[nullc]

> My '90s computer had a single 1280x1024 CRT where I always had to tweak the focus and alignment to get readable text. With no GPU, scrolling in an editor was always an exercise in patience, watching the text repaint line by line.

I don't intend to insult, but to me this came across to me as a kid larping as someone who used computers in the 90s.

Computers have improved by hardly imaginable magnitudes, but latency and interactive responsiveness for simple tasks like text editing is not generally one of them.

Whenever I go into the attic to dig out a really old machine to pull something off it, I am immediately struck by how much more responsive the interface is compared to current systems.

I respect that your experience is different but I can't figure out how that could possibly be.

[userbinator]

My experience of responsiveness agrees with you, and so does this guy's:

https://danluu.com/input-lag/

[asveikau]

I remember text editing UIs struggling when the machine was otherwise overloaded.

Although that started happening much more when text editors started to be written in garbage collected languages more often, which I put in the current century.

I still get that today if I use an old machine and/or a fancy text editor.

[wbl]

Emacs has always been written in Lisp, and it's possible for badly written code to make it lock up. Not a new complaint on low RAM machines where the gc and paging interact badly. But you need very low RAM by today's standards.

[asveikau]

Carefully worded with "more often" because I knew emacs was an outlier. I was never an emacs person myself so I don't know it first hand, but in do know people used to call it a resource hog a long time ago.

[titzer]

Emacs is largely written in e-lisp. Does it have problems with lag? I don't think so.

I think what made (makes) those editors laggy is a heavyweight representation of text and a creating a lot of garbage when processing said text.

[adrianN]

I regularly experience typing lag in Slack on a modern Macbook Pro.

[zwaps]

Well at least this retro experience is back with Javascript laden apps, that feel like they pull ui elements from a 56k connection

[winrid]

It almost sounds like they used a machine with the wrong graphics drivers installed...

[Stratoscope]

> I don't intend to insult

Then don't? ;-)

> but to me this came across to me as a kid larping as someone who used computers in the 90s.

Ah, my friend, you are far too kind. I had to look up "larping", as I had never heard the word before. Do I have it right, it means "live action role playing"?

I can only wish that I were a larping kid, but alas, I have been programming for over 50 years. I started in 1969 on Teletype machines and punched cards. Now that's latency.

You couldn't just interact with a computer directly like you can today. Oh, you could, but online time was $30/hour, or $210/hour in today's dollars.

So you would punch your program on paper tape, print it out, and carefully hand check it. After a few revisions, you punch a final tape, dial in, quickly run your tape through, wait for the printout, and hang up fast.

With any luck you could complete your online session in two minutes or less. So about $1 in 1969 dollars, or $7 in today's dollars for one run of your simple BASIC or FORTRAN or Algol-60 program.

Punch cards were a step down from that. You would punch your deck, print it out and hand check it, put a rubber band around the deck and drop it off at the inbox in the computer center. Come back the next day and you would usually have your printout waiting. With a core dump where your code crashed. On a good day you might get your core dump in as little as a few hours. Just keep dropping by the computer center to check the outbox window until you see a printout with your name on it.

So back to modern times! Yes, I definitely share your disappointment at the latency in some of today's systems. As one example, I have often wanted to try OneNote because I've heard so many good things about it, and when I have tried it out it seems great...

Except for the typing latency. It drives me nuts every time I try it. It feels like nearly a half second for a character to appear on the screen - both on Windows and Android. How can it be so messed up? It's almost as bad as the full duplex Teletype connection I grew up on. (Maybe it has gotten better, it's been a while since the last time I gave up on it.)

In any case, this is rather orthogonal to the font rendering I was talking about. I'm pretty sure the improved font rendering isn't what causes that kind of latency, as there are plenty of apps I use that have beautiful fonts and very low latency.

Thank you for the interesting comment and conversation! :-)

[aasasd]

I happen to have an experience with Pentium at 75 MHz, where text in Borland Pascal on DOS appeared slower than I could type (long before learning touch-typing), and pressing backspace after spotting an error required some patience.

Scrolling in GUIs is known to be sorta expensive: it's normally offloaded to the graphics system to be done wholesale as just a shift of the image, but if your GPU drivers suck then you're in for a crappy time (which was normally a thing in a fresh installation of Windows or Linux).

Basically, don't do much on a weak CPU.

[Narishma]

I find that hard to believe. Borland IDEs ran extremely well on the 386 and 486 machines of the day. If you're having trouble with them on a Pentium you probably misconfigured something.

[aasasd]

Wasn't my call, as it was a uni machine.

[anthk]

This is bullshit because DOS applications wrote to the VGA registers directly.

[aasasd]

You mean slow scrolling in Windows/Linux due to wrong drivers is bullshit because DOS apps wrote to VGA registers?

[anthk]

No, scrolling under DOS was really fast. And Windows 98 run much faster than X on a machine with similar specs.