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Stupid Slow: The Perceived Speed of Computers

Summer 2024

Computers today are faster than ever. They are faster at crunching numbers, they can handle more I/O and they can produce better quality graphics than anything previously produced. Even a dirt cheap modern microcontroller will run in circles around the home computers I grew up with. And yet, computers today often feel slow.

There's recently been some discussion about why computers feel slow today. Discussions like these return with regular intervals. Sometimes the focus is on bloat and resource glut, sometimes on the fact that despite ample hardware resources, software still runs slowly. The discussion has been going on for a while. One of its most famous installments is Niklaus Wirth's A Plea for Lean Software.

I agree with most of the critique and could easily write a very long and very bitter essay about the state of modern software. But I also think that abstraction is both too useful and too profitable to go away anytime soon. The key is balance, but balance is problematic in itself, because it isn't an absolute. One person's necessity is another person's bloat.

Without delving further into the depths of this discussion - which is much more complex than one might think - I'd like to explore an argument often made about how computers used to feel much faster. That doesn't mean that a Commodore 64 can mine bitcoin at speeds comparable to a modern GPU, but rather that for proportional workloads, computers used to be perceived as much snappier than they presently are.

First of all, is this a reasonable claim? I personally think so. Most of the time computers are faster and better than ever. Most of the time. Sometimes they're very slow, and the problem is that they're stupid slow: there's no rhyme or reason to why they're so abysmal at certain things when they're so fast at others.

Microsoft Teams, for example, will toss around sound and video for massive online meetings like there's no tomorrow, but feels like glue when switching between two different text chats. I can search for messages sent by a multitude of users across a span of several years, but when browsing the results, the UI is like treacle.

Though it might be particularly prevalent in business software from megacorps, stupid slow is everywhere - such as in modern terminal emulators suffering from a capped frame rate. As a software developer, I can of course come up with a number of rationalizations for why things are the way they are. As a user, I'm just perpetually annoyed.

This feeling of perpetual annoyance comes from somewhere, and I believe it's increased over time. Input lag, for example, was something I hardly ever experienced during the 1990s, but it seems to have crept in everywhere since then.

So, are computers less snappy today?

Windows 95: Your Mileage May Vary

Wirth wrote his plea for lean software in February of 1995, a couple of months before Microsoft released Windows 95. At this time, Microsoft had a solid position on the business software market, but their dominance was in no way as certain back then as it is now. In many ways, the roaring success of Windows 95 - along with ever-cheaper PC hardware - was what truly cemented Microsoft as the de facto monopoly in both business and home computing.

I consider Windows 95 to be a watershed moment in more ways than one. It is, to me, what truly introduced the concept of bloat and poor performance to the world of consumer and small business software. Much business computing was, at this time, still taking place in DOS. A single tasking system, virtually unchanged since the early 1980s and mostly running text mode applications, will of course feel snappy - especially on a 486 machine.

Windows 95 was a stark contrast to this. Above all, it's prone to swapping, which is catastrophic on an old mechanical IDE drive. MS-DOS, Amiga, Atari and other older systems never swapped, because they couldn't swap: you either had enough memory, or you didn't.

It's hard to give a fair and unified assessment of the 1990s Windows experience. Many Windows 95 users have fond memories of it. For others, it will probably trigger a desire to assume fetal position and start sobbing uncontrollably. In hindsight, it was a decent desktop environment with a clear and coherent interface design. It was also a massive resource hog. Microsoft themselves recommended a 486 computer with 8 megabytes of RAM, but in reality, even this was a bit optimistic. Just a couple of years later, when Windows 98 was released, the average consumer machine was much better matched to the actual hardware requirements. The same can, honestly, be said for Linux paired with an ever so modest X11 window manager.

Coming from the Amiga, Windows 95 felt like a bad joke even on a Pentium: slow, janky and constantly tormenting the hard drive with page file access. On the other hand, I was very fond of...