Almost everything on computers is perceptually slower than it was in 1983 (2017)

Most machines I work with these days take minutes to get rolling.

Okay, I know that systems are bigger and more complicated now; buses have to be probed and trained, RAM has to be checked, network stuff needs to happen, etc., etc., but minutes? This is just industry laziness, a distributed abdication of respect for users, a simple piling-on of paranoia and "one or two more seconds won't matter, will it?"

Story time.

A cow-orker of mine use to work at a certain very large credit card company. They were using IBM systems to do their processing, and downtime was very, very, very important to them. One thing that irked them was the boot time for the systems, again measured in minutes; the card company's engineers were pretty sure the delays were unecessary, and asked IBM to remove them. Nope. "Okay, give us the source code to the OS and we'll do that work." Answer: "No!"

So the CC company talked to seven very large banks, the seven very large banks talked to IBM, and IBM humbly delivered the source code to the OS a few days later. The CC company ripped out a bunch of useless gorp in the boot path and got the reboot time down to a few tens of seconds.

When every second is worth money, you can get results.

A counterexample: in 1983, enter two search terms, one of them slightly misspelled or misremembered, hit f3: "no results", spend 10 minutes trying to find the needle in the haystack, give up and physically search for the thing yourself.

Enter two search terms slightly incorrectly now: no of the time it will know exactly what you want, may even autocorrect a typo locally, get your accurate search results in a second.

When things were faster 30+ years ago (and they absolutely were NOT the vast majority of the time, this example cherry picked one of the few instances that they were), it was because the use case was hyperspecific, hyperlocalized to a platform, and the fussy and often counterintuitive interfaces served as guard rails.

The article has absolutely valid points on ways UIs have been tuned in odd ways (often to make them usable, albeit suboptimally, for the very different inputs of touch and mouse), but the obsession about speed being worse now borders on quixotic. Software back then was, at absolute best, akin to a drag racer - if all you want to do it move 200 meters in one predetermined direction then sometimes is was fine. Want to go 300 meters, or go in a slightly different direction, or don't know how to drive a drag racer? Sorry, need to find a different car/course/detailed instruction manual.

I can't agree with this enough. The whole of web development in general really grinds my gears these days. Stacking one half-baked technology on top of another, using at least 3 different languages to crap out a string of html that then gets rendered by a browser. Using some node module for every small task, leaving yourself with completely unauditable interdependent code that could be hijacked by a rogue developer at any moment. And to top it all off now we're using things like Electron to make "native" apps for phones and desktops.

It seems so ass-backwards. This current model is wasteful of computing resources and provides a generally terrible user experience. And it just seems to get worse as time passes. :/

I've been using Sublime all week and it feels like an engineering masterpiece. Everything is instantly responsive. It jumps between files without skipping a beat. My battery lasts longer. (I don't want to turn this into an editor debate, though. Just a personal example.)

If you would've asked me a month ago, I would've said that engineers cared too much about making things performant to the millisecond. Now, I would say that many of them don't care enough. I want every application to be this responsive.

I never realized how wasteful web tech was until I stopped using it. And I guess you could say the same for a lot of websites – we bloat everything with node_modules and unnecessary CSS and lose track of helping our users accomplish their goals.

More relevant to the article, I fully agree with the authors upset at trying to do two parts of the same task in google maps, it's entirely infuriating.

Edit: duplicate submission: one directly on twitter, this one through hte threaded reader. The other submission has >350 comments: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21835417

In 1998, I used https://www.mapquest.com/ to plan a road trip a thousand miles from where I was living, and it was, at the time, an amazing experience, because I didn't need to find, order and have shipped to me a set of paper road maps.

In the 1970s, when I had a conversation with someone on the phone, the quality stayed the same throughout. We never 'lost signal'. It was an excellent technology that had existed for decades, and, in one particular way, was better than modern phones. But guess what? Both parties were tied to physical connections.

Google Maps is one product, and provides, for the time being, an excellent experience for the most common use cases.

> amber-screen library computer in 1998: type in two words and hit F3. search results appear instantly

So that's a nice, relatively static and local database lookup, cool.

I wrote 'green screen' apps in Cobol for a group of medical centers in the early and mid 90s. A lot of the immediate user interface was relatively quick, but most of the backend database lookups were extremely slow, simply because the amount of data was large, a lot of people were using it in parallel, and the data was constantly changing. Also: that user interface required quite a bit of training, including multi-modal function key overlays.

This article has a couple of narrow, good points, but is generally going in the wrong direction, either deliberately or because of ignorance.

1) I can't manipulate data in my resultset well enough in google map.

2) Searches are too slow.

3) Mousing is bad.

Now, you can argue that those are related.

The first two are an argument for moving away from full-page post/response applications to SPA-style applications where the data is all in browser memory and as you manipulate it you're doing stuff on the client and pulling data from the server as needed, desktop style.

The latter? I don't know why he had to go back to DOS guis. Plenty of windowed UIs are very keyboard friendly. Tab indexes, hotkeys, etc.

> GUIs are in no way more intuitive than keyboard interfaces using function keys such as the POS I posted earlier. Nor do they need to be.

This is where he loses me. I remember the days of keyboard UIs. They almost all suffered from being opaque. You can't say "the problem is opaque UIs" when that describes the vast majority of keyboard-based UIs.

While there are obviously ways to create exceptions, GUIs are intrinsically more self-documenting than keyboard inputs, because GUIs require that the UI be presented on the screen to the user, and keyboard inputs do not.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21831931

[2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15643663 (posted two years ago)

For example, I would say some significant percentage of both websites and electron-style apps don't need anything other than pure HTML5+CSS3. Javascript only if necessary. Not here are 5 different Javascript frameworks! Of course there are cases where a framework is applicable, but I'm talking about the vast majority of cases. Then on top of all that are 20+ javascripts advertising and spying per page and pages become unusable without a good js blocker (umatrix is my favorite). Some of this is technical and some of it is business, either way developers need to focus on the fundamentals and pushback against dark patterns.

Now on the desktop side, this is also why I am a CLI junky who lives in a terminal. CLI apps don't get in the way, because most of the time you are just dealing with text anyway. There are many websites that ought to be a cli app at least via api. This is also one of my criticisms of companies trying to force people into the browser by disallowing api clients.

It was the constant bloat and spying that finally spurred me to go gnu/linux only many years ago, and things are only getting better since then. It requires a change in how you do your computing, yes. It may not be easy (higher learning curve), but the rewards are worth it.

The section about google maps follows a form of criticism that is widespread and particularly annoys me, namely => popular service 'x' doesn't exactly fit my power user need 'y', therefore x is hopelessly borked, poorly designed, and borderline useless.

There is always room for improvement, but all software requires tradeoffs. One of the things that makes a product like google maps so powerful is that it makes a lot of guesses about what you are actually trying to do in order to greatly reduce the complexity and inputs required in order to do these incredibly complicated tasks.

So yes, sometimes when you move the map some piece of data will be removed from the screen without your explicit consent, and yeah, in that moment that feels incredibly annoying. But balance that against the 100s or 1000s of times you used google maps and it just worked, perfectly, because it reduced the number of inputs needed to use it to the bare minimum.

Google maps doesn't need to fit every use case perfectly, and while its fine to talk through how your hyper specific use case could and should work, remember all the times that it seamlessly routed you around traffic from your office to your house in one touch while you were already hurtling down the highway at 70 mph.

So you couldn't be bothered to find a better route planner and defaulted to Google Maps? Which you got for free, instantly available? And now you're unhappy because it doesn't do exactly what you want? Please spend some effort on your tool selection before you spend time ranting. And let's turn this around: Did you at some point in 1990 wish you'd brought a map? How did you resolve that? Google Maps on a pocket computer would have been a marvel back then!

if I open up maps, type in the location i want to go to, click 'directions' and add my starting location i click and drag all over and move the map around, zoom in and out to look at the route and my info does not disappear. I click add a destination if i want to add a destination. if i want distance from the center of town, I change the starting location of my directions to the center of town.

For the people who face issues with google maps, can they please describe to me what you are trying to accomplish and the steps you take that results in the info on screen disappearing? I'm genuinely curious on what I might be doing differently to have such a seamless experience vs the awful experience described.

https://www.extremetech.com/computing/261148-modern-computer...

That survey shows that the Apple //e latency from keypress to screen display of 30 milliseconds is something current computers don't even approach, even though their processors are far faster.

Here's another article: https://www.pcgamer.com/the-latency-problem-why-modern-gamin...

Of course there are reasons for this. We demand a lot more functionality. But there are costs to the functionality. In addition, most systems are not designed to minimize latency or jitter.

I believe we could do a lot better, but it would require that more hardware and software developers care about it.

The other day I was thinking about the Baader-Meinhof phenomenon, but I couldn't remember the name of it. So I googled "when you suddenly notice something everywhere" and Baader-Meinhof was first result. Go back to 1983 (maybe even 2003) and let me know how long it takes to structure your search terms so you get the right answer.

Bullshit. The search results appear instantly if you are searching a small text file in an editor. But if your app is actually fetching the data from somewhere, a dBase database on a network disk mounted from a Netware server, good luck. You type your words, you hit the search key and then you wait. There is no indication that anything is actually happening, no spinning things, not progress indicator, nothing. You cannot do anything while you wait either (multitasking is not a thing in DOS, remember?), you just sit and wait there hoping for the best.

And this is an application that is trying to keyword search few megabytes of data over a local network. Not an application doing a fuzzy search on hundreds of terabytes of data across half a planet...

I feel like this topic has merit and with a well written article with real examples (both 2019 and 83) it could be something special, but this isn't that.

I'd be interested to know how many upvoted based on the title/what they expected this to be, rather than after having tried to read it. Most of the replies from the older thread are about the title alone (or being critical of the content).

It feels like all of this effort has been spent making computer interfaces worse. The only improvement I can point to between MFC and a modern web UI is DPI scalability. Besides that, there are tons of regressions, from keyboard accessibility to consistency in look, feel, and operation.

The system programmers of 1983 were used to low-level programming, and most of them had probably written code in assembler. Web programmers seldom have that deep understanding of the computer.

At least, this is true from my own personal experience.

How much LESS am I getting out of of the Raspberry Pi? I'm not exactly sure. I just know I can reboot in seconds and get back online while my Mac is still be showing that stupid grey logo screen.

Of course, the Raspberry Pi can't come close to running Logic Audio and 5 virtual machines simultaneously doing other things in the background as I generally do on that Mac. But the boot up to useful state speed metric favours the much lower spec'd device by far.

For daily stuff like going from OFF to editing an office document, the Mac is sloth slow. It's a very interesting and wide divergence of competencies when it comes to performance and ability.

We are definitely witnessing the later part of the Law of Diminished Returns when it comes to updating and upgrading computer equipment.

I can't say whether or not we've reached the apex, but we sure are close if we haven't. Today, anyone can have a super computer. But nearly nobody does.

He's apparently never bothered to learn Twitter's built-in keyboard shortcuts. You can do almost everything on Twitter without touching a mouse.

The speed of modern pcs is surprisingly bad, relatively speaking, but this mainly just means they aren't as much ridiculously quicker as they probably should be.

(The main issue cited is not meaningful, in my view, as computers from 1983 just couldn't do graphical maps at interactive frame rates at all.)

Partly, this was due to the fact the IBM PC did not have SIMD operations in 1983, but the rest is because modern compilers run complex optimization passes in tiny fractions of a second.

Also, I'd like to see this person say that operations on computers were perceptually instant while logged into a PDP-11/70 or (let's be a tad generous) a VAX-11/780 with a half-dozen other people all trying to use it at the same time. Yes, faster computers existed in 1983. Didn't mean the likes of you got to use them.

One time he started a process, went away on holiday for two weeks, and it was still running when he got back.

These days it would be much faster than real time - not just native, but in a web browser.

The C-beams glittering in the dark were pretty cool, though.

Every app wants you to "experience" its data solely in its walled garden with no ability to cross-compare data. Say I want to find a coffee shop on the way to somewhere but also one which appears in a list of great coffee shops on a separate Reddit post I found. Pretty much impossible on mobile, and a major pain on desktop.

At the very least, give me the ability to hide records/items/instances I've already seen as I'm working my way through several searches or lists. Often times searching things on Yelp and Google feels like re-reading the same list, just differently ordered over and over again.

Bad enough. So I wanted to close the box. That took a minute, because you couldn't just click anywhere inside, you had to click at one single ... and unmarked ... location. Here? Here? Here?

I've noticed that many advertising-supported pages (say trade publications such as 'FierceWireless') are a disaster on mobile with ads and other intrusive pop-ins causing page elements to move all around to the point where it isn't worth trying to click anything because it won't be there by the time your finger gets there -- but "oops!" you clicked on an ad so the cash register goes KA-CHING!

G maps had the option to be excel and instead chose to be the bottom shelf of the cereal aisle. It's fine to treat your users like consumers instead of power users, but that opens a hole in the market for a city-aware, mobile-friendly GIS tool.

Random other info: One time the application on the remote host crashed and dropped me to a Unix shell. ls showed the directory had around 50000 files. The system's name was "DS Galaxy 2000".

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wirth's_law

My opinion is that the baseline for what we achieve as good (and quick) service has been slowly lift up by the industry. At the same time specific design practices were implemented to ease our frustration about slow service, and "feel" at least that the service is quick.

I really dislike that tendency in design and behavior and find it counterproductive.

First of all, when data sets start to get that big it becomes a monumental task to organize just the execution order of the compiled code. Second, the main thing the bitch from the article is complaining about not being able to do is something you just can't do from the phone UI. Google has a trip planner app that specifically helps locate interesting landmarks between the start and destination points, and even plan where to stop for gas or find a hotel for the night all from a single tab. For having spent so long writing his rant, I'm surprised he never tried googling a trip planner app. It would have been faster and prevented him from proving what an idiot he is.

Then you would run out of memory if you were doing anything ambitious.

Partly, this was due to the fact the IBM PC did not have SIMD operations in 1983, but the rest is because modern compilers run complex optimization passes in tiny fractions of a second.

Also, I'd like to see this person say that operations on computers were perceptually instant while logged into a PDP-11/70 or (let's be a tad generous) a VAX-11/780 with a half-dozen other people all trying to use it at the same time. Yes, faster computers existed in 1983. Didn't mean the likes of you got to use them.

It has gotten worse this year.

Make it so.

Also, remember when none of us was a portuguese author and we used paragraphs rationally and wrote things down without splitting them into 200 letter long strings because we used mediums made for rants and did not need a separate app to wrap it all into something vaguely resembling text?

Also has anyone noticed that time passes and things change?

They should be grateful if opening a modestly-sized word document takes less than 10 seconds.

GTK is truly the last bastion, and even it took a hit with GTK 3.0

not surprising my railgun accuracy in quake 3 started to decline in quake 3 after that.

I blame the ports.

> So I double-click on the thing ... one ... two ... three ... four ... five ... six ... it's about seven seconds before I can actually see the image. [...]

> So that's really slow and I'm going to talk about that for a bit, but there's an element of severe irony to this which is that as soon as I double click this thing within one second it draws an image and it's a pretty high resolution interesting image. It's just not the image that I care about.

> So obviously it's not hard to start a process and draw an image on the screen in much less than seven seconds. They just don't manage that.

> Now. I gave a speech a year ago that started this same way. That was 2016. It's now 2017 and of course a new version of Photoshop has come out and of course what will align directly with my point in the next few slides: they've made it worse. And the great way in which they've made it worse is: say there's some operation that you want to do maybe once in a while like create a new image... So I'm going to go to file, new ... Urghh. And that menu takes - it probably takes about a second to come up.

> And you might think "Oh, well, you know it was just all these assets were cold or something.. Maybe they come off the hard drive. It'll be faster next time." And it's like: "Well, let's test that out. Nope." Like every time. I'll use the keyboard shortcuts. File. New. Nyeaarghh. [...]

> Imagine if the people who programmed this were trying to make VR games. Everybody would be vomiting everywhere all the time.

> Well what machine am I running this on? It's actually a pretty fast machine, it's a Razer Blade laptop with a pretty high-end i7 in it, and you can talk about how fast the CPU is or the GPU is and some arbitrary measurement and I'm going to discuss CPU speeds here and I want to say in advance that none of what I'm about to say is meant to be precise or precise measurements. I'm making a general point.

> And the general point is that the CPU of this thing would have been approximately the fastest computer in the world when I was in college. Or the GPU would have been the fastest computer in the world in the year 2000 or thereabouts.

> Now you might say "That's a really long time ago. This is ancient Stone Age." Well. Photoshop was released in 1990 before either of those dates. And Photoshop 6, which I used heavily during my earlier days in game development is from the year 2000. And this is what it looks like. This is a screenshot of Photoshop 6. It's got all the same UI that Photoshop has today. It's got all these same control widgets and it's got our layers and channels and all that stuff. Today the UI is a different colour but apart from that it's essentially the same program.

> Now I don't doubt that it has many more features. But you have to ask how many more features are there and what level of slowdown does that justify?

- Jonathan Blow, Reboot Develop 2017: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=De0Am_QcZiQ&t=155

Every damn time!

Bah humbug, I hate modern technology!

This luddite author should go into goat herding if they hate modern tech so much.

- Getting less stable - Getting less speedy - Getting less efficient

I blame the fact that old programmers and young programmers do not have the appropriate relationship.