Going Nowhere Really Fast, or How Computers Only Come in Two Speeds.

In my experience, this is 100% spot on. Hell, while typing this comment the caret is catching up to my keystrokes. Why can't we get interfaces right? We have all this processing speed available and yet our computers are slow. I press the shortcut to open a new filemanager window and it takes a second, why can't it take a few ms? My window manager is already loaded, what takes so long!<p>Like it or not, this is the primary reason that the iPhone is so popular. It is the first <i>fast</i> smartphone. All the other phones I had tried before the iPhone came out were just frustratingly slow. Hopefully, with the competition, other phone manufacturers have started to fix this (I'll get my first Android phone soon, I hope it's a fast one).

As I posted in his comments section:<p>&#60;em&#62;And could exist again.&#60;/em&#62;<p>I hope it does.<p>Still, this reminds me of Joel Spolsky's &#60;a href="<a href="http://joelonsoftware.com/articles/fog0000000020.html&#62;Bloatware" rel="nofollow">http://joelonsoftware.com/articles/fog0000000020.html&#62;Bl...</a> and the 80/20 myth&#60;/a&#62;. The reason this computer doesn't exist is because people don't want it—or, to be more precise, they don't want to make the trade-offs it implies in sufficient numbers for there to be a market for such a computer.<p>Nothing is stopping someone from making a stripped-down version of, say, Linux that will boot "into a graphical everything-visible-and-modifiable programming environment, the most expressive ever created faster than the latter boots into its syrupy imponade hell." But most people evidently prefer the features that modern OSes and programs offer. Or, rather, they prefer that modern OSes support THEIR pet feature and make everything as easy to accomplish as possible at the expense of some speed.

What year is this guy living in?<p>I can't remember the last time I noticed my UI hanging. Maybe once or twice when I had a macbook, but certainly not in the past year.

It feels like the article merely repeats some of what I read in the Unix haters handbook years ago.<p>LISP machines were extraordinarily expensive for a single-user machine, much of which was due to the heavyweight hardware (like 32-bit processors, 32MB of RAM and fast high-capacity disks in the 1980s).<p>If I recall correctly, your basic Symbolics LISP machine, with software, cost about $50,000 in 1986. According to an online inflation calculator, that's $96,500 in today's money. I can guarantee that the resulting 64-core 128GB machine with 1TB of SSDs in RAID-10 configuration would beat the pants off of the Symbolics workstation, use less power and make much less noise and you'd have money left over.<p>All that said, interface responsiveness is part of the user experience. If your application/OS/device crosses that threshold were the user has to wait, it's a failure. People only stick with Word for Windows (surely the unnamed word processor referenced) because they don't know better or have a choice.

This is exactly why I'll never buy another computer without an SSD. No other upgrade I've done in the last 10 years has benefited the overall feeling of responsiveness as much. I'd be very interested in seeing a blind taste test of an an Atom + SSD vs. i7 + 7200RPM HD. I bet most would pick the Atom as the faster machine for most common tasks.

I remember building an 700MHz (I think) pc, setting it up with Win98SE and Office 97 and commenting to someone that I didn't see how anyone could want for much faster processor speeds; boy, did it have teh snappy.<p>Seems I was wrong...

Um, the machine I'm using now cost about $400 and doesn't have an SSD, runs Ubuntu with programming IDEs, OpenOffice and WinXP virtual instances for IE testing and Flash and Gmail open constantly and it almost <i>never</i> hangs or feels unresponsive unless a program is misbehaving, which is rare and easy to detect and fix.<p>I'm really curious about his setup. If it's Windows, I've been able to make long-used Windows machines feel much snappier by trimming cruft annually or so. One of the reasons I love Ubuntu so much is that I <i>don't</i> have to do that.

This in no way rings true with my experience of modern computers. I think most people will agree, unless you are blatantly taxing a machine beyond what it was ever meant to handle (running 17 instances of Visual Studio at once, <i>and</i> trying to edit a Word document perhaps), even an entry level machine should run relatively smoothly.

As the sometime user of an Underwood manual typewriter, I have to say that I haven't hit cursor lag on a word processor since the days of WordPerfect 6.0, fourteen years ago. I should add that my typing speed was never really challenging the Underwoods, either, though.

Love this blog!<p>If only there was more constructive criticism of the broken mess that is desktop OSs...

I'm very suspicious of the LISP-Machine nostalgia. I bet once it had grown up to support TCP/IP and firewalls and FireFox and Skype and 3D cards with weird drivers and Win32 compatibility and antivirus software and multiple users with loads of ACL systems and Adobe Reader and Flash and so on, it wouldn't be half as wonderous.

I was skimming through Peter Cochrane's 108 Tips for Time Travellers, a book from 1997/1998 this week. In it, he complains that his computing power has gone from 4Mhz to 40Mhz and word processors have slowed even then, and in future we'll need supercomputers to write letters.