We had low latency input and smooth animation 30 years ago. The latency and lag of modern user interfaces is all in the layers and layers of software. It's especially noticeable when you look at like NES games and the like, they ran at 50 or 60 FPS (depending on PAL or NTSC) and typically had zero input lag (unless there was some sprite limit being exceeded). Modern games at 50 FPS are so sluggish you feel like you've downed a full bottle of wine or something. The difference is the time it takes to render a frame today, which can be 100ms or more, especially when the GPU is struggling.

But what I meant was like pixel density and so on. My screen is a lot higher resolution than it was 20 years ago, but it doesn't actually display much more information as my ability to actually resolve fine details has if anything worsened with the years. My screen is farther away and my font size higher, that's the big difference.

I've actually really struggled with slow, unoptimised software forever. Microsoft Word's Equation editor is so slow and sluggish that once you've written one page of equations or more it just becomes unusable, since it's not feasible to wait several seconds for the equations you typed in to appear.

It's the same with code editors. Sublime Text 3 is crazy responsive and it's a joy to use, however I missed certain features that VS Code had, so I switched, however the latency issues are very noticeable. Typing is a little slower, switching tabs is very slow (like 100-ish ms?) and when you're opening new files you could literally watch the text being color coded before your eyes on my i7 laptop I used back then. Things got worse when I started developing Flutter applications while running the Flutter and Dart extensions. VS Code would sometimes take several seconds to react to me pressing the backspace button, which made it incredibly frustrating to work with.

How is it possible that our computers are so incredibly performant these days, yet seemingly not fast enough for simple document editing or text editing tasks?