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Why does my machine feel slower than an Apple ][ ?
I came across an interesting thread on YC hacker news today. While the thread is about yet another text editor which is just like the rest, except with GPU rendering (again, nothing particularly worth mentioniong) -- a side discussion started about the apparent slowness of computers.
gemini://dioskouroi.xyz/thread/30447705
There is a link to some guy timing keyboards with a logic analyzer and frame-by-frame camera. It seems that modern keyboards are several times slower than the entire keyboard-to-screen turnaround of Apple 2. I am not crazy after all!
A low-end controller scanning a modern keyboard is likely orders of magnitude more powerful than the entire Apple 2. A modern computer is thousands of times faster. And we still can't get a character from the keyboard to the screen faster.
WTF, really.
Several mentions of rxvt terminal came up, as perhaps the fastest. XFCE terminal is pretty slow, and for some reason I've been using it; I definitely feel it. Suckless claims that even rxvt, with its 32K lines of code, is too big, compared to st (my guess it's even more responsive than rxvt, but it's just a guess).
The joy of sitting in front of a clacking Apple ][ is hard to describe. It's the only great machine Apple has ever made, in spite of Jobs (may he burn in Hell).