Acceptable speed for interactive computing is psychological. A person
expects a certain level of performance which matches one's thought
processes. Not too fast, not too slow. What people really want is
consistent performance.
I watched a friend of mine who had given me all kinds of grief on the
horrible performance of TSO because it sometimes took 20 seconds to edit
a file, but normally just a few seconds. He brought a 4300 down from our
New York office to demonstrate APL. He stood there smiling, happy as
could be, while it took almost a minute to load his workspace. Several
things. Something he could see was happening. The tape was spinning. It
always took that long to load a workspace. He was in control of the
situation.
I too got that sinking feeling when occasionally on our TSO system I
pressed the enter key and nothing happened for a few seconds. Did the
system go down and I just lost the last hour of work?
CDC, on one of their time sharing systems, had an interesting parameter.
It was a delay in sending back the results of an interactive request. If
the calculations were completed in less time than this delay the
response was held until that time interval was met. Therefore,
performance was consistent even though the load on the processor varied
tremendously.
Wordstar under DOS took about 5 to 10 seconds to load a document. As we
have moved through word processors to the present it has always taken
about this amount of time. Much slower people get impatient. Much faster
and there's not time for a quick sip of coffee and a chance to compose
one's self for the task at hand.
If I had my way, software developers would have to use the smallest
configuration on which their product was supposed to run to test and
demonstrate their applications. If the latest version or Windows or
whatever is supposed to run on a 256M one GH processor then Bill ought
to use that size PC hooked to his big screen when he demonstrates it to
the world. And, before he shows it off, maybe he ought to put on all the
applications we don't use but must have like virusware, spyware and all
the other cute stuff that seems to come with PCs for "free".
Our PCs are like refrigerators. No matter how big they are they are
always full and there is unidentifiable green stuff at the back we
couldn't find for months.
Randy MacDonald wrote:
Hello J.R.;
I'd love to see examples of where today's computers seem slower than those
of the 1970s. It's just not the impression I get.
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