"amber-screen library computer in 1998: type in two words and hit F3. search results appear instantly"
Bullshit. The search results appear instantly if you are searching a small text file in an editor. But if your app is actually fetching the data from somewhere, a dBase database on a network disk mounted from a Netware server, good luck. You type your words, you hit the search key and then you wait. There is no indication that anything is actually happening, no spinning things, not progress indicator, nothing. You cannot do anything while you wait either (multitasking is not a thing in DOS, remember?), you just sit and wait there hoping for the best.
And this is an application that is trying to keyword search few megabytes of data over a local network. Not an application doing a fuzzy search on hundreds of terabytes of data across half a planet...
Exactly so. I used those computers back in the day. I actually designed library software in the 80s. Users today would go crazy waiting for the hard drive a 10Mbps Ethernet connection away to slowly pull data out of dBase database.
Bullshit. The search results appear instantly if you are searching a small text file in an editor. But if your app is actually fetching the data from somewhere, a dBase database on a network disk mounted from a Netware server, good luck. You type your words, you hit the search key and then you wait. There is no indication that anything is actually happening, no spinning things, not progress indicator, nothing. You cannot do anything while you wait either (multitasking is not a thing in DOS, remember?), you just sit and wait there hoping for the best.
And this is an application that is trying to keyword search few megabytes of data over a local network. Not an application doing a fuzzy search on hundreds of terabytes of data across half a planet...