[rescue] tired of current GUIs / a rant about the daily garbage we put up with

[Patrick Giagnocavo]

Just delete this if you don't like my opinion, but ...

we now have multi-Ghz multi-core, multi-GB RAM systems with GUIs that companies have literally spent $100 million+ on, and yet the state of GUIs has not advanced, and the UIs struggle to keep up with the glacially-slow humans that type on it (input latency on Apple IIe and early Macs was lower than today's in many cases).

Things people actually accomplished real work on:

NextStation running NS3.3 - hardware we now would not even view as a competitor to a Raspberry Pi: 33Mhz 68040, 32MB RAM, 1120x832 resolution.

SPARCstation 10 - 50Mhz CPU with up to 1MB cache

I don't think it is "all Microsoft's fault" in that OSX and Linux haven't really shown their ability to be that much more compact. You would really have to struggle to cut down a Linux GUI system to 512MB RAM, for instance.

Did people just become lazy?  Did everyone being able to afford a computer, result in a dumbing-down or lowest common denominator approach? Why does so much of computing these days just seem like a total crapfest?

I have been seriously thinking about using the Coherent unix-a-like, or various Z80/CPM boards running on actually low end hardware.

What's the minimum you need, for actual hacking? 

/rantoff,
Patrick