alt Hacker Newsever use wordstar on Z80 system with a 5 MB hard drive?
responsive. everything dealing with user interaction is fast. sure, reading a 1 MB document took time, but 'up 4 lines' was bam!.
linux ought to be this good, but the I/O subsystem slows down responsiveness. it should be possible to copy a file to a USB drive, and not impact good response from typing, but it is not. real time patches used to improve it.
windows has always been terrible.
what is my point? well, i think a web stack ran under an RTOS (and sized appropriately) might be a much more pleasurable experience. Get rid of all those lags, and intermittent hangs and calls for more GB of memory.
QNX is also a good example of an RTOS that can be used as a desktop. Although an example with a lot of political and business problems.
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I believe this is kind of survivor-bias. It's very rare that RTOSes have to handle allocating GBs of data, or creating thousands of processes. I think if current RTOSes run the same application, there would be no noticeable difference compared to mainstream OS(Could be even worse because the OS is not designed for that kind of usecases)
>what is my point? well, i think a web stack ran under an RTOS (and sized appropriately) might be a much more pleasurable experience. Get rid of all those lags, and intermittent hangs and calls for more GB of memory.
... it's not the OS that's source of majority of lag
Click around in this demo https://tracy.nereid.pl/ Note how basically any lag added is just some fancy animations in places and most of everything changes near instantly on user interaction (with biggest "lag" being acting on mouse key release as is tradition, not click, for some stuff like buttons).
This is still just browser, but running code and displaying it directly instead of going thru all the JS and DOM mess
Every single hardware subsystem adds lag. Double buffering adds a frame of lag; some do triple-buffering. USB adds ~8ms worse-case. LCD TVs add their own multi-frame lag-inducing processing, but even the ones that don't have to load the entire frame before any of it shows, which can be a substantial fraction of the time between frames.
Those old systems were "racing the beam", generating every pixel as it was being displayed. Minimum lag was microseconds. With LCDs you can't get under milliseconds. Luckily human visual perception isn't /that/ great so single-digit milliseconds could be as instantaneous, if you run at 100 Hz without double-buffering (is that even possible anymore!?) and use a low-latency keyboard (IIRC you can schedule more frequent USB frames at higher speeds) and only debounce on key release.