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Comment by baldfat | Hacker News Reader

> 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.

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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.

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 :)

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