multiple milliseconds or seconds? Ridiculous! Those of old enough to remember 9600 baud know the disappointment (in our lifetimes) waiting many minutes to download a jpg just to find it wasn't what we wanted. Or that mp3 track from some obscure FTP server....
But this problem applies equally to local software.
I believe there was a name for it but I cannot recall the term. The idea is that as hardware gets faster, software developers add bloat^W features so that the user always experiences the same speed. "Speed" mean something like the time taken to perform some routine user task.
Microsoft has been usurping user resources like this since at least the 1990's. They always had the new hardware before it hit the market. New software was tested on new hardware that no consumer yet had.
By the time the user purchased a new computer, the company had a new software version that already uses up whatever resource gains the new hardware provided. Pre-installed. The end result is the user experiences the same speed.
If the user ran the old version on new hardware, they might see a speed increase.
But the company makes it very difficult to do this and/or wages a relentless marketing campaign to convince users to try the new version and ditch the old one.
The new software version did the same basic tasks the older version did, but because of the bloat^W features the speed was not any faster for the user. Not to mention how the new version would usurp gains in storage space and RAM as well.
Incidentally, regarding downloading images over dialup, didnt you abort unwanted images before they completed?
I recall images rendered slowly line by line across the screen.
And I remember bandwidth being too slow even on a corporate network to blindly batch download images and then delete the unwanted ones.
It was more efficient to view each one as it was downloading and abort if unwanted.
Essentially Parkinson's Law: any system will bloat to consume the resources available to it and then some.
But some of us enjoy NOT indulging in that, and having a Web page served in milliseconds from low-powered hardware, or having MIPS-speed IoT hardware run on microwatts and do a decent job using modern compiler smarts to help get there...
"By the time the user purchased a new computer, the company had a new software version that already uses up whatever resource gains the new hardware provided. Pre-installed. The end result is the user experiences the same speed."
This is true, but there's a couple of other factors involved. One is the recent gains in storage efficiency, and the other is familiarity over time with the new gains. When SSDs hit the scene, you could migrate your existing installation to solid state storage and see immediate, measurable gains. Then PC manufacturers started shipping SSDs as standard equipment, and folks got used to that level of performance. Essentially, it became the new normal. A while later NVMe hit the scene and suddenly even traditional SSDs began to feel "too slow". Again, manufacturers are beginning to ship NVMe-based units, pushing the tolerance levels even further out.
I've experienced this recently; my main workstation has a Skylake CPU, DDR4 RAM, and an NVMe OS drive, with a SSHD (solid state hybrid drive) for storage. I recently revived an older but still very fast workstation with a standard HDD, and it felt like I'd gone back to the "Windows Vista Capable" days of the late 2000s. Same OS (Windows 10 and Elementary OS), same software, technically faster CPU on the older workstation, but it was so "slow" I could barely stand to use it. I felt like I was waiting ages for applications to start or web pages to load, even though it was usually less than a few seconds difference. But oh, what a difference those precious seconds can make in human perception!
"When SSDs hit the scene, you could migrate your existing installation to solid state storage."
If by "installation" you mean the OS, I have not needed SSDs. I migrated my installation to RAM. I stopped using disk for the OS and data I am working with. I can fit everything I need in RAM. I still use disks sometimes for long term storage of infrequently accessed data, but it surprises me how infrequently I need them. For me the recognition of "immediate gains" in speed was not with the advent of SSDs it was with the availability of >= 500MB RAM. Diskless became too easy.
But I do understand what SSDs have done for other users with different requirements and I think that has been a great improvement.
Indeed, latency is very important. For a while I used an SD card + adapter in my laptop as the main boot drive (mainly for the shock resistance), and although sequential accesses were quite a bit slower than the HDD it replaced, the near-zero access time meant it was noticeably more responsive in practice with lots of random access I/O.
To be fair there has been somewhat of a shift in certain industry sectors. Some gaming companies finally recognized the importance of 60 fps gaming for many people, PS4Pro giving the user the option to choose between eye-candy or responsiveness is a very good thing to happen, with PC gaming there's been quite a boom with high-fps gaming with supporting displays becoming more affordable.
VR put latency on the general radar for many people previously completely oblivious to the issue, imho another good thing to happen.
> Those of old enough to remember 9600 baud know the disappointment (in our lifetimes) waiting many minutes to download a jpg just to find it wasn't what we wanted.
It was also pretty bad with a 56k modem as far as I remember -- definitely not minutes though! The wait becomes worse when the JPEG is of a... critical nature, if you know what I mean.
multiple milliseconds or seconds? Ridiculous! Those of old enough to remember 9600 baud know the disappointment (in our lifetimes) waiting many minutes to download a jpg just to find it wasn't what we wanted. Or that mp3 track from some obscure FTP server....