... and the UI is also going back

Following my last post on concurrent processes, my good friend Effie Nadiv noted that the UI is also getting backwards.


Back in the old days, Lotus 1-2-3 had a menu line that was not opening to overlay your main screen but was instead changing the menu line each time you make a menu selection. One can argue that this is not optimal, but I remember it as something very useful. Today in some cases you find yourself struggling to open the sub-sub-sub-menu to select something, trying not to close the entire thing before you make your selection.

It becomes also a common practice that any new dialog or window may hide previous ones, extra info may hide the main data etc. Effie argues that it all becomes from the philosophy that the application may do whatever it wants. Restrictions would heart creativity and we don't want that. So you have creativity in the new versions: my new version of Babylon has a fancy UI, ignoring the fact that it is not working, and the old one with the standard Windows UI was OK, it's a real charm. The new office is a nightmare, after you got used to something. Any new version of a SW tries to justify itself with a new fancy visual design which you don't want. You just want it to work.

Process Concurrency - are we stepping ahead or backward?

The first version of Apple's iPad allows only one running process. A bit limited, but most people reported high satisfaction. On the other hand, my OS allows for multi processes to run in parallel and it starts to turn me crazy.

Why process concurrency is a BAD THING

• You are showing a presentation and suddenly some pop-up from another process pops
• Doing a critical debugging task, you are all focused and sharpened, but then your machine starts being sluggish as some background process decides to take CPU time or memory
• You open your task manager to understand why your machine is so sluggish and see a list of so many processes. What's all that? I don't need half of it. Though, the first "terminate" that you try shuts down the system.
• Any utility today can decide to run in your background, to really control what runs in your background you need to be an expert, otherwise you lose your background to all sort of things you really don't know much about.

How often do you click Ctrl+ALT+Del?

I find myself at least once a day using the Ctrl+ALT+Del to check what's holding my machine. How about you?

So, how was it back then, in the good old times?

In DOS, you could have only one process running. If you wanted to jump to another without closing your application you could use TSR but you could have only one TSR pop at a certain time, and when it was at the background it took NO resources, it just set there waiting for an interrupt without making any sigh.

The un-responsiveness that we get today from our systems is unbearable. Applications decide to go at the background to update themselves, or to index the file system, or to do other non-critical task. The feeling is that the resources of the machine are not yours. You are lucky if the machine throws a bone at you giving you some resources.

The user experience you get today on a quad core, xGhz CPU with xGB fast RAM are worse than what you got on an old old x8086 machine, 1000 times weaker. The difference is that the old applications were much more focused on being lean and mean, never went to the net during their operation (the web was BBS and gopher), and they didn't run in parallel.

We need to go back to the old approach, giving the stage to one application at a time - all other would be HALTED and would not take any system resources. It sounds so limiting, but this is how DOS used to work. And this is how the first version of iPad works.