> It is really slow, with a text user interface or menu driven interface.

It should be stressed that "really slow" is relative. 1200 baud for text, specifically scrolling text, is really usable. You feel it much more if you're constantly repainting a screen (because now you're sending 2K of text over at 120 cps).

But scrolling simple prompts, simple menus, text messages are all fine at 1200 baud. That's faster than reading speed for most people. Systems were kept terse due to slower rates, but when it came down to actually "using" the systems, folks weren't typically shouting at their machines to go faster.

When BBSs became more focused on software than messaging, speed became a much bigger issue.

I would also toss out the concept that what moderns call "speed" is actually latency.

Latency of even a 300 baud modem is essentially instant, in some cases faster than modern heavily buffered cable modem services. Hit enter and it starts responding instantly.

People are used to a second or so latency on modern web pages, when shopping on amazon or whatever. Then they see a 300 baud modem vs a 30 megabit cable modem and think if "hit a key see response" takes a second at 30 megabits/sec then at 300 bits/sec 100K times slower, it must be "hit a key see response 100K seconds later" LOL no nothing like that at all.

UIs were generally lower latency aka "faster" back in the old days than they are now.

Bufferbloat is easy to address if you've got a $50 ubiquiti router that can shape traffic. A bigger I'd say is when ISPs add jitter and other forms of unreliability to make SSH unusable unless you upgrade to business class.

Really slow -- as in waiting for the messaging system to search/display the list of all waiting messages, being loaded over a slow IDE hard drive with limited memory ....

But yea. Once you got to 1200 baud; the phone line could fling text at you just beyond normal reading speed; if all it was doing is sending that. Add in a lot of ANSI or terminal escape codes, and it can feel a bit sluggish till 56kbps

Emacs still has aggressive terminal optimization code in it that calculates the smallest set of terminal commands necessary to repaint a screen in one state, into the desired state. So Emacs may still be usable -- not ideal but usable -- at 1200 baud.

Something similar exists for vi, but I don't know if Vim has it.

The QuickEd external message editor for QuickBBS was perfectly usable at 1200 baud. During screen repaint it gave priority to updating the current line so it was responsive and went back to repainting the screen as soon as you stopped typing. It would ensure that it does not have too much data in the output buffer to keep latency down.

I wrote it with my brother.

ITS Emacs (the original TECO verision) using the SUPDUP display protocol supported "line saving", so it could tell your terminal to stash a line in memory before overwriting it, so later it could almost instantly redisplay that line when you scrolled back to it. That was really great at 300 baud. 1200 baud too, of course. But modems used to cost about a dollar a baud.

https://github.com/PDP-10/supdup/blob/master/supdup.mss#L635

I posted this earlier about the Gosling Emacs screen redisplay algorithm. That was the code that RMS rewrote.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26114104

To be fair, RMS a right to fuss and complain, because UniPress did kind of pull the rug out from under him. The display update optimization code that Gosling wrote was pretty ugly but amazingly brilliant dynamic programming stuff, and it had a skull-and-crossbones warning in the comments.

RMS originally used the display update code from Gosling Emacs, but then rewrote it all from scratch for later versions of Gnu Emacs, after UniPress threatened him not to use it. As modems and networks became faster, and people started using window systems instead of terminals, having an "Ultra-hot screen management package" became less important. But it's a really cool algorithm, a great example of dynamic programming, and Gosling even published a paper about it!

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22849522

James Gosling's Emacs screen redisplay algorithm also used similar "dynamic programming techniques" to compute the minimal cost path through a cost matrix of string edit operations (the costs depended i.e. on the number of characters to draw, length of the escape codes to insert/delete lines/characters, padding for slow terminals, etc). https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gosling_Emacs

>Gosling Emacs was especially noteworthy because of the effective redisplay code, which used a dynamic programming technique to solve the classical string-to-string correction problem. The algorithm was quite sophisticated; that section of the source was headed by a skull-and-crossbones in ASCII art, warning any would-be improver that even if they thought they understood how the display code worked, they probably did not.

https://donhopkins.com/home/archive/emacs/skull-and-crossbon...

Trivia: That "Skull and Crossbones" ASCII art is originally from Brian Reid's Scribe program, and is not copyrighted.

https://donhopkins.com/home/archive/emacs/mw/display.c

    /*  1   2   3   4   ....            Each Mij represents the minumum cost of
          +---+---+---+---+-----        rearranging the first i lines to map onto
        1 |   |   |   |   |             the first j lines (the j direction
          +---+---+---+---+-----        represents the desired contents of a line,
        2 |   |  \| ^ |   |             i the current contents).  The algorithm
          +---+---\-|-+---+-----        used is a dynamic programming one, where
        3 |   | <-+Mij|   |             M[i,j] = min( M[i-1,j],
          +---+---+---+---+-----                      M[i,j-1]+redraw cost for j,2
        4 |   |   |   |   |                           M[i-1,j-1]+the cost of
          +---+---+---+---+-----                        converting line i to line j);
        . |   |   |   |   |             Line i can be converted to line j by either
        .                               just drawing j, or if they match, by moving
        .                               line i to line j (with insert/delete line)
     */

https://donhopkins.com/home/documents/EmacsRedisplayAlgorith...

https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/1159890.806463

A redisplay algorithm, by James Gosling.

Abstract

This paper presents an algorithm for updating the image displayed on a conventional video terminal. It assumes that the terminal is capable of doing the usual insert/delete line and insert/delete character operations. It takes as input a description of the image currently on the screen and a description of the new image desired and produces a series of operations to do the desired transformation in a near-optimal manner. The algorithm is interesting because it applies results from the theoretical string-to-string correction problem (a generalization of the problem of finding a longest common subsequence), to a problem that is usually approached with crude ad-hoc techniques.

[...]

6. Conclusion

The redisplay algorithm described in this paper is used in an Emacs-like editor for Unix and a structure editor. It's performance has been quite good: to redraw everything on the screen (when everything has changed) takes about 0.12 seconds CPU time on a VAX 11/780 running Unix. Using the standard file typing program, about 0.025 seconds of CPU time are needed to type one screenful of text. Emacs averages about 0.004 CPU seconds per keystroke (with one call on the redisplay per keystroke).

Although in the interests of efficency we have stripped down algorithm 5 to algorithm 6 the result is still an algorithm which has a firm theoretical basis and which is superior to the usual ad-hoc approach.

More info:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22850973

>> but when it came down to actually "using" the systems, folks weren't typically shouting at their machines to go faster.

Did you ever download or upload files?

>> scrolling simple prompts, simple menus, text messages are all fine at 1200 baud.

Yes, on a 80 column text screen, there was only so much you could see at a time. People who have only seen web pages with inline images at high resolution that load instantly would probably see 1200 baud as slow.

You are arguing the exact same points the GP made but using selective quoting to make it sound like a rebuttal.

Uhmmm try running your terminal at 9600 baud, and see how quickly you get bored with it :) And that's 4 times as fast.

I did this for a while recently because I needed to access something over a serial port and it was not fun. 1200 is really slow.

This slow speed is one of the reasons the curses library and its descendants try to only repaint small sections of the screen using escape codes to move the cursor. Ironically it's also quite helpful with some modern terminals that are very heavyweight on graphical (pixel) redraws.

E.g. I can refresh a TUI app using MacOS Terminal.app 30x a second using ncurses; but a naive wipe/redraw at that rate produces visible flickering and artifacts.

That's true, though it really surprised me how slow it felt.

In the end I pumped the terminal speed up to 115k2 and it still felt very slow. Especially quickly paging through logfiles with 'less'. I remember spending part of my college days on green screen 9600 baud terminals (before they bought enough X terminals for everyone) and they felt snappy back in the day. And there was already a lot of TUI stuff going on back then. And in those days I didn't even know about gnu screen (or today's tmux) yet!

I think I've just gotten spoilt with today's computer performance.

1200 is not too bad on a bbs, I'm often doing that on my c64. 300 is slow!

I used 9600 setting up an rs/6000 last week, and it was fast enough that I didn't notice.

I live in a weird alternate universe.

Not that weird, I still have a bunch of SPARC Netras with serial ports only (no video) and several HP-UX boxes <3

I love that old stuff, and figuring out how to use their boot managers etc. On the Netras the configuration is actually stored on a smart card. Very cool.

300 you have to wait a little for text but 150 was really slow. When I got my 2400 and 9600 things were crazy fast.

One day in the mid 1980s we were checking the speeds available in our VT100 terminals. For fun we dropped it down to 150 to see what that was like. It was so slow that when you hit the delete key, you could watch it backspace, type a space, then backspace again.

> It was not at all similiar to today's web and social media because each BBS was local...

This is an important distinction, because depending on the size of your town and how social you were, there was a good chance you might meet these people in real life. Imagine if everyone in this thread actually went out for a beer or played disc golf with each other every once in a while.

Indeed, we often had meetups. This really made it much more fun.

On the packet radio side it was even more fun because you could see all the packets flying through the air and you could 'eavesdrop' on other people's conversations. Which sounds worse than it is - on the CB it was already a given that conversations were public so everyone was already used to that. And it didn't require any wizardry, pretty much every program showed a running log of the packets received. We're talking 1200 baud so you could actually follow it. People would often send stuff by broadcast too (usually many times because of the high packet loss and the chance of people missing it).

In fact this really helped my early grasp of network tuning, messing with window and repeat timers to improve performance. Because it was all going in slow-motion you could really see the effects.

IBM PCs didn't come out until after I was out of high school. A few years later I decided to join a meetup of the people who were users on the BBS I was on. It was mid 1980s, and it turned out that all the users I had been chatting with were in High School. First of many experiences where I felt pretty old.

Yeah, I ended up meeting a bunch of the regulars on my local BBS.

> Another big factor was that calling BBSes used a phone line. If your family had a single phone line, it was in use when using the modem. No one could make or receive phone calls when you were online. This meant that serious BBS users and sysops running BBSes had multiple phone lines. Those who couldn't afford multiple phone lines were calling late at night when no one else was using the phone.

My brother would pick up the phone and yell into it to knock me offline.

BBSes were the gateway drug to MUDs for me. And even at 1200 baud a DIKUMUD was plenty playable.

> My brother would pick up the phone and yell into it to knock me offline.

Yup this is why I rerouted the phone line through my room and had it hooked up to a switch :P