Computer latency: 1977-2017 via danluu.com

This article is an exhaustive look at computer latency over the last few decades. The conclusion? Modern computers are significantly slower in keyboard-to-screen response time.

the default configuration of the powerspec g405, which had the fastest single-threaded performance you could get until October 2017, had more latency from keyboard-to-screen than sending a packet around the world.

Though the article deals specifically with detailing the degradations in latency of a keypress on computer hardware over the past few decades, I found this observation to be eerily similar to what’s happening with the degradations in speed of the web over the past few decades:

The solution to poor performance caused by “excess” complexity is often to add more complexity. In particular the gains we’ve seen that get us back to the quickness of the quickest machines from thirty to forty years ago have come not from listening to exhortations to reduce complexity, but from piling on more complexity.