The latency issue is very real. I work in Linux, Mac and Windows on fairly fast computers and programming in VSCode is so annoying because of the latency . On my 486 in Borland Turbo C++ ide, I click on a key and I see it instantaneous.

Of course if you never tried it, you wouldn't notice the difference and think I have some sort of OCD. But it is really noticable. I don't know if it's 100ms or 200 ms but there is a difference.

Get a high refresh rate (<1ms latency) LCD/LED monitor. This is by far the most important. It took a while to catch up to CRT latency, and it's still sold as a niche product, but we are there.

If you are in Linux, you may want to turn off your display compositor (KDE/XFCE), or use a lightweight xorg window manager like fluxbox or i3. This isn't necessary when using a fast GPU, but even then you may dislike animations.

Use a text editor with a real GUI toolkit (not electron or similar) like emacs or gvim/nvim-qt. Unfortunately, emacs can struggle rendering syntax highlighting, but outside that it is lean and snappy. Hopefully the recent progress with tree-sitter will resolve that.

I have met very few people who care about latency the way I do. I think most of it comes from my nostalgia of DOS-era computing. The most satisfying hardware purchase I have ever made is a good looking 2K IPS/VA 120hz/144hz+ freesync display. Millions of hours of my life experience were noticeably improved.

I'm looking forward to the day that display tech, GPUs, and connection standards have gotten to the point that high PPI (@2x UI scaling) high refresh rate microLED displays are practical. It's going to be so nice to have text with as much contrast, cripsness, and accurate letterforms as print with as little latency as is possible on a modern system.

It's not as comfortable as print, due to backlighting, but you just described the phone screen I'm typing this comment on.

Trying any editor other than VSCode might help; it’s notoriously slow.

Emacs is the same. I'm not talking about slow loading time or changing tabs which I understand. It's the act of clicking on a key.

Emacs? Keyboard lag? Is that with some kind of LSP or other itegration?

I find that Emacs keyboard responsiveness on text (on a 17 year old core duo laptop) is indistinguishable from vi or nano.

What they're getting at is that the latency is caused by overhead from the OS and USB, increasing it across the board regardless of editor — each keystroke has more layers to pass through compared to a machine from the 70s, 80s, or 90s, plus USB by the nature of how it works unavoidably adds latency that's variable depending on CPU load, since USB is CPU-dependent. There's also more layers in the display stack, increasing the amount of time it takes for what's actually displayed on screen to match machine state.

A Core 2 Duo era laptop specifically might not suffer as much as its desktop counterpart though, because laptops from that era often used PS/2 for their internal keyboard+trackpad connection and thus don't suffer USB latency increases unless the laptop's motherboard was doing something weird like implementing PS/2 via an onboard adapter attached to the USB bus.

Well, maybe web and javascript is not the best tool to create an IDE with.

Do you feel the same latency with eg. Notepad++, Qt Creator, or Kate?

One of the nicest screens I have ever used was on a monochrome ega laptop.

Sure, the pixels were huge and slow, but the contrast ratio was really good without it being too bright. It’s hard to explain why it was so good. I suspect it was a bit transflective.

The problem with those old monochrome/greyscale LCDs is that they were horrendous for ghosting.

I imagine if you just wanted an old laptop for wordstar or something, they’d be amazing due to their clarity; but I remember trying to play commander keen on them and getting a headache.

Thanks for the flashback! Got my first own computer from my grandfather. It was a 486 laptop with a bulitin trackball and floppy drive. The display was as you described. Movement on the screen was just a blurry mess.

I'm also bummed out that these sorts of things are all including OPL2/OPL3 Adlib style clones when I'd much rather have Sound Blaster support with the digital audio channel.

Fair point, but in this case (4mhz 8088) I think it doesn't really have the guts to play 16 bit stereo digital audio?

Update: apparently there's a hacky way to play digital audio through these FM synth chips, and several games and music players for DOS do just this.

It says this card is sound blaster pro 2.0 compatible if I understand it correctly. Of course on.aliexpress a lot is lost in translation.

One thing I'd love to see is a Pentium III class machine with a lot of cache and ram with a pcie SSD in pocket size. I feel like those machines were held back by hard drives of their day.

Look into things using the Vortex86DX3.

That sounds a lot like the Atom/Pentium 4000 based 7” notebooks you can find online from the usual large retailers.

Asus Eee 901?

> fractal spiral of hardware and software abstractions

I've often used "onion", but this is much more accurate :)

That said, the 8088 wasn't 3nm, it was 3µm.

> mid-90s 68k or PPC Mac using components manufactured on a much smaller node would be incredible.

Why not just use an FPGA?

As I understand, there’s limits to the efficiency that can be achieved with FPGAs which makes them less than amazing for usage in e.g. laptops.