When I started computering, the fastest modems could (theoretically) transfer 2.4 TCP payloads per second (28.8k / 8 bits per byte / 1500 bytes per Ethernet frame). My home internet connection today can do around 30,000. That's 12,500x speedup in 22 or so years. Feels weird.
Weird because (1) wow, that's a big scaling factor; but more importantly for me, (2) wow, everything feels roughly as fast/slow as ever. Current computers feel faster than Windows 95, slower than Windows 2000; faster than early OS X, slower than OS X Snow Leopard.
Hardware perf has increased monotonically, as you'd expect. But computer performance does *not* increase monotonically. It wanders around this region of perf that's fast enough for my dad not to notice, but slow enough that I'm perpetually frustrated.
I spent Friday working on DAS billing migration, which is mostly waiting. Wait for Numbers to beachball for a while, wait for a thousand OS X animations that don't help me in any way, wait for Stripe to slowly load 2,000 customers over many minutes (perhaps a megabyte of data).
But then the same computer can encode 40 GB of 4K ProRes video into a tiny, near-lossless 100 MB h.264 file in about 45 minutes. But also, my spreadsheet pins a core for 15 seconds just to load 50k rows, a task that 1998 spreadsheets would've been faster at. Seems wrong.
This seems right and I've been guilty of it.
