Negahertz

Negahertz (NHz): Noun - The unit of measurement of the amount of frustration created by unnecessarily slow software and operating systems.

My reawakened passion for vintage computing has changed my perspective on modern computing in various ways. One thing that leaped out at me recently was the discovery that old computers aren't necessarily slower than new computers.  Of course computers today are millions, even billions of times more powerful than any high-end personal computer from the 1980s.  But until recently the everyday experience of using a modern computer has usually been characterised by blissful periods of speed and productivity interlarded with teeth-grinding delays.  These delays, these periods of software- and operating-system induced gridlock, I describe with the term "negahertz."

If the number of megahertz equates to how fast a computer is in theory -- or used to -- then negahertz equates to how slow the computer actually feels in practise.  There are plenty of ways that an old computer system can feel faster than a new one.  Anyone who grew up in the 1980s will remember switching on a personal computer -- like an Atari 800XL or an Apple //c in my case -- and booting almost immediately into a usable programming environment.  Before the days of multitasking graphical user interfaces it was possible to fit a computer's operating system and a built-in programming language comfortably onto ROM.  (Although, once Apple invented the graphical user interface it was no longer possible to fit an entire operating system in ROM.) Bigger storage devices and faster CPUs spurred companies on to develop ever bigger and more capable operating systems, but at the price of turgid boot sequences and often sluggish interfaces.  Computers went from being under-powered machines that were productive in seconds, to over-powered machines that took longer to start than it took to boil a kettle.  If you think about it this is a strange concept -- strange that we, the all-powerful consumer, meekly put up with it for so long. (Of course, it's not like there were any alternatives.)

The concept of negahertz has encouraged me to look at the reality of using a computer -- and not the technical stats driven fantasy of clock cycles, revolutions per minute, or bus speeds. All of those wonderful developments in raw speed and power can be crippled by software bureaucracy and the mire of abstractions. Just as negawatts encourages you to think of where energy is wasted -- and can therefore, if desired, be saved -- negahertz has made me think more about what a computer could and should be.  A machine that puts the needs of users first -- that may not be blazingly fast but is instantly responsive; that doesn't bring interaction to a halt while the file system is busy; that has a graphical paradigm that creative programmers can expand upon, instead of being straitjacketed by; that is understanding and tolerant of errors and mishaps and that puts a smooth and stress-reduced experience first.

Of course, it is not all gloom and doom. Far from it.  In fact, we may be seeing the best of both worlds: a humane user experience driven by inhumanly fast hardware. The smartphone and tablet revolution has finally forced complacent operating system vendors to take boot times seriously and to prioritise the responsiveness of the user interface -- as they should always have done.  This betterment of experience and improvement in perceived performance has not been the direct or necessary outcome of faster hardware -- it has emerged because consumers un-purchased and un-bought slow and buggy mobile devices into oblivion.  Those who wished to survive shifted their priorities accordingly.

In the meantime, I find it a fun mental exercise to now rate slow-loading apps and websites in negahertz -- and to imagine how, with the right ideas, hundreds or thousands of negahertz could be saved.