51–60 of 177 posts
I need to send this to the people who designed the website for one of my favorite local pizza places, Dino's ( https://www.dinostomatopie.com/ ) -- they did _really_ well, generally, but no matter how hard you try, some things come through: the fonts rendered as text are perfectly crisp at whatever absurd DPI this Chromebook has.
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I'm always amazed at how universally terrible graphic design was during the 90s, and I mean at the level of big-name corporations (not GeoCities laypeople). In-house Designers at these businesses (or contractors at the equally big-name firms they hired out to) were presumably well-educated and steeped in the history of the medium, but churned out nearly unintelligible, ugly garbage. Most of the design principles that…
Many elements were owed to CRT displays and larger pixel sizes, so rather domain specific. E.g., the mandatory drop shadow typography wasn't to be seen in print. On the other hand, I wouldn't like to witness modern screen design on a CRT. Moreover, the 1990s came just after a massive retro design trend in the 1980s and there were still some informal reference to 1950s design around, countered by a rather blocky "who…
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I'm always amazed at how universally terrible graphic design was during the 90s, and I mean at the level of big-name corporations (not GeoCities laypeople). In-house Designers at these businesses (or contractors at the equally big-name firms they hired out to) were presumably well-educated and steeped in the history of the medium, but churned out nearly unintelligible, ugly garbage. Most of the design principles that…
There was plenty of good graphical design on the web in the 90s. There was also a lot of bad graphical design which usually gets highlighted today. There was an underlying issue that web design was difficult before browsers supported CSS 2.1 well. You really couldn't get HTML elements to fit a graphical design reliably. CSS 1 didn't really have the ability and table layouts were pretty coarse. Using raster graphics w…
I need to send this to the people who designed the website for one of my favorite local pizza places, Dino's ( https://www.dinostomatopie.com/ ) -- they did _really_ well, generally, but no matter how hard you try, some things come through: the fonts rendered as text are perfectly crisp at whatever absurd DPI this Chromebook has.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> ten times the resources for doing the same thing Is it really ten times the resources, and really doing the same thing? My computer today uses much less power than what I had in the '90s, and cost less too. It has an internal 4K display and two external 4K displays. My '90s computer had a single 1280x1024 CRT where I always had to tweak the focus and alignment to get readable text. With no GPU, scrolling in an edit…
> My '90s computer had a single 1280x1024 CRT where I always had to tweak the focus and alignment to get readable text. With no GPU, scrolling in an editor was always an exercise in patience, watching the text repaint line by line. I don't intend to insult, but to me this came across to me as a kid larping as someone who used computers in the 90s. Computers have improved by hardly imaginable magnitudes, but latency a…
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> ten times the resources for doing the same thing Is it really ten times the resources, and really doing the same thing? My computer today uses much less power than what I had in the '90s, and cost less too. It has an internal 4K display and two external 4K displays. My '90s computer had a single 1280x1024 CRT where I always had to tweak the focus and alignment to get readable text. With no GPU, scrolling in an edit…
> My '90s computer had a single 1280x1024 CRT where I always had to tweak the focus and alignment to get readable text. With no GPU, scrolling in an editor was always an exercise in patience, watching the text repaint line by line. I don't intend to insult, but to me this came across to me as a kid larping as someone who used computers in the 90s. Computers have improved by hardly imaginable magnitudes, but latency a…
Then don't? ;-)
> but to me this came across to me as a kid larping as someone who used computers in the 90s.
Ah, my friend, you are far too kind. I had to look up "larping", as I had never heard the word before. Do I have it right, it means "live action role playing"?
I can only wish that I were a larping kid, but alas, I have been programming for over 50 years. I started in 1969 on Teletype machines and punched cards. Now that's latency.
You couldn't just interact with a computer directly like you can today. Oh, you could, but online time was $30/hour, or $210/hour in today's dollars.
So you would punch your program on paper tape, print it out, and carefully hand check it. After a few revisions, you punch a final tape, dial in, quickly run your tape through, wait for the printout, and hang up fast.
With any luck you could complete your online session in two minutes or less. So about $1 in 1969 dollars, or $7 in today's dollars for one run of your simple BASIC or FORTRAN or Algol-60 program.
Punch cards were a step down from that. You would punch your deck, print it out and hand check it, put a rubber band around the deck and drop it off at the inbox in the computer center. Come back the next day and you would usually have your printout waiting. With a core dump where your code crashed. On a good day you might get your core dump in as little as a few hours. Just keep dropping by the computer center to check the outbox window until you see a printout with your name on it.
So back to modern times! Yes, I definitely share your disappointment at the latency in some of today's systems. As one example, I have often wanted to try OneNote because I've heard so many good things about it, and when I have tried it out it seems great...
Except for the typing latency. It drives me nuts every time I try it. It feels like nearly a half second for a character to appear on the screen - both on Windows and Android. How can it be so messed up? It's almost as bad as the full duplex Teletype connection I grew up on. (Maybe it has gotten better, it's been a while since the last time I gave up on it.)
In any case, this is rather orthogonal to the font rendering I was talking about. I'm pretty sure the improved font rendering isn't what causes that kind of latency, as there are plenty of apps I use that have beautiful fonts and very low latency.
Thank you for the interesting comment and conversation! :-)
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> ten times the resources for doing the same thing Is it really ten times the resources, and really doing the same thing? My computer today uses much less power than what I had in the '90s, and cost less too. It has an internal 4K display and two external 4K displays. My '90s computer had a single 1280x1024 CRT where I always had to tweak the focus and alignment to get readable text. With no GPU, scrolling in an edit…
> My '90s computer had a single 1280x1024 CRT where I always had to tweak the focus and alignment to get readable text. With no GPU, scrolling in an editor was always an exercise in patience, watching the text repaint line by line. I don't intend to insult, but to me this came across to me as a kid larping as someone who used computers in the 90s. Computers have improved by hardly imaginable magnitudes, but latency a…
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I could format my table layout with the font to make it pixel perfect, assuming a white on white color scheme. /s
The other day I discovered https://favicon.cc , "in beta" since 2007. Instead of canvas it uses a html table for drawing (as well as the 1:1 preview!)