Comment by xp84

Every time I'm in a place of business with shiny computers, I'm reminded of the difference in efficiency between the newest systems and the 'green screen' terminals and other similar tech that was everywhere in 1990.

Most of those were extremely optimized for their specific purposes - for instance, screens were carefully designed to fit all the necessary information to complete a task without any scrolling. They had extremely low latency despite all the hardware being potato-grade compared to what we have today.

When latency existed, simple things like the keyboard buffer allowed the skilled user to get ahead of the machine and move onto another task, while the processing caught up.

Today, it's all a webapp with a ton of React, probably 5,000 npm modules, and you get to watch skeletal loading rectangles pulsating after every click (or branded animations on the "customer-facing" flavor). Instead of having muscle memory of hands on a keyboard (usually a specialized one which gave a dedicated key to every important function), the user must move their arm to find touch targets placed at arbitrary places across a 24" touchscreen, and often hunting for functions inside ••• menus.

Obviously, no usability testing has been done on any of these. Or if it has, the only thing tested was "Can a 17-year-old with zero skills ploddingly complete a transaction (the happy path only!), after only 15 minutes of training?"

So yeah, I never listen to any "newer = better" takes.