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> I often would use the mouse cursor to 'mark' the position of the loading bar (we really are spoiled for speed these days).

This is just me, oh my gosh. I thought I was the only one who did that. But now I come to think about it, it can't be true.

It has been a really long time since I used that technique last time...

What ? I still do that at least once a week/month.

Last time it was for the linux dropbox updater, last week.

I am also a fan of using another window so I can use the mouse and still have a marker to monitor progress.

Today everything goes so fast that it's faster to kill and restart if it's not visibly moving, IMHO

I guess what has changed is me, not the computing environment. When I was young, I easily grew impatient when things were going slow. Nowadays I still kinda feel nervous, but not to the point to warrant such bookkeeping methods.

My urge to measure everything has only grown with age. I don't chalk it up to nervousness though. I'd say it's driven by curiosity and and a desire to forecast.

I do this all the time too, but unfortunately many processes today only go around in circls instead of showing the actual progress.

to be fair, "actual progress" is almost always a misnomer anyway.

I find the Progress bar is usually about as accurate as the Time Remaining calculation. Both are better than nothing but more of a fiction than reality.

When I implement progress bars I most often implement "pessimistic progress", so "considering all timeouts, worst case we are 46.5% (of the time) to some result", with an update every few hundreed milliseconds. As possible mix in data from completed subtasks.

Nobody ever complains if the process suddenly speeds up because progress was made before the timeout, as long as your initial estimate wasn't absurd (looks at Windows Explorer). Even a naive progress bar counting down the 60s timeout is more informative and satisfying to watch than an endless spinner.

Absurd initial estimate? All of the estimates tend to be absurd.

Done in 30s ... I mean 15min ... ah, 10s ... 1hr 7min ...

Oh, come _on_ ...

Windows 95/98 used to occasionally do some particularly insane estimates. I took this screenshot many years ago of copying a tiny NetHack install between drives: https://i.imgur.com/q7tc9R1.png

Vista, I think it was Vista, "fixed" that by adding an estimation pass first, that often took longer than the copy itself, and was almost as bad at estimating. It sometimes took much longer. The fix was far worse than the problem, yet it survived unchanged.

It was so bad I ended up discovering Teracopy which was decent at estimation, and far faster at copying. Was a must-have until I migrated away from Windows.

How exactly do utilities like Teracopy implement high-performance copying? In other words, what are the performance bottlenecks in explorer.exe? Personally, I've observed that:

1. Explorer attempts to do a file enumeration prior to copying, which sometimes could waste a lot of time.

2. It seems tools like Teracopy use buffering aggressively, which can speed up the copying significantly based on my experience on Windows XP with slow HDDs.

Are there any other points worth noting?

Single pass and aggressive buffering seems to cover what I remember, but it worked better than it I expected, even on high speed drives or SSD to high speed drive. They may have had other tricks, it's been a while now.

The other thing that I liked is it's non-blocking - you can continue doing copies while one is in progress, if it's to the same destination it gets added to the queue in progress. If different destination it goes in a new queue that waits for the first to finish.

We used to call these "Microsoft Minutes"...

True! I know some of the people involved in the windows update bar. Since cpu and dusk are so different across devices it’s hard to know actual time it will take. Instead teams divided their packages into theoretical weights and the progress bar showed the percent of total “weights”. That’s why it can be choppy is packages with few subdivisions have little to interpolate.

Progress indicators that moving perfectly and steadily are probably time based, but I'd have thought they've always been work based. Example: you know you have to copy 20GB across the network; update the progress bar with 'percent of data complete' periodically (on a timer, in the byte copying loop, whatever.)

I've seen dual progress bars: one for "overall progress" (each one of five tasks fills this bar 20%) and one for the current task (maybe downloading, maybe unpacking, maybe copying, maybe waiting for hardware to reply...)

We pushed "progress bar" data to the client via SignalR once x% of a slow moving process were complete.

I've written progress bars that combine all of the above. Each sub-task had a weight though, and adaptive interpolation was used to animate the progress bar between chunky updates from less granular tasks based on how far they usually increment over which time interval.

With a process that happens on regular intervals like a Windows Update, I always wondered why the system doesn't store metrics on how long the process has historically taken on previous runs, and then just uses a weighted average of historical times as a time-based total estimate, converted into a divisor for work-based progress estimates (i.e. if previous runs took 60 minutes on average, then progress at 25% would say "45 minutes remaining", then if it suddenly jumped to 50% would immediately say "30 minutes remaining." Even if they're choppy, those time estimates would actually be correct if you sampled and averaged them.)

Not sure if anyone's mentioned this yet, but the old original Mac OSX boot screen had a progress bar that was based on the exact length of the previous boot time.

A couple of weeks ago, I marked the (no)progress bar on a macOS update with a piece of surgical tape.

Thank you for posting a physical marker; I was afraid I was the only person that's done so.

I've been known to use Post-its and the frame of my monitor as a marker. Both are much easier with how prevalent dual-monitors are these days.

Shit, I think I last used it last week! In my GUI wrapper for rsync while transferring some large files. It took about 45 minutes for one of the files.

Get off my lawn!

But what newbies will bever know the heck of: dip switch settings for IRQ for modems.

Thats what literally got me into computers...

In order to dial up BBSs and play tthe Pit and dl warez.

—-

Ive told this story before, but in about 1992? Or so - i got grounded for a month because i had been calling in long distance to a bbs in san jose to play the pit - and racked up a long distance bill of $926 - my dad was livid.

He yelled at me and said “why are you wasting all this time with computers! Its never going to do anything for you!”

Years later after i became successful with yee olde computerz! He apologized to me and said “im sorry i yelled at you for that time you cost me all that money in long distance charges.”

I also got yelled at by my dad for racking up long distance charges in 1991 or 92 but in my case it was only about $150 for calling the Sierra BBS to download stuff for King's Quest games or something :)

Wonderful!

Were you also calling into PCLink?

I used to have a challenge with my best friend at the time:

We used to call 411 and challenge to whom could keep the 411 operator on the phone longest.

Same here, except it was San Jose to San Jose. However still had a bill because I was in Zone 1 and the BBS was in Zone 3 (phone book tells you which zone) So.. charges. Dad wasn't mad, I think he realized I was going to get a job in the field.

You up-dadded me!!!

> Ive told this story before, but in about 1992? Or so - i got grounded for a month because i had been calling in long distance to a bbs in san jose to play the pit - and racked up a long distance bill of $926 - my dad was livid.

I had this problem until I discovered a bug in a Major BBS door game (TradeWars 2002) that let me have unlimited BBS credits. No more charges on my moms phone bill and even was able to trade those for other things in real life. Early bitcoin in a way. Looking back on it, my need to get online overrode my ethics regarding either my moms bank account or the sysops running the BBS. Oh well.

I've told the exact same story. Weird.

Also $926?

Doubtful - I was calling from Tahoe City California to San Jose California...

And it was a summer month long binge on PCLink and BBSs...

(I later convinced my highschool to install a CAD network on which we installed a BBS Called Heaven and Hell and ran a warez site from there....

Fun times.

EDIT: Oh -- and it was run on an EverexStep Cube machine... I think it was a 386?

"Years later after i became successful with yee olde computerz! He apologized to me and said “im sorry i yelled at you for that time you cost me all that money in long distance charges.”"

At which point you lit up your Havana Muy Gordo with a $1000 bill and said, "Don't sweat it?"

Similar but earlier story... staying up late at night or waking up early before school to login to BBS's. First with a Practical Peripherals modem that my dad acquired to dial into his business (which still used teletype). I got myself a Hayes 2400[1] and convinced my dad to get the fixed calling within your area code which I mostly paid for with my part-time work. I tried to stay within my LATA which included Sherwood Forest, Camelot, some others with doors and FIDO that can't recall. And then I made a mistake and on the advice of another BBS'er tried one in what I thought was a neighboring LATA. It was great! Active! Doors! gFiles! Warez! But was actually zones away in Texas. I had a good old time until the bill came. My Dad was purple he was so angry and I worked a lot of odd jobs to pay that off.

. .

[1] somehow just before college I got a used USR Courier HST. Then I sent it in with what was probably all of my hard earned beer money for upgrade to a Courier v.Everything... I still have that one, found it while moving https://v.gd/gF83mM)

> But what newbies will bever know the heck of: dip switch settings for IRQ for modems.

And dip switches to set hard drives to primary/secondary. Get that wrong and your machine didn’t boot.

those were jumpers :)

And making sure ATM0(?) was sent so that the modem was quiet...

>I too witnessed the 'windows is running slow when installing' bug. I often would use the mouse cursor to 'mark' the position of the loading bar (we really are spoiled for speed these days).

Most software doesn't feel any faster compared to Windows 95 (see Wirth's law). Also most shitware does not display a loading bar anymore, instead you get some spinning stuff that's just an animation.

> Also most shitware does not display a loading bar anymore, instead you get some spinning stuff that's just an animation.

In fairness, that's because users constantly complained about loading bars not being accurate (they'd freeze, change speeds, stop right at the end etc.), but having a "true" loading bar that proceeds smoothly basically requires solving the Halting Problem. So out it went.

Let them complain and ignore it.

One time I was installing Windows 95, I had to move the cursor the whole time because otherwise the installation got stuck. I discovered this after at least 30 tries.

I remember having this exact some experience once before! I'm glad I wasn't the only one.

> That way when I would walk-away from an install

But a few minutes later you'd be back to swap in floppy number 18

Was this a win95 only bug? I remember doing the mouse thing on 98 as well.

I mean, I still do the mouse thing all the time, regardless of OS. Not because I actually expect it to go faster, mind you, but rather because I'm bored.