And yet my Amiga and my ST display a menu as soon as I click, can keep up with my typing, and scroll documents without lag. My MacBookPro can do none of these things.
+1 I can remember coding up tricky algorithms on 1Mhz embedded processors back in the day which would be instantaneously responsive. Today, although we have supercomputers in our pockets that can do decent speech recognition and other extraordinary things, many really simple I/O operations seem to lag. Is it really possible that all that performance can be effectively neutered sometimes simply by too many layers of software ? If not, what else could it be ?
Software randomness and complexity made OS 'bloated', tapping into the immense resources. Up until linux 2.4 computer still had a smallness feel, there was not many abstraction layers to cross, short response time[1]. Now even with systemd fast boot, v8 jitted javascript and performant machines you notice a slight delay.
[1] of course pushing compositeless full screen cga or even vga doesn't require the same architecture complexity
