The page in question discusses latency in terminals, not how it compares to performance of previous generations.
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.
Also, almost all performance issues come due to features, which nostalgia about the past always ignores. Some specific tasks may have been tangentially faster, but you also had orders of magnitude less features available, and said feature make your overall workflow much faster. None of these people would actually give up on their zsh/autocomplete/fzf/custom git-integrated theme for a few ms better latency.
Let's face it,none of those are compelling reasons for more latency when at the same time the computing power available has ballooned to its current level.
Adding auto-complete given processors litterally orders of magnitude faster should have been feasible without getting slower.
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.
Today's terminal has some difference, the fonts should look anti-aliased, flickering should be as minimal as possible, should be able to theme it based on preference. One terminal able to support so many different terminal type VT100, rxvt, and still need to perform fast. I have worked enough on text only and 256 graphics terminal in yester years and feel today is still better.
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.
The argument is that a terminal shouldn't be slower given the increase in computing power by several magnitudes. Maps has its own scalability challenges, but a terminal doesn't need a live network connection and isn't/shouldn't be maintained by 100 developers who each only know a small bit of the codebase and step on each others' toes.
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 at the end of their comment.