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Comment by jfengel | Hacker News Reader

What version of 1983 did he live through?

My Osborne 1 took a minute to load Wordstar. Searching a document would take more minutes if it was longer than about 30k because it had to swap to floppy disk. Connecting to a BBS was time for a bathroom break. So were compiles.

I think most of what is perceptually slower for the author is that it's a small percentage of the 40 years it took to get here. I loved my O1 but it did what little it could do very slowly. My phone in my hands right now is doing a trillion more things better and faster.

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I haven't read the article and only started using computers as a kid in the early 90s.

My take on perceptually slower is:

I don't remember computers being slow back then. They were just like they were.

Whereas today, especially since I'm living in Latin America on flaky and slow mobile internet connection and low to mid-range phones, the range of speed of just taking into account websites is massive. From super snappy to barely usable. Which makes me much more conscious about it.

Maybe it is just selective memory, and the difference in my age, but I feel back then, how something will perform was more predictable and consistant from a user perspective.

Indeed. Even his first example of library computers seems off. In 1998, my library was part of a small network of libraries in my city, searching the catalogue involved making network requests over ISDN, and, while impressive for the time, it was not fast.

I can definitely get behind the Gmaps UX rant, but that's nothing to do with speed.

I remember our local library got a digitized index in the early eighties ( was card based before? I was very young ).

The digitized index was a couple of touchscreen terminals, which were plenty fast.

Clearly this person never tried to load a program on a C64 with a tape drive. I could make myself lunch and the thing still wouldn't be done, and there was a non-zero chance it would screw up somehow and you'd have to rewind the tape and start it over. Upgrading to floppy wasn't much better, either, before the advent of fast load cartridges.

Contrast that with my current Win 10 install, which on a 3-year old computer goes from "off" to login screen in under 10 seconds.

Depends on what the goal is of course. A c64 started and dropped you into the interpreter in under a second.

Input latency being another absolutely astonishing difference.

But modern computers have so much more computational throughput that they’re many orders of magnitude more useful as tools.

I think the author is just saying that we lost the feel of immediacy for the common case, which I agree with, sometimes I press something and there’s either a sub second delay (text input) or a large pause (clicking an icon) before the machine seems to be doing anything.

Back in the day, you press a key and your computer is displaying it before the key has risen; you press enter and your hard disk churns immediately and a flashing light would blink merrily indicating work. That’s what perception is.

(Also, you could use a c64 with a floppy or Hard-disk which was obviously much faster than tape)

He’s not commenting on load times of software as far as I understand. He’s commenting about UI responsiveness.

PERCEPTUALLY slower. meaning, you click on something and you know instantly that at least it's processing, i.e. without perceptually detectable delay. Almost 100% of SPAs (including gmail and "electron" type apps) suck terribly at this, and they pay it with double- and triple- clicks from frustrated/clueless users

Nobody does it worse than imgur.com . You upload something and there is no indication, no feedback, nothing

The only perceptually faster feedback I can vividly recall my 1983 8-bit computer giving is "Oh, I know it took my input because now it's frozen."

seriously? it's easy to tell that something is slow to respond, because you can compare the time it takes from the audible mouse click to the change you see on screen, and primates are very very good at perceptual discrimination

To this day nothing can compare to the input snappiness of my Apple IIc and Dan Luu's article proves it [0].

[0] https://danluu.com/input-lag/

That's true but might also veer into the land of "technically correct". Dedicated hardware and font lookups for screen display means that screen updates happened on the next retrace. That doesn't mean the time between hitting Enter and the spreadsheet updating or the word processor re-wrapping the text was faster in 1983 than it is today.

The first paid programming job I ever did was writing some relocatable machine code in a USR$ because the patron's BBS couldn't calculate the XMODEM CRC in BASIC fast enough to support the upgrade to his new 1200 baud modem. I know I got paid $20 and I think it was about 20 bytes of code. I wish I got paid $1/byte for code I write today!

[0] - http://www.page6.org/archive/issue_11/page_24.htm

Wouldn't that be great. :D

I mean, nowadays I am not very much into the "actually" arguments: I really don't deem it that important that older computers were better specialized for lower input lag. I just want that lower input lag back.

Complexity in modern machines and OS-es has grown too much. I feel a next Linux-like revolution might be coming that addresses this -- although this time around it would be much slower and gradual so it might not actually constitute a revolution per se. More like evolution.

I think that just means that users expected nothing to happen very quickly. You push a button, and would instantly get a beach ball, so you could get up and go elsewhere while you waited to see if this time it would actually work.

I'm all for fixing the million annoyances in modern UX. The Web was built by something even worse than a committee -- it was built by a thousand committees. But let's not have rose-colored glasses, either. Computers in 1983 and 1998 were immensely frustrating, and some of what makes computers slow today is also what makes them better than the half-baked, hard-to-use, fifty-pound monstrosities of the past. We can and should do better in the future, but not if we mis-remember the past.

Computers were slower but i wouldn't call them frustrating. Windows start menu in 2000 was an 100% intuitive hierarchical menu. Today it takes me 10 minutes to remove the utterly useless spammy crap that MS ships by default.

It used to be that software would get slower due to more and more baggage (or "technologies") it accumulates, but hardware would get faster at a higher rate. The past 10 years software keeps piling up more and more libraries but CPU performance is essentially stuck and even more, we have the shift to mobile, which means underpowered computers. This inevitably leads to bloated , slow systems , or "UX".

In 1983/86 not much was delivered over BBS, it was almost all floppy based. The 1.44 was around 50kbyte/sec, so it took a while before people generally had broadband that would match that.

However, a BBS didn't do a bad job with interfaces. I remember pcboard or iniquity which had reasonably good interfaces, you could often type what you wanted rather than navigate the menu system.

What about phone calls from browsers, last time I looked at Teams it consumed around 250MB for the one process tab funnelling voice traffic.

Also, most TUI interfaces don't suffer the way that the post describes, aside from vi itself, I don't remember much in the years gone by that is as fast as vim to work with, though, it has accumulated some timber since.

You're right: this post would make more sense if the author had gone for 1997 or so. Not too many bathroom breaks needed for various operations.

In 1997 I was doing IT classes in secondary school. One of our preferred ways to bunk of class was to ask if we could "write up our reports in the library" on the RMNimbus 186s. 15 or so minutes for the computer to boot into some kind of menu system that gave you a "press 1 to start windows 3.1, press 2 to start BBC Basic" type menu, then another 20 minutes to boot windows and then another 5 minutes to start MSWord. Write three lines and then it's time for the next class!

Huh, in 1997 our (average) school had some decent Pentium machines. We'd boot into Window 3.1 + a Novell Netware prompt and be able to launch Encarta or Word (or Wordperfect in DOS) within a minute or two.

To be fair - we asked to go to the library because that's where the crappy old machines lived.

Excuse me while I go down memory lane...

I think when I started (1995) it was a computer room with some 486s and the library with 186s. Then we got the internet, a single ISDN line shared by all of them, which was about as fast as you'd expect.

At some point these got upgraded to pentiums with windows 98 or similar - in those happy days the IT people at the school had absolutely no idea what they were doing so we had a happy few months of installing and playing doom and quake over the network.

I once found the IT technician going around all the computers and holding down the delete key to clear out the username field grumbling about "bloody kids filling these up", he was very impressed when I showed him how to select all...

I love reading this. My background is similar.

At some point the "business" teacher said whoever can get at least 120 wpm in the typing game gets 100% in his class component. That must have seemed to him like an impossible achievement to motivate us.

A week or so later, a dozen of us had 100% in his part of the course and got to sit around and play games for the rest of the 6 weeks.

That's got to be one of the most useful skills you picked up in school though!?

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