Try using the old analog control systems where responses are basically instant. It feels like the controls are reading your mind.
Not all machines were like this though, we also had a Compaq Presario with some kind of Celeron running 98SE and that thing did feel slow more often than not, especially after several months of usage with the cruft buildup that comes with that.
> Mac OS 9 felt pretty darned fast on my 400Mhz iMac G3 back in 2000.
You were using a UI that (at its core) was built for 1984 machine, with sixteen additional years of hardware performance improvements.
Every once in a while I boot up a Mac from 1989, and Mac OS is definitely not snappy on it.
I think if you want speed, you need to find something built for a system far more constrained than the one you're actually using. The choices the developers made to make the system merely usable under those constraints will make it fast once they're removed.
We could have really snappy stuff today, but have gotten enamored with our latency inducing abstractions and haven't really gone back to fix it.
80s and 90s bloated UIs sure seem snappy and miniature by today's standards.
It needs to be a big show, and everybody must be able to directly understand it without any learning curve or even rtfm.
Everything else (ergonomics, features, ...) are too often secondary values.
I wouldn't say that UIs were great in the 90s. They weren't. It was also harder to implement them. The programming languages were more tedious, low-level, etc.
But as so often, it's disappointing what we do with our additional power today. Snappiness wouldn't even be my first concern, though.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36446933 - Windows NT on 600MHz machine opens apps instantly. What happened? (2023-06-23)
Follow up to the above by the original author:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36503983 - Fast machines, slow machines (2023-06-28)
Also Windows NT was released in 1993 when typical PCs were more like 100MHz, so this is getting a 6x speedup from the designed experience.
Now we don't have such excuse, at least for non networked apps.
If you're gonna do that, then remember how much faster a well-expanded Amiga was. Even faster than any real 68k Mac when emulating Mac.
Also, it’s pointless to open a menu in less time than it takes the screen to refresh.
My 22” Diamondtron went 2048x1536 @ 85Hz or 1600x1200 @ 100Hz (which is what I usually ran it at)
