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Comment by angrygoat

5 years ago

This reminds me of graphing calculators in the late 90s when I was at school. I initially had a HP, but it took what felt like 500ms to respond when I pressed a key. I switched to a TI-83 and it was chalk and cheese - instant response; you could even write programs in assembly. There was a small cottage industry of traded programs for it.

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angrygoat

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wtallis  5 years ago

HP's early graphing calculators definitely had very high latency. But they dealt with it properly, which PC's don't. An HP-48 series calculator will buffer dozens of keypresses, and handle them in-order as if the UI had been instantly responsive. So you don't actually have to wait for a menu or dialog box to be drawn to the screen—if you've learned the necessary input sequence to perform the task you want, you can enter it at full speed. The keyboards were also very high quality with great tactile feedback, so you didn't need visual feedback on the screen to know your key press had been registered.

  • randogogogo  5 years ago

    I'd pile on that the programmability of the HPs was amazing compared to the TIs. The manual for my HP-48sx was a chonkyboi but man could I do so much with it. Once I figured out how to calculate pitch frequencies for equal temperament (just a mathematical series) I was using the BEEP function (IIRC) to have my calculator play music.

  • snvzz  5 years ago

    I own both hp50g and some TI calcs (86/89).

    I'd describe hp and ti as laggy and slick, respectively. The 50g is what I used in university, but now I seldom touch it as the 86/89 are so much more pleasant to use.

    • wtallis  5 years ago

      Since the HP50g is running an emulator of the 48G, it inherits a lot of the UI lag. It also inherits most of the UI efficiency; in my experience, the keystrokes saved outweigh any remaining visual latency deficit relative to the TI-89. But that's contingent on learning how to use it well in the manner of becoming a power user of emacs, while the TI-89's UI paradigms and learning curve feel more like using Microsoft Office.

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  • ptx  5 years ago

    PCs used to do this, before GUIs got all asynchronous on us. Try it with the old-old-old-old-style start menu (the one from NT 4 and 5).