[HN Gopher] What we can learn from vintage computing
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       What we can learn from vintage computing
        
       Author : ecliptik
       Score  : 25 points
       Date   : 2022-12-13 15:12 UTC (7 hours ago)
        
 (HTM) web link (github.com)
 (TXT) w3m dump (github.com)
        
       | robinsonb5 wrote:
       | The lesson I wish OS designers would learn from vintage computing
       | is that when it comes to an interactive user interfaces,
       | responsiveness matters far more than throughput, and so nothing
       | required for interactivity should be swapped out, ever, under any
       | circumstances.
        
         | Pr0ject217 wrote:
         | Do you have an example? (From a curious dev)
        
           | robinsonb5 wrote:
           | When I think of vintage computers I think of computers old
           | enough that they have no concept of virtual memory. In
           | particular, the Atari ST, the Amiga and the Acorn Archimedes
           | - on all of those platforms the user interface wasn't merely
           | another task running among dozens, it was the most important
           | thing the computer was doing - and while it's hard to
           | describe, the feeling of immediacy is noticeable (even if the
           | task your mouse click set in motion takes minutes or hours to
           | complete - the widget will give you instant visual feedback
           | when you click it) and its absence on more modern machines is
           | also noticeable. (If a modern machine's thrashing the hard
           | disk - especially on spinning rust - it can take seconds for
           | the same feedback to happen, even if the machine itself is
           | thousands of times faster.)
           | 
           | Yesterday's topic about the memory footprint of desktop
           | environments touched on this - the fact that if a memory-
           | hungry process triggers a swapstorm it can take minutes to
           | regain control of a Linux desktop.
           | 
           | I call that sense of immediacy the feeling of "having the
           | computer's full attention" - and ensuring that nothing
           | required for interactivity gets paged out is the only robust
           | way I can see of creating that feeling - but instead we use
           | the somewhat crude, brute-force approach of throwing more RAM
           | at the computer until the swap-outs stop happening!
        
       | klint wrote:
       | Author here. This was a fun one to work on. Kept finding out
       | about new things I wish I could have squeezed in there.
        
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       (page generated 2022-12-13 23:02 UTC)