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from the perhaps-providing-prompt-prompts-prompts-perceived-performance-primacy dept.
Have you ever had that nagging sensation that your computer was slower than it used to be? Or that your brand new laptop seemed much more sluggish than an old tower PC you once had? Dan Luu, a computer engineer who has previously worked at Google and Microsoft, had the same sensation, so he did what the rest of us would not: He decided to test a whole slew of computational devices ranging from desktops built in 1977 to computers and tablets built this year. And he learned that that nagging sensation was spot on—over the last 30 years, computers have actually gotten slower in one particular way.
Not computationally speaking, of course. Modern computers are capable of complex calculations that would be impossible for the earliest processors of the personal computing age. The Apple IIe, which ended up being the “fastest” desktop/laptop computer Luu tested, is capable of performing just 0.43 million instructions per second (MIPS) with its MOS 6502 processor. The Intel i7-7700k, found in the most powerful computer Luu tested, is capable of over 27,000 MIPS.
But Luu wasn’t testing how fast a computer processes complex data sets. Luu was interested in testing how the responsiveness of computers to human interaction had changed over the last three decades, and in that case, the Apple IIe is significantly faster than any modern computer.
https://gizmodo.com/the-one-way-your-laptop-is-actually-slower-than-a-30-ye-1821608743
(Score: 1, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday December 31 2017, @12:52AM
Not beautiful, but really fast is my ancient FinalWord II word processing software running on a Win 7 laptop under the DOSbox emulator. Later versions were called Borland Sprint wordprocessor.
Scroll top to bottom of medium sized docs, 100 pages, 50 lines on a "VGA" screen page, is effectively instant (at the repeat rate of the PgDn key). Jump from home to end is instant.
Same for search, effectively instant, along with search & replace.
FWII was written to use a swap file so if DOS crashed, all but the most recent key strokes could be recovered. Now it's so fast that I don't lose much of anything. Used to be the "Swapping..." legend would display for a second every now and then. Now it's rare that I ever see it, it's not up long enough to be displayed.
While I don't use this emulation very often, it's convenient when I need to look at the source files for a number of long docs that I wrote on CP/M and MS-DOS systems.