| > 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! :-) |