> My point is, that maybe todays software is not all that bad.

Well, as an interface designer who is supposedly in the age category where his best memories are still being created I feel a bit insulted, because from my point of view, a lot of things are pretty bad. Don't get me wrong, things are also a lot better, but there is more to life than HD video, better color fidelity, novelties made possible by virtual reality, and the interconnectedness of the web - even when these are all big improvements over the past! But it does feel like the computer is being domesticated into the new TV.

As far as interfaces themselves go, the main culprit (from a design POV) is almost always the priority of touch-first design, with mouse a distant second, and keyboard input only existing for things that could not removed through dumbing things down, like input forms.

Now touch interfaces are great in some areas, but any time I have to select/copy/paste text I am painfully reminded of their limits. In general it feels like 90% of the time I am struggling to do things that would be trivial with mouse and/or keyboard. And let's not even go into the lack of tactile feedback[0].

Even more insulting is that it is not that hard to make an interface that supports different modes of input, or where the potential keyboard input is easy to understand. There even exist modern quasi-innovations like react-select, which uses a select field for mouse and touch and lets you type to autocomplete among available options for keyboard power-users[1].

The opening line about perceptual slowness also rings true. In my childhood we had long loading times because of slow hard drives or CD-drives. Now we have them for the sake of saving development costs and adding ad revenue. The internet is a bloated mess, which from a content perspective it doesn't need to be at all; many websites work better if you turn off JavaScript[2].

Then there is web development itself, starting with a reliance on bloated overly generic modules, all the way down to the metal where there is an unawareness that there is even such a thing as an ever increasing memory/processor performance gap, or that this might also affects JavaScript code.

Well, it does, and not even browser vendors themselves seem to be fully aware of it. For example: on all platforms that I've tried, a simple radix sort is between two to eighty times faster the built-in sorting algorithms when sorting numbers, for all array types, regardless of whether it is in-place or a sorted copy[3]. (in the use-case for which I investigated it, the improvement is five to ten-fold, allowing me to do interactive animations where before I had to resort to slow renders). The difference makes sense for plain Arrays, which cannot assume integer values, but why the heck are the typed arrays so slow? They're plain contiguous memory array; compared to all the other browser complexities this is about as simple as it gets!

I could go on for a while but the point is: it's not like things were better in the past. It's just that a number of these things should have gotten better and instead seem to have regressed. And I know it's complex combination of many reasons, but it's still saddening to see.

[0] http://worrydream.com/ABriefRantOnTheFutureOfInteractionDesi...

[1] http://jedwatson.github.io/react-select/

[2] http://idlewords.com/talks/website_obesity.htm

[3] https://run.perf.zone/view/Radix-sort-Uint8Array-loop-vs-fil...,
https://run.perf.zone/view/Radix-sort-Uint8Array-100-element...
https://run.perf.zone/view/Radix-sort-Uint8Array-loop-vs-fil..., https://run.perf.zone/view/Radix-sort-Uint8Array-100-element..., https://run.perf.zone/view/Radix-sort-Uint8Array-loop-vs-fil..., https://run.perf.zone/view/uint32slice0sort-vs-1000-items-ty..., https://run.perf.zone/view/uint32slice0sort-vs-radix-sort-10...