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Comment by WillAdams | Hacker News Reader

The corollary is Wirth's Law:

>software is getting slower more rapidly than hardware is becoming faster.

>Wirth attributed the saying to Martin Reiser, who in the preface to his book on the Oberon System wrote: "The hope is that the progress in hardware will cure all software ills. However, a critical observer may observe that software manages to outgrow hardware in size and sluggishness."

I wish that there would be more instances of developments like to Mac OS X 10.6, where rather than new features, the software was simply optimized for a given CPU architecture, and the focus was on improving performance.

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This doesn’t hold with my experience, I remember how slow my old machines used to be - especially the ones with spinning hard disks. Not to mention early smartphones… I’ve had computers in my youth I used to turn on then go and make a coffee. Now it’s practically instant.

> Now it’s practically instant.

No it's not :)

Phones do not shut down. Powering off and back on still takes forever.

As for desktops, Windows at least keeps starting stuff in the background long after your UI gets displayed.

Yeeeah dude you have some seriously rose tinted glasses on.

My windows machine can go from completely powered off to a big application like a web browser fully open and operational on maybe 10-15 seconds, and yes, fully powered off. No way I’m making coffee in that time. Sure, windows might run stuff in the background, but it’s so fast that stuff doesn’t get in the way of me using the thing at all.

As for phones, “forever” is a silly thing to say but even if I granted you that one off boot time, you have somewhat moved the goalposts as you talked about the act of using software in day to day usage. On my laptop I can genuinely open 10 apps, close 10 apps, and open 10 apps again all within 10 seconds, probably faster if I wasn’t constrained by literal click actions. My computers growing up would grind to a halt if you tried to run like 3 things at once!

There are always instances of inefficient software, but there was back in the day too, I remember generating a new map on civilisation 1 on my 286 and it taking 10 hours. There is no way you can possibly say that on average software is slower today than it used to be, that statement in general is just completely false.

The improvements you describe come down to one thing: solid state drives. If we had them in the 90s, your software would've been starting up just as fast (or even faster) then. Meanwhile, once the software did start, it ran faster and with fewer resources than software does today. It's not rose colored glasses: software today truly is worse on average than software 20 years ago.

You say that like once the software has started it had washed its hands of that slow spinning disk, anything that interacts with data (god, remember trying to do video editing 20 years ago?? It was hell) was a nightmare.

And oh yeah, 100% I agree SSD’s are a huge factor as to why software runs faster now than it used to on average for day to day activities. Thanks for mentioning one of the things that helps demonstrate my point.

But it is not the only thing, that’s for sure. I can think of a few other critical things that made usage of computing faster over the years, and I bet you can too.

Partially unrelated but I once downloaded anime on dialup, used to take 30 hours per episode at low quality…

> I remember generating a new map on civilisation 1 on my 286 and it taking 10 hours

Humm. If my glasses are rose tinted, yours are black tinted. I've played quite a lot of civ 1, even on an xt with 8088, and i'm pretty sure map generation did not take 10 hours.

Perhaps if you hacked yours to use larger maps...

I'm also pretty sure civ 1 got to the menu on my 8088 faster than Death Stranding 2 on my ps5. Although that might be my rose tinted glasses indeed. Civ 1 also didn't have a 29 Gb day one patch :)

Let’s be honest for a second - we could both pick examples of slow software on old machines, slow software on new machines, fast software on old machines, and fast software on new machines, and talk about cherry picked experiences all day long to “prove our points”.

Which… by default… means I’m you’re going to have a lot of trouble asserting your “everything is slower now” point, if you see my point ;). I may also have to accept I can’t assert necessarily that everything is faster now. Fortunately I don’t really need to, as I am happy to restrict my point to simple activities, such as web browsing and such, but that’s by the by.

And to answer your question I don’t remember why it took quite so long to generate civ 1 maps, but I have a vague memory of trying to do weird things with the maps with my dad, so perhaps they were larger or there was some generation mod but I honestly couldn’t tell you my memory is too fuzzy. I do remember the copy protection that required looking up words in the manual though…

The horrors of booting Windows 2000 on a Pentium 1.

But there is something to be said about prior optimizations in limited resources. A few months back a friend was restoring a G4 iMac and I was astounded at how snappy the whole thing felt once the OS had finally loaded.

We forget how snappy iTunes was while using only 30MB of RAM.

If you can combine the best of boths worlds, there could be something special there.

Modern OS and software are very bloated but it is astounding how fast the hardware crunches through all that. But it could be better.

There was bloated software back then too, everything’s relative in that regard. A huge amount of the “bloat” can also be attributed to project assets, we forget how restricted we used to be about the look and feel of applications also. I bet people who write 1980’s software said the same thing about iTunes needing a “bloat worthy” 30mb of ram, I mean, what single application could possibly need that much! Am I right?

And yet https://danluu.com/input-lag/

This is self reported to be mostly about screen latency, no one is stopping you using a crt monitor on your PC if you want to

Software optimized for a particular processor is today's tech. In the future we may see CPUs that alter themselves to better serve the needs of software. I can see a day where a "cpu" was actually a bunch of different processors connected via a FPGA so that the software could reconfigure the CPU on the fly.

Why the down votes here? This is an interesting idea.

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