From: dmhills{at}attglobal.net (Don Hills)

In article , "Rich"  wrote:

> ... My point is that this satisfaction from
>responsiveness is distinct from the time (limited or not) spent on a
>task.  I believe this is one reason people desire and enjoy ever faster
>computers.

They desire and enjoy computers that are responsive enough to not get in
their way when they want to get something done. For traditional business
use, they already have them.

I appreciate the difference between responsiveness and overall time. I had
formal training in user interface design and implementation and several
years of putting it into practice. To give an example that Tony can
appreciate, IBM made threading easy and simple in OS/2 programming so as to
encourage programmers to use separate threads for processing and user
input. A well written OS/2 app will always be responsive to user input even
if the main loop is busy or hung. Trouble was, too many programmers took
the Windows approach of the period and did user input in the main loop,
leaving users hanging if the app wasn't responding.

For a real-world example, compare the IBM Web Explorer (in Warp 3) with the
Netscape browser of the time (v2.02) which was a port from the Windows code
base. The IBM browser was always responsive, even when waiting for a page
to load. The Netscape one left you staring at the clock until it completed
or timed out. Even if the Netscape browser had been faster (it wasn't), I'd
have used the IBM one because it was a much more pleasant experience.

Getting back to my mail and news on my 486, it takes noticeably longer than
my desktop Pentium 733 to perform heavy lifting such as downloading and
processing the mail and expiring old posts etc. But when it comes to the
actual UI such as selecting posts, moving through mail items, scrolling and
paging text etc, it's instant. I can scroll through posts at 20 per second,
which is much faster than I can read them . This is partly because
it's a text mode (VIO) app instead of a GUI app, but since this is the way
God intended mail and news to be read  it's not a problem. It also
helps that IBM put a lot of time and effort into developing readable fonts
for use on character mode display devices and carried this over into OS/2.
Every time I open a VIO window on a Windows system I'm reminded that
Microsoft... didn't.

So in summary, I'm using Yarn to do mail and news on a 486 instead of using
Thunderbird on a Pentium 733 because it's a more pleasant UI experience.
It's also almost as fast, because most of my time is spent reading and
replying. Waiting for upload/download etc is a small proportion of my time.
I usually do something else while that's happening, anyway, such as check
my Webmail accounts.

--
Don Hills    (dmhills at attglobaldotnet)     Wellington, New Zealand
"New interface closely resembles Presentation Manager,
 preparing you for the wonders of OS/2!"
    -- Microsoft advertisement on the box for Windows 2.11 for 286

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