[agumonkey]

yeah latency is not all.

I have an HP48 calc, even though it had a monstrous cpu for its time, the system had layers of interpretation rendering the UX well... sluggish. But the ergonomics and paradigm was so neat, that you didn't need real time. You could keep stacking functions on the HP48 stack, you'd know in advance how it would behave, so it wasn't an issue. And counter intuitively, I enjoyed the pauses so I could think about what to do next.

[wtallis]

The key thing that made the HP48 work in spite of its latency is that the behavior was completely predictable. You could press a long key sequence faster than the GUI could react, but each keypress would be interpreted as if the GUI had kept up. So you could press an arrow key several times to navigate through a menu or dialog box that hadn't been drawn yet. The input event buffer was large enough to handle almost any input sequence that you could actually memorize.

On a PC, the latency is both less predictable in occurrence and in how it is handled, so when a window is unexpectedly slow to appear, you have to notice and wait rather than continue to type, otherwise your input may be sent to the wrong window.

[agumonkey]

Agreed