[richardjdare]

My Amiga back in the day had a very snappy gui. But I remember it took 1 minute for a 512px jpeg to decode using FastJpeg which was written in assembly language, and I'd leave my computer running all night to draw a mandelbrot set or perform a simple 3d render.

Not to mention that if you wanted to use floating point arithmetic, you had to do it in software via a library, or use fixed point routines. Floating point units were expensive hardware add ons that were eventually integrated with the cpu.

It is to the credit of the gui toolkits on those machines that they seemed so fast, until you tried to do serious computation. Then you became fully aware that you only had a 7mhz cpu!

[Ekaros]

I think it is forgotten just how simple thing a basic gui is graphically. Ofc, things look nicer now, but still. It is not very complex thing.

On other hand, also always make me question what are we really doing these days. Some tricks are nice and make things better, but how much is wasted on billions of devices every day...

[wakeupcall]

That things look nicer now is highly debatable. More complex, but just perhaps. How many pages I've seen scrolling on HN showing how the proper "toggle button" needs to work and animate in order not to be confusing where a checkbox still looks infinitely better to me? Or overlay scrollbars, that save essentially no space (which is given to padding instead!!!), hide the position are more difficult to grab?

I still think the W95/Motif-CDE/late Amiga years had very decent UIs even by today standards. Especially on Amiga, everything was expected to be interacted with with minimal latency. Everything was absolutely super-responsive. The UIs were legible, functional, and had tremendous information density.

That is the total opposite of today.

[adastra22]

And they had hardware acceleration for graphics (not a GPU as we understand it today, but the graphical composition was done in hardware).