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> My friggin circa 1984 Mac Plus felt faster on most stuff than the generic desktop PC

See how fast it felt.

No way and NO HOW! That statement is 100% false. The issue is you remember that it felt fast. My Amiga felt like lightening to me in 1985 and I still boot it up from time to time. The delays in everything is over the top and Mac 128k were horribly slow.

You're confusing throughput with latency. Those old systems were objectively more responsive because the keyboard and mouse were tied directly to high-priority IRQs which were serviced in the OS. Now we have USB keyboards and mice, which go on the same IRQ lines as every other USB device, and even if the OS could service them specially, it doesn't. So keyboard and mouse events go on a queue of things to do: disk accesses, network packets, etc. And the whole system feels slower because of the time lag between you sending a command to the machine via kb or mouse, and the machine actually receiving it.

Oh come on, there's no way you can tell the difference in latency between a mouse of that era and a USB mouse today. Surely there's enough demand in the e-sports scene to lower input latency as much as possible?

It’s not that mouse pointers today are normally laggy; they aren’t, as you correctly say. But when a modern system is very busy, it’s normal for the keyboard and mouse input to lag too, but that wasn’t normally the case with older systems, since human input peripherals were typically given their own special higher priority interrupts or whatever.

This was of course done because the systems back then were so slow that they would be in danger of regularly dropping key presses or clicks otherwise, which would have turned people off these newfangled electronic typewriters. But the result was that the interactive experience with respect to latency was given great importance in the design of those systems, unlike today, when it is taken for granted that people will accept whatever laggy system they are given, and will just be directed towards a CPU upgrade if they complain about it.

Anything that is above a netbook or a sub $500 laptop doesn't lag and today's computers and phone are spoiling us. I have a 8 year old netbook and I run a minimal Linux install with a tiled window manager and it is quick. I also have an i5 Sandy-bridge desktop and I also work with a tiled window manager because I prefer it, but my wife has Windows 10 on the same computer and it is spot on and that is 6 years old. My video work station is blazing fast and it never lags on anything except chugging through 4K/8K video renders.

I found this post about latency of input devices very interesting: https://danluu.com/keyboard-latency/

Wouldn't count on it: https://danluu.com/keyboard-latency/

Have you actually used a computer from that era for any significant amount of time?

Yes, an Amiga. And it ALWAYS responded instantly to mouse input at least.

A Windows 3.1 PC from that era, not so much :)

I meant the Macintosh Plus, not the Macintosh 128k. I was off by a few years, the Mac Plus came in 1986.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Macintosh_128K

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Macintosh_Plus

I think the example is a bit too sluggish but is probably a more correct presentation of the actual facts than my nostalgic outburst.

The delays of just writing a widow is so slow. Macintosh Plus Review https://youtu.be/_bI0moHdjPQ?t=22m29s

I was an Amiga kid. I had friends and co-workers who had Macintosh Plus and they always seemed to be so S-L-O-W to an Amiga.

Amiga 1000 from 1986 https://youtu.be/CDWdVk-hmgA?t=51s

The window draws were also slow BUT Ray Tracing and full animation compared to that lame Macintosh is just a whole different generation. Amiga lost and it took till 1994 or 1995 to beat an Amiga in 1986.

Oh gods, I was a kid in the 80:s and I was so envious of all my friends who had Amigas.

That did not look any less responsive than doing the same on LibreOffice on my high-end gaming laptop, with an SSD, and in many cases it looked more so.

Of course, the newer one has newer graphics, but it also has enough transistors to replace each one in the 68k with a whole new 68k.

> My friggin circa 1984 Mac Plus felt faster on most stuff than the generic desktop PC

You do have some merit to the argument, but your 1984 Mac didn't have half as "pretty" UI, and that matters to some people. It didn't do dynamic language processing to figure out if you've made a grammatical error. It did not have to continuously scan every data stream for malware. It did not have to use a significantly restricted environment to limit damage when some malware did get through. It didn't even support multitasking. My point is that computers today do so much more, but responsive UI is entirely possible for desktop applications, but the development cost is more than most companies/people are willing to pay.

So why have a full pretty UI at the cost of latency?

If the latency begins to cross a threshold and begins to be inconvenient or distracting, it is time to step and think that may be the pretty UI is too ahead of its time, and we should stop making the UI prettier than it can be at this time.

Because some people (including me) loves it. I don't care about a few extra ms for having an interface that's satisfying to watch / use for 12 hours per day.

I have to add that most computer I see of my friends are extremely snappy, I don't really see what you are talking about.

I think you greatly underestimate the number of non-technical people who care more about gee-whiz coolness than responsiveness. Back in the aqua era of OS X with the super sluggish genie effects and so on, the general public loved it and it was mostly "power users" and professionals who went into the settings to tone down the animations.

I dunno. Maybe initially, sure, but I've seen countless people use, for example, internet explorer where half the screen was taken up by malware toolbars (I wish I was exaggerating...), which is not pretty, not good UX, not gee-whiz coolness at all. And they never once complained, they just accepted it as the way it is and kept on going.

And there’s the reason. Users are too forgiving and too passive, because the industry has trained everyone to have incredibly low expectations.

Developer and corporate status games select for political skill and self-indulgent overcomplexity, with added spice from dark patterns. There’s no reward for UI/UX/internal simplicity and elegance.

The culture at some companies would have been hugely improved with a few literal angry-users-with-pitchforks moments.

> There’s no reward for UI/UX/internal simplicity and elegance.

Then why do it? I like a good UX just as much as you, and I value simplicity, but people just want "good enough". And that is all there is to it.

> I think you greatly underestimate the number of non-technical people who care more about gee-whiz coolness than responsiveness.

I think you've built a strawman. People who use computers to get shit done might pay lip service to things looking good, but at the end of the day they want a tool that does the job without a lot of bullshit. To the extent that the kind of person you're talking about exists, they are consumers who live in tablet land and should be ignored for desktop/workstation use cases.

I completely ageee that they belong in tablet land but tablets did not exist in the mid 00s. All of my older relatives who now use iPads exclusively all used OS X back then for both ease of use and aesthetic reasons.

You are repeating the same excuses the industry has pilfered to us for decades.

"It didn't do dynamic language processing "

Which could very well do it's stuff in a different thread and execution context given the actual payload such a system needs to transfer from a wordprocessor is trivially small. Then notify user. Don't rob the system of its low latency just because you want to run the analysis in the same thread because it's "simpler". It's simpler only if low latency is not a fundamental requirement.

"It did not have to continuously scan every data stream for malware"

Which can be considered a one more defect of the system which I forgot to lambast. Sandbox my wordprocessor, let me operate in realtime in unsafe environment and once I'm moving something out of the sandbox, then do the analysis.

"your 1984 Mac didn't have half as "pretty" UI,"

This argument is moot. Pretty UI:s are computationally a tenth or hundredth of the complexity of an AAA title. Unless one does it wrong. And if the system does not provide enough horsepower, provide a backup! Reduce the computational load! Cut the transparencies, freeze the animations, etc.

> Which could very well do it's stuff in a different thread and execution context given the actual payload such a system needs to transfer from a wordprocessor is trivially small.

It's a blocking operation, so doing it in a different thread will not magically mean the requesting application can get it faster. Besides, this is already done in a different thread, but it increases the load of updating the UI.

> Which can be considered a one more defect of the system which I forgot to lambast. Sandbox my wordprocessor, let me operate in realtime in unsafe environment and once I'm moving something out of the sandbox, then do the analysis.

Which is already what is happening, but all data in and out needs to monitored. But regardless, it cannot operate in an unsafe unrestricted environment, because that implies full access to the memory.

> This argument is moot. Pretty UI:s are computationally a tenth or hundredth of the complexity of an AAA title. Unless one does it wrong. And if the system does not provide enough horsepower, provide a backup! Reduce the computational load! Cut the transparencies, freeze the animations, etc.

As I started to say, you have some merit to the argument, but I simply pointed out that modern UIs require multiple orders of magnitude more computational power to render. And providing a fallback is yet another cost of developing, and for the most part not something people/companies will pay for.

> The decade when Moores law gave freebies to software is probably one of the reasons for this astronomical sluggishness. Application feels slow? Well, just wait a year and get a new faster CPU. No need to spend resources on optimization.

I'd like to see a word 1.0 coded with current tech stacks. Same functionalities. And see how fast it feels.

I think this feeling is a combination of a lot of things taken for granted and nostalgia.

"with current tech stacks"

Computers will behave sluggishly, unless care and dedication is paid they don't.

I'd start from a 3D engine, a font layout system, and the huge chunk of simple and efficient open source utility libraries that have sprung up. Or slap it on top of QT if that system can be made to behave non-sluggisly.

One point is, that you need to be able to access the low levels of the system. To understand it's limitations on your higher level architecture, and on the other hand, figure out what can be made blazing fast under which circumstances and use those as your bearings as you are developing the system. With usability, and understanding of end user being on the front seat. The whole time.

The point is, although the system does a great many things, there is no reason from the usability point of view those things are done in serial except legacy and poor design. A system can be made to feel immediate despite what it's doing under the skin. Delay those action, design the system with the user and her time as the first class citizen, rather than some other constraint.

Take a modern complex 3D AAA game. One of the root constraints is that it should never lag. Well, they do, obviously, but that is considered a defect more often than not.

And... Word... would need some deeper fixing on it's basic premises. As I recall I was pretty easy to break the Word 1.0 layout system in any number of ways.

I think a Word 1.0 with current tech would be awesome. Unfortunately, few parties seem interested in delivering fast applications anymore, instead focusing on cross-platform availability - you can't release a desktop app anymore without a mobile counterpart.

In theory things have gotten a lot faster, doubly so if you consider UI and logic can be distributed over multiple cores, and even moreso considering file access is a factor 10-100 faster than back then, and memory size has increased by over 9000.

But it'd be poor on features and nobody would want to use it because of Feature X. I had been looking for a lightweight Slack client alternative, but the only thing I could find looked like shit.

>I don't know who started with the idea that it's smarter to buy more hardware than to spend resources on programming

It was the CFO's idea. Software is expensive, and hardware is _incredibly cheap_.

Moreover, if you're in the business of selling hardware, be it PCs, mobile phones, white goods, whatever, it is in your power to throw cheap hardware at the problem, because software development will always be one of your highest costs. You will never be able to just drop readymade code into your new hardware design. And you can more easily recoup the cost of hardware development because you can mark up the price of anything with a faster CPU or more memory accordingly; you can't so easily charge for software features.