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I find https://danluu.com/input-lag/ to be quite convincing and a direct contradiction to your point. He has some analyses of various other elements of computing, too. We certainly haven't gotten faster across the board and I'm still amazed at how slowly many of the programs I use today actually load.

I tried to follow his advice for a while but didn't ever notice a perceivable difference between, say, st and alacrity. I think the justification for why we care about latency, there, is a bit fuzzy -- the examples he provides are about stylus inputs, the feedback loop there is more direct and there's more physical experience. I can't tell you what you feel of course. Currently I use kitty. Perhaps I'm blessed by unusual latency insensitivity....

I remember reading that piece, and found it to be interesting and accurate, but somewhat irrelevant. Most people just don't care about latency that much. If we go back to an ancestor high up in this thread, "low latency input and display" is not a goal of computing. "Enabling people to do things they find useful and/or have value" is the goal. And it just turns out that, for most tasks -- even most gaming tasks (or other things where you might say "low latency is important") -- low latency just is nowhere near as important as just being able to do these things at all.

Sure, we might sometimes notice the latency and find it vaguely annoying, but we put up with it because modern computing (with all the attendant "complexity" or whatever that makes low-latency hard) enables us to do things that computers of 20 or 30 or 40 years ago were just completely incapable of doing.

And for the people who really do care about low latency, they can usually build something custom that gets them where they want to be -- as Dan Luu points out in his piece.

There came the trend of leaving your computer on instead of powering it off just because starting up was so slow.

So much has improved that Blow’s arguments about how much better computers used to be has an air of Old Man Yelling at Clouds to me.

Booting into Workbench off a floppy is fun and all but my current machine boots up so fast now it’s ridiculous.

> but anybody who remembers computers 20 years ago being faster either has some serious rose tinted glasses, or was not using computers 20 years ago.

Or they're using something like the grade book in Canvas, a very popular LMS, and finding that it is in fact slower than GeoCalc on a C-64.

> I think you are just paraphrasing his point, so don't take this as a shot in your direction, but anybody who remembers computers 20 years ago being faster either has some serious rose tinted glasses, or was not using computers 20 years ago... You can still use a text editor and vim at least is still pretty snappy.

This is a single analysis from a single person, but if you look at empiric data for latency in terminal text input, there is a pretty significant negative trend over time: https://danluu.com/input-lag/

See https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32616485

That article is talking about a very narrow aspect of latency, things like "if I press a letter on my keyboard, how quickly does it show up on my screen?" And most computer users care much more about throughput than latency, within reason, anyway.

But 20 years ago, starting applications was slow, because spinning-rust hard drives were slow, CPUs were slow, and we didn't have as much RAM. Yes, applications executed fewer instructions to start up, and used less RAM back then, but today I type on a 13" laptop with 64GB of RAM, so much that my OS doesn't know what to do with most of it, to the point where the OS filesystem buffer cache is "only" using up 12GB, and 44GB is just sitting completely unused for anything. Yes, maybe it's absurd that running a desktop environment with a browser (granted, with over a thousand tabs open), some terminal emulator instances, and the one annoying Electron app I can't get rid of, consumes 8GB of RAM, which alone is three orders of magnitude more RAM than I had 20 years ago.

But the bottom line is that I, as a user, just don't need to care about resource utilization. I don't need to close my word processor when I want to play a game or watch a video. Oh, speaking of that -- in 2000, my CPU didn't have the ability to decode DVD-quality MPEG2 video in real time! If I tried, CPU usage would be pegged at 100%, and the video would still stutter and be unwatchable. (I'm not saying that there weren't CPUs in 2000 that could do this, just that mine could not, and I couldn't afford one that could.) Today I can stream 4k video from some storage location tens or hundreds of miles away, and decode it (on GPU or CPU) and play it back on a machine that sits on my lap (the aforementioned 2000-era CPU of course lived in a big tower case).

"Computers were faster 20 years ago" -- yeah, right.

I disagree, Microsoft Word on a Mac in the 90s was lightning fast and rock solid.

Few apps start up instantly in 2022. Many require a good network connection and/or a half a gigabyte of RAM, for no good reason.