7 ms·
This might just be because it's a demo, but man are things ever fast... they open up a document and it just instantly comes up. They load a video and bam, insta
by Kranar 22d ago
This might just be because it's a demo, but man are things ever fast... they open up a document and it just instantly comes up. They load a video and bam, instant. There's a little segment where Bill Gates is showing off opening up multiple instances of Excel and they open up so quickly. I tried opening up Excel on my desktop PC and the speed is nowhere close to what this video is showing. I open up a document nowadays and there's a splash screen, there's some lag as the application checks if there's an update, the application appears and the layout starts to jitter and flicker... none of that is in this demo.
Obviously some of this is for show, but even still it indicates people cared about having a very smooth and snappy user experience back then and that it was absolutely important to showcase performance. Somewhere along the way developers just quietly agreed that latency is the user's problem.
- initramfs 22d agoHad no idea Leno did a 90 minute infomercial!
- senderista 22d agoOTOH your programs and OS probably don't crash all the time nowadays.
- wookmaster 22d agoProbably because they're all phoning home looking for licenses first
- mike_hearn 22d agoIt's not fast. Look at 19:40 when he's starting new apps. You can see each newly launched app slowly paint individual regions of their windows. At 50:56 you see Photoshop slowly load in tiles of an image. That's a strong memory of that era for me; watching apps slowly repaint bits of their windows as the HDD thrashes. And that would have been running on a machine with probably 16MB of RAM, so far beyond what most users would have. It wasn't really Windows' fault. It was well optimized. Machines of that era were just really slow.