it.

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

#179

Post by gsich »

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 some apps have incredible UX.

Name 10. Some variety (Android, Windows, Linux, GUI, CLI) preferred.

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

#180

Post by drbawb »

ergothus wrote: post #72
gridlockd wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> ...there's no actual evidence in this article, and it comes across as a rant and selective nostalgia. You're saying that as if somehow that was a problem, but it's not.

How so? The article is based on an assertion that directly counteracts my memories. I remember using computerized library card catalogs in the 80s. I remember using AltaVista in the 90s. I remember using the Up/Down/Left/Right navigation (and full-screen re-renders) in Mapquest pre-google maps. I remember using the cgi-bin version of imdb.com. I can see how promptly things work now. I can see the additional benefits…

>I remember using the Up/Down/Left/Right navigation (and full-screen re-renders) in Mapquest pre-google maps.

Web apps sucked then, and they still suck today. The only difference between then and now is the decades of development effort that has been wasted trying to make JavaScript fast enough to mimic old applications.

I used MS Streets & Trips[1] in the same era, and it was awesome. It worked offline (something Google maps only got recently, and it sucks pretty bad at it), the search for POIs along a route was wicked fast, and it supports the author's purported use-case of mapping out a whole trip.

This shit ran blisteringly fast on a Windows 2000 laptop w/ no internet connection & 256MB of RAM. Now I'm expected to have an always on connection & I need gigabytes of RAM just to accomplish the same thing inside a web browser. -- I've missed many a turn because "navigation apps" assume LTE coverage is perfect; which is just not the case for many parts of the midwest. So I'm resigned to using a dedicated GPS unit.

[1]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4YO_KGdsUm4

---

On the topic of library catalogs:

You'll click through results in these catalog apps and there's sometimes seconds of delay because they're doing completely unnecessary shit like querying inventory at peering libraries. It wastes cycles and network round trips trying to answer a question I didn't even ask. (Inventory levels of a given title.) -- Browsing a digital card catalog is literally the perfectly indexed dataset computers dream about, and somehow people have gone and managed to make that excruciatingly slow.

It's gotten so bad I usually just go talk to the librarian if they're not busy, since their interface to the library's inventory typically looks more like the one's referenced in the article.

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