Maybe some web apps are inconvenient, but you can easily setup a command line interface or Linux system and move blazing fast.
Well... not really. Terminal response times are way slower than they used to be in the 80's. Sure, we have greater throughput, but we also have greater latency. https://danluu.com/term-latency/
Consider a VT100. It could only go up to 19200 baud, and couldn't actually handle constant streams at that speed.
However I do agree with the general message of the article. Current UX is a mess, websites are overblown by tons of javascript. There's no reason there should be loading spinners in this day and age with the power we have at our fingertips.
The VMS manuals suggested that system administrators may want to keep the hard wired terminals down to 2400 buad and hide the fact from users by turning on "smooth scroll" (which only scrolled about that fast anyway) in order to keep the interrupt load down on the Vax. Something about batching of interrupts on the multiport serial cards.
The problem is just that there's too much javascript running in the browser and it's too poorly written (loading each post individually in Reddit by example instead of batching them). Reddit's redesign in particular is really really bad. At least they offer the old site but it looks so bad. I'd love to have something looking more modern but without the javascript overload.
Do you have data / a citation to back up that statement? Most things seem faster to me. As long as the command line responds as faster as I can type, I don't care about it being faster.
That being said, overall speed and what can be handled by the system certainly does matter in many cases, even if it is _just throughput_. I've recently been running commands to search/process data from the command line recently
1. Search through a directory structure with millions of files (find)
2. filter down to ones containing a certain thing (grep)
3. find certain values in the files based on pattern matching (sed)
4. filter to files where one value equals another (test)
I can't imagine that would _ever_ finish running on a computer in the 80s. It works just fine on my current computer (albeit taking a minute to run).
It's at the end of their comment.
That being said, it also seems to have to pull in the 99th percentile behavior in order for the timings to be an issue, and even then it's not horrible; it doesn't get actually "bad" until you consider the worst performance (99.9th percentile) of the worst performer (st). It seems overly picky to me.
Here is another survey which takes it from a different angle.
I should have clarified my original post but it's too late:
I am lamenting primarily against the latency introduced by the amount of layers involved both at the hardware and software level compared to yesteryear.
Compositors, virtualization, higher level languages, etc. do not come for free; despite explosive increases in computing capability, we also have an explosive increase in the number of running threads and the resources required to maintain them.
Another case, Google maps is a bad example in tours. Used it to explore many cities, not only turn by turn direction. It worked get although personally like openstreet maps, because I feel one company s shouldn’t control so many aspects of life and like open source nature of it.
Indeed able to discover a onsen built by community in Hokkaido. That’s based on a lake I saw by just zoom in out of the map to do exploration and saw it built by Ainu community living there. In that turn by turn map helped quite a lot to reach there subsequently just by click and dropping a pin there. Submitted a text describing it and subsequently visited by many people.
Took a journey through treacherous mountain and went up to 2500 meters high and crossed it via a tiny off-road designed for motorcycles. That too did based on exploration of map on phone.
Paper maps didn’t provide such convenience. Yes POS is slow, but then it has different expectations today. Try integrating old POS with 10 payment network working under milliseconds to authorise transactions. Worked enough since 1990 with dos based POS and also wrote IBM MQ C++ code for integration. Don’t want to go back there.
I think today is a step forward. Like always there will be good and bad as it was in 1980 or 1990. But largely today we do much more with computers than we ever did in those days.
So not everything is perceptually slow on computers. Apple Watch, iphone, androids are responsive and usually fast. Windows 10 for certain tasks might be slow but then overall it’s not that bad either.
As far as exploration goes you can do the same or even more today than before. I can discover planets. Built3D model in physical form, use CNC on desktop, do laser cutting in my home.
Built a computer like BBC micro, raspberry pi, fly a computer using fly by wire and test it using real physical model plane. Can do farming on a small scale using hydroponics at home. Can just go on and on about it. All possible thanks to advancement in speed and reduction of size in computing devices and peripherals.
So I feel it’s not slow, just the work we do with old computers is very different from what we do with modern one’s.
Given some corrections, we certainly have the capability to build terminal workflows with less latency. So there is nothing wrong with pushing the community forward.
It's not a matter of nostalgia or just being content with the way things are. People used to argue vehemently against the features we enjoy today such as autocomplete and advanced theming, but a few people kept their heads down and made it happen anyway, because it was The Right Thing.
""" It's caused by conhost.exe excessively hammering the registry to query the following two values:
HKCU\Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\ImmersiveShell\TabletMode HKCU\Software\Microsoft\Windows\DWM\ColorPrevalence Having previously reported this issue through Feedback Hub (to no avail), let me offer my observations from debugging this issue:
It's not specific to Dell's XPS series - I've been able to reproduce on any Windows 10 installation from version 1703 and up It only occurs when the console application writes output that causes the console to scroll It only occurs when the console application in question is in foreground/focus Each reg value mentioned above is queried 6 times, per scroll!!! """
The solution I use is to minimize the terminal when it's scrolling. When I compile my projects if I don't minimize the terminal it takes forever to finish.
It depends on how fast you allow items to be written (pixels per unit of time) on your display and if you force writing of everything or allow line skips. If you want to experiment I think putty has pretty fine-grain control options.
I remember doing 'dir' on a large directory, it scrolled so fast, so fast. I said to my friend, "The next generation will be so fast it will have finished scrolling before you finish typing the command."
Sadly, it was not to be. DOS on a 486 is as fast as computers have ever gotten, perceptually.
And while my connection is fast, it's a lot less reliable than the one I had 20 years ago, with about three 15-minute disconnects per day on average (although that has more to do with the general shit-quality of the Comcast monopoly than anything else).
I only reboot my machine for security updates now.
20 years ago, I would turn off the monitor to avoid burn-in, but typically just kept the computer on.
Of course, your point about connection speeds is entirely right - but I don't think anybody would honestly advocate just entirely going back to 56k. Rather, we really should be trying to answer the question of why using a computer feels much more sluggish (probably a better word to use than slow) than it did back in the day.
Yes, some of it is rose-tinted glasses and nostalgia, but most of what people discuss is worth taking into consideration. Nobody would seriously go and use a 20 year old computer unless they were making a statement of some sorts - and that statement is not "20 year old technology is entirely better than what we have today" but rather "why can't modern technology do things this 20 year old device can?"
Even then, once the thing did boot up, applications were rather responsive.
> ...you can easily setup a command line interface or Linux system and move blazing fast.
No, you can't. The majority of people uses software that is imposed upon them. The majority of work can not efficiently be expressed in CLIs.
It's the responsibility of software developers to write responsive software and in many cases, they have failed. Of course, with the inefficient web platform, their job is made difficult from the start.
We get to keep our shell utilities and CLIs, but they were robbed of tiny single-purpose GUI tools.
We get to keep our shell pipelines and perl scripts, but they're getting locked out of their Excel spreadsheets and VBA scripts.
Hell, with how things are going even automation tools like AutoHotKey are going to perish.
"People don't know how to code" or "users aren't tech-savvy enough for data processing and programming" are bullshit statements. They just happen to not code the way Silicon Valley does. And now these users are getting corralled into caged web apps and experiences that give them no flexibility at all and just treat them like children, all the way from the feature set to the presentation.
That's been the issue with every Windows OS. The cheap consumer hardware available at the time of the release was not enough to provide a snappy OS experience.
Unfortunately, hardware frequencies have sort of stalled, so now we're back to square 1 again, where W10 doesn't run snappy on median consumer hardware, but the hardware isn't getting faster at the same rate it was during the first decade of 2000's.
I have a Windows 7 machine for some legacy games and software, and it feels much faster on a 6-year old CPU (Haswell) than W10 does on a 1 year old CPU.
Mac OS isn't much better, I had a 2011 MacBook Pro w/ the best CPU for that model which was borderline unusable until I put an SSD in it. That was HFS which was designed w/ spinning rust in mind, I couldn't even imagine running APFS on top of spindles for an OS volume. CoW & the features it brings is awesome on flash w/ lots of IOPS, but painful on anything else.
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That all being said though, Windows 10 is just crap. I'm not convinced there's any amount of hardware you can throw at it that will make it feel as snappy as Windows 7 did, because it's evident to me that the developers just don't care anymore. I initially installed Windows 10 on an i7-6700K w/ one of the fastest consumer NVMe drives and one of the best GPUs available at the time. The start menu lagged perceptibly on a pristine installation. That was before all the "feature updates" shoveled Microsoft's ever increasing amounts of managed code, adverts, and online crap into the start menu.
If the developers gave a shit about UI latency the Start menu wouldn't require internet connectivity[1] and the task bar wouldn't make hundreds of thousands of IO calls.[2] Even if you can come to accept the speed the start menu, the functionality just isn't there. It routinely feigns ignorance of plain text files sitting in the root of my "Documents" library; even if I type the exact file name. I would gladly welcome the Windows 7 file index service back into my life.
[1]: https://www.bleepingcomputer.com/news/microsoft/windows-10-s... [2]: https://randomascii.wordpress.com/2019/09/08/taskbar-latency...
But the 2nd half of your comment, I disagree with. To me, Windows 10 has the perception of being faster than Windows 7 was with the same hardware - most of my machines have been on Windows 10 for ages, but I actually finally upgraded one of my work laptops just today, and this still holds true for me.
With great support for multiple monitors, great high-DPI support, a better command line, Hyper-V, WSL and more, I actually love Windows 10 - it's a fantastic OS.
Maybe the HN crowd can but not your average or median computer users
> I remember turning on the computer and waiting for the motherboard company logo to finish flashing
I still have computers that take some time to boot. Issue is, I just rarely power off/on. Instead the computers go to sleep which if much faster to come out of.
Of all the tasks this is an uncommon one.
Wanna talk about stability, not responsiveness and snappiness, you can add OSX/macOS to that list in addition to the above. It's not great but it's vastly better than anything else not on the above list. I've never, in 20 years, had a Linux GUI system that wasn't fairly crashy. "Oh it was just an app crash" or "oh X just quit but the OS is still up and you can restart it" or "oh some KDE daemon just shit the bed, restart X or do [arcane invocation] to put KDE back in a good state and it'll be fine" yeah OK well it's still a crash and I still lost stuff so it may as well have BSOD'd for all I care. Before I switched to macOS I was kinda blind to how bad it was because it was just normal. Modern Windows seems to be getting better on that front but I only use it for gaming so IDK.
[EDIT] to be fair, if I hadn't experienced BeOS and QNX (on shitty hardware, mind you, even by the standards of the time when I ran them) then super-minimalist Linux GUIs might be what I'd consider "snappy and responsive". Those were just in a whole other league, and really reset my understanding of what was possible (but rarely achieved)
Before corporates entered the Linux market (e.g., Red Hat and Canonical), Linux actually used to be faster than Windows. Today, I find Ubuntu (and most Ubuntu based distros) to be equal or sometimes worse than Windows on the same hardware. It just feels as "weighed down" as Windows.
And yeah, you are absolutely right about BeOS - it felt revolutionary to run two sessions of a movie player on a 200Mhz powered system with 16 MB ram!
Regarding the shitty hardware...
The f-ing fastest desktop experience i ever had was somewhere in the late days of KDE 3, across NetBSD, ArchLinux and Gentoo, on Pentium3@933Mhz with 512MB RAM, onboard I815 Intel graphics(edit: with the 'superspecial' 4MB VRAM Dimm-thingy), and some IBM Deathstars. With the same toned down look across all three systems, and toolkits, instead of the usual teletubbyfication.
What can i say? When your KDE 3 crashed you were holding it wrong, or it was somehow miscompiled, be it the optimization , or some libraries.
For me it was rock solid and lightingly fast, at least in my configurations.
The same can be seen nowadays with systemd and pulseaudio. They can be used if configured right. The question is if one wants to be hassled with that, if it isn't.
/endrant
[EDIT] oh as for BeOS, it ran a lot of the same junk I ran on Linux just fine. Better, really. It wasn't suitable for a server, but that didn't and doesn't really matter for one's desktop OS experience. Especially these days—can it run a VM (as one supposes any modern BeOS-alike could, because why not)? Cool, then I can run most any deployment target I like on it.
Only Mandrake and PCLinuxOS got this right, they had nothing in /etc which wasn't applicable, because somehow generated programmatically by their installer, according to the choosen configuration.
That was CLEAN, there were no useless ##commented out things for stuff the system didn't even had installed.
Unfortunately their package repos at the time were 'clean' (meaning lacking the stuff i needed/wanted) too.
SUSE also tried this with YAST, but got it wrong often, and felt sluggish and bloated.
I can't really remember XFree86 and later Xorg crashing on me, except when pushing its boundaries wrt multi monitor and hotplugging, i guess that depends on the used hardware and the quality of their drivers?
Everything goes to shit as soon as you install one of those “desktop environments” though.
I for one find xmonad & co extremely pleasant to use even if there’s a slight learning curve. I really don’t see what Cinnamon, Gnome & co. have to offer (except to users who aren’t very technically oriented, who’d probably be more productive on OS X or Windows anyway)
That's what I thought, you didn't...
Another distro I like is "Linux Mint Debian Edition" ( https://linuxmint.com/download_lmde.php ) that feels more "light-weight" than its Ubuntu derived counterpart Linux Mint.
The median computer user and use cases from 1983 to 2020 are very different.
- linearity: logical steps are simple (boot, os, login, byte fetching)
- predictability: it can be non instant but I know what's coming
I had an old pentest distro with linux 2.4 on a key and a few recent ones using systemd and tailored DE. Whenever I used the old 2.4 era distro, maybe I had less capabilities overall, maybe a few glitches here and there, but somehow I felt in contact. Everything reacted as-is, throughput felt large (console output, file IO). Even the old sequential boot had a 'charm' to it. Even though systemd is so vastly superior in all aspects .. there was something that appealed to me. Weird.
Can disable the low-battery beeping; cannot disable the POST beep unless you switch to vendor logo mode.
(It's your standard old-style beep - just rendered through stereo speakers that have uncannily decent audio reproduction at that particular frequency for some reason. In a serene, quiet room.)
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