I actually used computers in 1983; I learned to program on an Atari 800xl, and later upgraded to my father's IBM AT (w/ Hercules graphics!) While computers have become extraordinary faster doing actual calculations or manipulating large amounts of data, as long as you had sufficient RAM[1], UIs responsiveness has gained latency (and generally became perceptually worse) on a curve that peaked in the Windows Vista era, when it started to improve again very slowly.
Note that I said "UI", not "GUI". Text mode visual UIs - which were fine for some tasks. I knew several people that preferred Lotus 1-2-3[2] over Excel and Quattro Pro specifically because of 1-2-3's low latency.
Every layer of abstraction added overhead. Protected memory was worth a bit of latency. Multiple layers of object oriented vtable calls and unnecessary texture bitblt on every GUI widget added made GUIs sluggish for questionable benefits.
> adware/bloatware/trackers/etc
Those huge sources of latency (and other) problems, but networks always add large amounts of latency. The web, which was designed for documents, not as a platform for interactive GUIs, has and will always have terrible feel slow, unpredictable, and laggy. Some of that is unfixable due to the speed of light and the overhead from any thin-client system that requires regular roundtrips to a server.
[1] everything became painfully slow if you were constantly needing to move pages to/from the swapfile.
[2] Lotus 1-2-3's release in 1983 was so popular the very idea of "IBM PC Clone" was created, with 1-2-3 acting as a popular compatibility test.
Note that I said "UI", not "GUI". Text mode visual UIs - which were fine for some tasks. I knew several people that preferred Lotus 1-2-3[2] over Excel and Quattro Pro specifically because of 1-2-3's low latency.
Every layer of abstraction added overhead. Protected memory was worth a bit of latency. Multiple layers of object oriented vtable calls and unnecessary texture bitblt on every GUI widget added made GUIs sluggish for questionable benefits.
> adware/bloatware/trackers/etc
Those huge sources of latency (and other) problems, but networks always add large amounts of latency. The web, which was designed for documents, not as a platform for interactive GUIs, has and will always have terrible feel slow, unpredictable, and laggy. Some of that is unfixable due to the speed of light and the overhead from any thin-client system that requires regular roundtrips to a server.
[1] everything became painfully slow if you were constantly needing to move pages to/from the swapfile.
[2] Lotus 1-2-3's release in 1983 was so popular the very idea of "IBM PC Clone" was created, with 1-2-3 acting as a popular compatibility test.