Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

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

twitter.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

31–40 of 388 posts

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

#31

Post by pixl97 »

ergothus wrote: post #4

> almost everything on computers is perceptually slower than it was in 1983 .... amber-screen library computer in 1998: type in two words and hit F3. search results appear instantly. .... now: type in two words, wait for an AJAX popup. get a throbber for five seconds. oops you pressed a key, your results are erased So we start with something 15 years AFTER the title as evidence of the "good" times, then make a vague…

Also the amount of data we query in most cases is many orders of magnitude larger.

Most of the 1980-1995 cases could fit the entire datasets in CPU cache and be insanely fast.

Most things I query these days are in the gigabytes to terabytes range.

Lastly, we have to make them secure,especially against malformed data attempting to attack the app, which eats a lot of CPU cycles.

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

#32

Post by smkellat »

A tweet thread where you complain about AJAX popups and other Javascript-based slow downs seems utterly ironic. Whatever happened to having your own blog? Even better is that these tweets were from 2017.

This makes me yearn for building an ncurses-rooted non-GUI flavour of Ubuntu.

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

#33

Post by RHSeeger »

soulofmischief wrote: post #15
dayvid wrote: post #12

I remember turning on the computer and waiting for the motherboard company logo to finish flashing. After that was the Windows logo. I also remember waiting for the dial-up modem to connect to the internet and waiting hours for a video to download. Heck, last week I played a game streaming on GeForceNow and I was surprised by how seamless the whole experience was. Maybe some web apps are inconvenient, but you can eas…

> you can easily setup a command line interface or Linux system and move blazing fast Well... not really. Terminal response times are way slower than they used to be in the 80's. Sure, we have greater throughput, but we also have greater latency. https://danluu.com/term-latency/

> Terminal response times are way slower than they used to be in the 80's.

Do you have data / a citation to back up that statement? Most things seem faster to me. As long as the command line responds as faster as I can type, I don't care about it being faster.

That being said, overall speed and what can be handled by the system certainly does matter in many cases, even if it is _just throughput_. I've recently been running commands to search/process data from the command line recently

1. Search through a directory structure with millions of files (find)

2. filter down to ones containing a certain thing (grep)

3. find certain values in the files based on pattern matching (sed)

4. filter to files where one value equals another (test)

I can't imagine that would _ever_ finish running on a computer in the 80s. It works just fine on my current computer (albeit taking a minute to run).

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

#34

Post by dahart »

seapunk wrote: post #13

Original source: https://twitter.com/gravislizard/status/927593460642615296 Threader version (if you’d like to read the compiled version without ads & fake news recommendations): https://threader.app/thread/927593460642615296

OH, thank you! This explains why the article is a wall of one-sentence paragraphs.

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

#35

Post by hoorayimhelping »

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 good ones to prove a point is boring and not reflective of the actual industry.

These posts fondly remember just the speed, but always seem to forget the frustrations, or re-imagine them to be something we treasured.

Remember autoexec.bat files? Remember endless configuration to get one program working? Remember the computer just throwing its hands up and giving up when you gave it input that wasn't exactly what it expected? Remember hardware compatibility issues and how badly it affected system stability? Remember when building a computer required work and research and took hours? I do, and it wasn't fun then, it was a detriment to doing what you wanted. It wasn't a rite of passage, it was a huge pain in the ass.

So yeah, things are slower now, and I wanna go fast. 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, and while things feel slower, computers are now open to a much wider audience and are much more usable now.

These posts always have a slight stench of elitism disguised as disappointment.

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

#38

Post by agumonkey »

michaelfeathers wrote: post #27

When an area of engineering is new we make products better than the market will eventually pay for. Over time, we learn how to make them just good enough to reach an equilibrium in a market. This is an idea that is explored in _The World Without Us_ by Alan Wiesman. The Roman Colosseum still stands, but buildings today don't need to be that durable. It would cost significantly more to make them that way, so we don't.…

Thanks so much. I was curious about these things for a very long time now.

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

#39

Post by tannhaeuser »

dayvid wrote: post #12

I remember turning on the computer and waiting for the motherboard company logo to finish flashing. After that was the Windows logo. I also remember waiting for the dial-up modem to connect to the internet and waiting hours for a video to download. Heck, last week I played a game streaming on GeForceNow and I was surprised by how seamless the whole experience was. Maybe some web apps are inconvenient, but you can eas…

The BIOS POST message is still there btw even on eg Thinkpads (Phoenix BIOS), you just have to enable it in the ... BIOS.
Post reply on HN