Hacker News Reader

Comment by DrScump | Hacker News Reader

I've never heard that from anybody who actually used computers in 1983.

Latency problems in the web/app world are the result of adware/bloatware/trackers/etc. and/or poorly-implemented frameworks and stacks, not modern hardware or O/S.

View on HN

I actually used computers in 1983; I learned to program on an Atari 800xl, and later upgraded to my father's IBM AT (w/ Hercules graphics!) While computers have become extraordinary faster doing actual calculations or manipulating large amounts of data, as long as you had sufficient RAM[1], UIs responsiveness has gained latency (and generally became perceptually worse) on a curve that peaked in the Windows Vista era, when it started to improve again very slowly.

Note that I said "UI", not "GUI". Text mode visual UIs - which were fine for some tasks. I knew several people that preferred Lotus 1-2-3[2] over Excel and Quattro Pro specifically because of 1-2-3's low latency.

Every layer of abstraction added overhead. Protected memory was worth a bit of latency. Multiple layers of object oriented vtable calls and unnecessary texture bitblt on every GUI widget added made GUIs sluggish for questionable benefits.

> adware/bloatware/trackers/etc

Those huge sources of latency (and other) problems, but networks always add large amounts of latency. The web, which was designed for documents, not as a platform for interactive GUIs, has and will always have terrible feel slow, unpredictable, and laggy. Some of that is unfixable due to the speed of light and the overhead from any thin-client system that requires regular roundtrips to a server.

[1] everything became painfully slow if you were constantly needing to move pages to/from the swapfile.

[2] Lotus 1-2-3's release in 1983 was so popular the very idea of "IBM PC Clone" was created, with 1-2-3 acting as a popular compatibility test.

I did (well nearly, started in 1984 on 8-bit home computers), and the only thing that was dramatically slower than today in normal day-to-day tasks was loading data from cassette tapes, floppy disks or via modem.

Since I've been on computers with hard discs (Amiga 3000 early to mid-90's) it's definitely true that responsiveness either hasn't improved much, or got even worse (I remember how confused I was when I first saw an application with a splash screen, to hide the long startup time). This sort of carelessness has been spreading like a plague since then.

I still remember adding a kind of splash/waiting screen to one email application because The Most Important Feature was executing too fast and users wouldn't feel that it really works. Sometimes latency is caused only by management.

That exists now on TaxCut software - when it says "checking your return for possible errors or red flags" or similar. It has some blinky lights animation or arrows or such that runs for about 10 seconds. It was probably done before Windows could bitblit the image to the screen.

That's true. Waiting to load a program from a Tandy cassette tape was a challenge. Floppy disks were a big jump forward.

Before that, the Big Jump for me was a move from a Hayes 300 baud modem to an AppleCat 1200. I clearly recall thinking "Woah! It's feeding data faster than I can read it!"

Next up was the BeOS. From cold boot to completely loaded desktop and hard drive light off in something like 15 seconds. (Meanwhile, Windows 95 took something like 2 minutes to boot up.)

The final quantum jump was about 6 years ago when I moved from a spinning to a solid state (SSD) hard drive. Again, big BIG boost.

The hardware and OS are fine. The problem is the web platform and its towering stack of abstractions, combined with the occasional problem of focusing on aesthetics over utility.

I haven't yet experienced a web-based application that I actually enjoyed using. The closest anything ever gets is to make me wish it was a native application so I didn't have to deal with all the web nonsense in order to use it.

Desktop too - so many frameworks and runtimes and threading and associated overhead that many apps don't feel as tight as they used too.

The hardware is fine. I wouldn't say the same about OSes. Desktop experience with Linux is incoherent. Windows and OS X are legacy monsters with 20 years of piling new features on top of not exactly rock solid foundation. Every time I see a frame drop when switching desktops on my MacBook I get so angry, I mean, really? It's 2017, game graphics are almost indistinguishable from life, and we're still having trouble drawing a couple of rectangles as our desktops?

Back in 1990, some guy named Michael Abrash wrote about this in Dr. Dobbs magazine. He actualy used computers in 1983. He published his first game in 1982 and worked on another game called Quake with John Carmack. Michael is an Oculus Chief Scientist, now, where he is deeply concerned with perception and delay.

To paraphrase the Dr. Dobbs article, his young child asked him why he never used his "fast" computer. He was initially puzzled by the question, as his current computer was a state-of-the-art max spec machine (486-233mhz?), but realized she was referring to his ancient Apple 2 or TRS-80 or such sitting in the corner of the office. While the new system was hundreds of times faster by every computational measure, user experience said otherwise and his child picked up on this. The old 1mhz 8bit box only needed a second or two to boot to a prompt, yet the state-of-the-art Windows 95 machine required 2 minutes to boot up. The new computer was faster. The old computer was more responsive.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com