> These posts fondly remember just the speed, but always seem to forget the frustrations, or re-imagine them to be something we treasured.
More to the point, I grew up with early Windows XP computers and early 90s Internet, and I don't remember the speed. Maybe I'm just too young and things were magically faster in the 80s? Maybe I was born just slightly before everything took a giant nosedive and became crap?
There are lots of things that annoy me about modern computers, but none of them take upwards of 2-3 minutes to boot any more. I remember loading screens in front of pretty much every app on my computer. A lot of my modern apps I use don't even have loading screens at all. I remember clicking buttons on apps and just kind of waiting, while the entire computer froze, for an operation to complete. Sometimes I'd start to do something complicated and just walk away and grab a snack because I literally couldn't use my computer while it ran.
There were entire joke websites like Zombocom set up to riff on how bad the loading screens were on the web back then. I would wait literally 10-15 minutes for Java apps like Runescape to load on a dial-up connection, despite the fact that the actual game itself played fine over that connection, and the delay was just due to dropping a giant binary that took no intelligent advantage of caching or asset splitting.
I can't imagine waiting 10-15 minutes for anything today.
I got a low-key allowance out of going to other people's houses and defragging their computers. Do you remember when Windows would just get slower over time because there was an arcane instruction you had to run every year or so to tell it to maintain itself?
> On the library computer in 1998 I could retry searches over and over and over until I found what I was looking for because it was quick
Now I have to wait for a huge page to load, wait while the page elements shift all over, GOD FORBID i click on anything while its loading
What library were you going to in 1998? I also did library searches, and they were insanely slow, and prone to the exact same "don't click while it loads" behavior that the author is decrying here. And that's if I was lucky, sometimes the entire search engine would just be a random Java app that completely froze while it was loading results. And forget about giving me the ability to run multiple searches in parallel across multiple tabs. Whatever #!$@X cookie setup or native app they were wired into could never handle that.
The modern database search interfaces I have today are amazing in comparison. I have annoyances, but you couldn't pay me to go back in time. A lot of those interfaces were actively garbage.
Again, maybe I'm just too young and everything took a nosedive before I was born. But even if that's the case, it seems to me that interfaces are rapidly improving from that nosedive, not continuing to slide downwards. The computing world I grew up in was slow.
>I also did library searches, and they were insanely slow, and prone to the exact same "don't click while it loads"
Not the person you asked, but around 2002 at my university library the computers were running a DOS like application, on the top part of the screen there were printed the commands and you can put your search and hit enter, after a few years it was replaced with a Win98 like GUI, you had to open the app if someone else closed it, then use the mouse to find the right dropdowns and select the options then input the search term then click Search. Before you would type something like "a=John Smith" hit enter and it would show all the books of that author.
The problem with us developers is that most of the time we are not heavy users of the applications we create, we create since test projects and simple test to check the application but our users might use the application many hours a day and all the little issues would add up.
> More to the point, I grew up with early Windows XP computers and early 90s Internet
He is talking about running local software before mainstream internet was a thing.
That is, locally installed software without a single line of network code in them.
MS Word started faster on my dads Motorola based Mac with a 7MHz CPU and super-slow spinning rust-drives than it does on my current PC with a 4GHz CPU and more L3 cache than the old Mac had RAM all together.
Even from a premise that the introduction of networking and graphical GUIs was a huge mistake that caused software quality to plummet dramatically, a lot of modern software today is still faster and better designed than the software I had as a kid.
I can maybe accept that I got born at the wrong time and everything before that point was magical and wonderful. I never used early DOS word processors so I can't speak to whether the many features we have today are a worthwhile tradeoff for the startup speed. I'll have to take your word for it.
But if people want to say that we're actively making stuff worse today, they're skipping over a massive chunk of history. If you look at the overall trend of how computers have changed since the 90's, I think literally the worst thing you could say is that we are still recovering from a software quality crash. People either forget or dismiss that a lot of early 90s software was really, really bad -- both in terms of performance and UX.
From the original post:
> amber-screen library computer in 1998: type in two words and hit F3. search results appear instantly. now: type in two words, wait for an AJAX popup. get a throbber for five seconds. oops you pressed a key, your results are erased
I'm still calling bull on this, because I also used 1998 Library computers and a lot of them were garbage. And I've used modern Library search engines, and while they're not great, a good many of them have substantially improved since then. This is a rose-colored view of history based off of individual/anecdotal experiences.
I'm not wildly optimistic about everything in the software ecosystem today. I do wish some things were simpler, I do see systemic problems. But holy crap, HN is so universally cynical about computing right now, and I feel like there's a real loss of perspective. There are tons of reasons to be at least somewhat optimistic about the direction of computing.
More to the point, I grew up with early Windows XP computers and early 90s Internet, and I don't remember the speed. Maybe I'm just too young and things were magically faster in the 80s? Maybe I was born just slightly before everything took a giant nosedive and became crap?
There are lots of things that annoy me about modern computers, but none of them take upwards of 2-3 minutes to boot any more. I remember loading screens in front of pretty much every app on my computer. A lot of my modern apps I use don't even have loading screens at all. I remember clicking buttons on apps and just kind of waiting, while the entire computer froze, for an operation to complete. Sometimes I'd start to do something complicated and just walk away and grab a snack because I literally couldn't use my computer while it ran.
There were entire joke websites like Zombocom set up to riff on how bad the loading screens were on the web back then. I would wait literally 10-15 minutes for Java apps like Runescape to load on a dial-up connection, despite the fact that the actual game itself played fine over that connection, and the delay was just due to dropping a giant binary that took no intelligent advantage of caching or asset splitting.
I can't imagine waiting 10-15 minutes for anything today.
I got a low-key allowance out of going to other people's houses and defragging their computers. Do you remember when Windows would just get slower over time because there was an arcane instruction you had to run every year or so to tell it to maintain itself?
> On the library computer in 1998 I could retry searches over and over and over until I found what I was looking for because it was quick Now I have to wait for a huge page to load, wait while the page elements shift all over, GOD FORBID i click on anything while its loading
What library were you going to in 1998? I also did library searches, and they were insanely slow, and prone to the exact same "don't click while it loads" behavior that the author is decrying here. And that's if I was lucky, sometimes the entire search engine would just be a random Java app that completely froze while it was loading results. And forget about giving me the ability to run multiple searches in parallel across multiple tabs. Whatever #!$@X cookie setup or native app they were wired into could never handle that.
The modern database search interfaces I have today are amazing in comparison. I have annoyances, but you couldn't pay me to go back in time. A lot of those interfaces were actively garbage.
Again, maybe I'm just too young and everything took a nosedive before I was born. But even if that's the case, it seems to me that interfaces are rapidly improving from that nosedive, not continuing to slide downwards. The computing world I grew up in was slow.