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by abainbridge
2171 days ago
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> they weren't particularly fast I remember them being amazingly fast. I was comparing them to Amigas in 1987 though. The Motorola 68000 in the Amiga 500 was less than 1.0 dhrystone MIPS, while the Archemedes A3000 was about 4.0. For reference, the machines cost about £499 and £599 respectively in 1987. As a result the frame rate, poly count and screen size in Zarch on the Archemedes was higher than Starglider II on the Amiga :-). Look https://youtu.be/MNXypBxNGMo?t=36, https://youtu.be/edDLqlG4quw?t=132 |
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Apps opened so fast you couldn’t perceive a delay between double clicking and then appearing. New windows for apps also instant.
The only times I noticed waiting was when doing something that legitimately seemed like I should have to wait. A big operation in a paint program. Starting up a game.
I think this consistent ‘zero delay’ came through firstly the fact that lots of the OS was in ROM, then the tight design and coding of the OS, then perhaps that the ARM CPU was pretty fast.
Running RISC OS on a Raspberry PI natively it’s still just as snappy for normal operations. Things that take significant CPU are also now fast thanks to the several hundred fold increase in MHz.
I’d love to see another ‘personal computer’ OS appear which focuses on making the UX feel like it’s all working hard real time (or as close as it can) so that we can get back to the joy of feeling that the machine is consistently predictable in how it responds. Today’s ‘personal’ OSes feel more like driving a car with automatic transmission, steer-by-wire and several mechanical problems that cause it to randomly fail to respond in the expected time or just do something entirely different.