> almost everything on computers is perceptually slower than it was in 1983 .... amber-screen library computer in 1998: type in two words and hit F3. search results appear instantly. .... now: type in two words, wait for an AJAX popup. get a throbber for five seconds. oops you pressed a key, your results are erased
So we start with something 15 years AFTER the title as evidence of the "good" times, then make a vague anecdotal reference to something modern. I've seen POOR performances in places, but the majority of experiences I see now are faster than in 1998 and definitely than 1983. Faster AND more convenient.
> And it's worth noting that HYPERTEXT, specifically, is best with a mouse in a lot of cases. Wikipedia would suck on keyboard.
Um....no. It's less convenient than a mouse, but way better than the function key-based commands than the author lists.
I think there is a lot of room available to complain about terrible interfaces today, and in particular how choked everything is by the need to track and add advertising, but there's no actual evidence in this article, and it comes across as a rant and selective nostalgia.
> Most of the 1980-1995 cases could fit the entire datasets in CPU cache and be insanely fast.
They couldn't then. They had to fit it in RAM.
> Most things I query these days are in the gigabytes to terabytes range.
That still is in "fits in RAM on a typical PC" to "fits in SSD on a PC, fits in RAM on a server" range.
There's little excuse for the slowness of the current searching interfaces, even if your data is in gigabytes-to-terabytes. That's where the whole "a bunch of Unix tools on a single server will be an order of magnitude more efficient than your Hadoop cluster" articles came from.
>Um....no. [Wikipedia is] less convenient than a mouse, but way better than the function key-based commands than the author lists.
Okay, but slap on an extension, and Wikipedia is much more usable without a mouse! For example, VimFX/Vimium allow you to click links (and do a bunch of other stuff) from the keyboard, and that makes it tremendously more usable.
Of course, that’s only true because Wikipedia is standards compliant and doesn’t break extensions’ ability to see links, which is not universally true of websites.
How so? The article is based on an assertion that directly counteracts my memories. I remember using computerized library card catalogs in the 80s. I remember using AltaVista in the 90s. I remember using the Up/Down/Left/Right navigation (and full-screen re-renders) in Mapquest pre-google maps. I remember using the cgi-bin version of imdb.com. I can see how promptly things work now. I can see the additional benefits I get now.
If the author makes an assertion that contradicts my experiences, they better provide SOME evidence, or be dismissed (which is presumably NOT their intent).
>I remember using the Up/Down/Left/Right navigation (and full-screen re-renders) in Mapquest pre-google maps.
Web apps sucked then, and they still suck today. The only difference between then and now is the decades of development effort that has been wasted trying to make JavaScript fast enough to mimic old applications.
I used MS Streets & Trips[1] in the same era, and it was awesome. It worked offline (something Google maps only got recently, and it sucks pretty bad at it), the search for POIs along a route was wicked fast, and it supports the author's purported use-case of mapping out a whole trip.
This shit ran blisteringly fast on a Windows 2000 laptop w/ no internet connection & 256MB of RAM. Now I'm expected to have an always on connection & I need gigabytes of RAM just to accomplish the same thing inside a web browser. -- I've missed many a turn because "navigation apps" assume LTE coverage is perfect; which is just not the case for many parts of the midwest. So I'm resigned to using a dedicated GPS unit.
You'll click through results in these catalog apps and there's sometimes seconds of delay because they're doing completely unnecessary shit like querying inventory at peering libraries. It wastes cycles and network round trips trying to answer a question I didn't even ask. (Inventory levels of a given title.) -- Browsing a digital card catalog is literally the perfectly indexed dataset computers dream about, and somehow people have gone and managed to make that excruciatingly slow.
It's gotten so bad I usually just go talk to the librarian if they're not busy, since their interface to the library's inventory typically looks more like the one's referenced in the article.
> How so? The article is based on an assertion that directly counteracts my memories.
Human experience is subjective and one account is not invalidated by another.
> If the author makes an assertion that contradicts my experiences, they better provide SOME evidence, or be dismissed (which is presumably NOT their intent).
Well....yeah, sure. If the author of the piece has no interest in actually supporting their point, and if readers on HN (the audience of my comment) have no interest in finding out that the article is just an opinion restating the title at length, then yeah, it's all inconsequential.
So we start with something 15 years AFTER the title as evidence of the "good" times, then make a vague anecdotal reference to something modern. I've seen POOR performances in places, but the majority of experiences I see now are faster than in 1998 and definitely than 1983. Faster AND more convenient.
> And it's worth noting that HYPERTEXT, specifically, is best with a mouse in a lot of cases. Wikipedia would suck on keyboard.
Um....no. It's less convenient than a mouse, but way better than the function key-based commands than the author lists.
I think there is a lot of room available to complain about terrible interfaces today, and in particular how choked everything is by the need to track and add advertising, but there's no actual evidence in this article, and it comes across as a rant and selective nostalgia.