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Comment by bsder | Hacker News Reader

> he’s built a computer with almost zero latency—when you do something, the computer reacts instantly.

Oh, the irony.

It's Microsoft's own fault in the first place that we have an operating system that is so horribly unresponsive.

And, now, umpteen years later, it's a BIG ADVANCE that we actually make computers do what we want, when we want. Just like before Microsoft.

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That's almost laughably incorrect, although unfortunately popular amongst a certain segment of the tech set. The nearly-impossible-to-use computers that did very little very slowly back in the 80s (and earlier) were not nearly as amazing as your memory is fooling you into believing. Sure, nearly-bare-metal OSes don't soak up much in the way of resources, but that only works in very narrow market segments, and computers are totally mass market now.

And in any case, you mean "before Windows" if anything, because DOS was fast as blazes (and did pretty much nothing as a consequence).

Essentially, when people think back to how responsive computers were "before windows", they are recalling computers which had no networking, and disks which were so slow that you would never write software which depended in real-time on getting that data from disk. You'd pre-load all the data you needed into your meager RAM and then, yes, for doing the one thing that was loaded into memory, with the data that was already in memory, the computer would be very very responsive. But when it came to saving or loading, you could go and get a coffee.

I have to say that in this case you're wrong. The Apple Mac Plus in my parents' closet, which I still fire up from time to time to play Dark Castle (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KCkbp4wurW0), had a zero latency mouse (or at least imperceptible) with zero flicker. Took Microsoft at least 20 years to get something comparable. This is not a nostalgic mis-memory, or an exaggeration. Please find an old Mac from the 80's and simply move the mouse around.

> they are recalling computers which had no networking

The very first network games I ever played were over AppleTalk on a Mac, like NetTrek (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z40VMsXtl0Y ... yes, that is digitized sound out of a 1984 machine), Maze Wars (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PoEpgfTtUYg) and the venerable Bolo! (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Bz_gYZ5kMvc), the latter still one of the best multiplayer gaming experiences I've ever had

> Sure, nearly-bare-metal OSes don't soak up much in the way of resources, but that only works in very narrow market segments, and computers are totally mass market now.

And we had Amiga. And BeOS. And Plan9.

All of which had very good latency. All of which Microsoft displaced with monopolist behavior and marketing money.

Microsoft is only interested in fixing the problems they caused now that they aren't the 800lb gorilla anymore.

If you had read further into the article (past the first two lines) you would have realised these latency issues are caused by hardware limitations rather than software. You can definitely bring latency down a decent amount in software, but as you approach 0ms the problems becomes exponentially more difficult. That's why this article is about Microsoft's pile of hardware prototypes, and how they're working on getting closer to 1ms in a table-like form factor.

The iPhone 5 just for context had a 55ms touch delay. The iPhone 6 actually increased that to 65ms (i.e. it got worse). Very few smartphones break the 50ms barrier (like one total from what I can tell).

That's what Microsoft are working on.

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