This was particularly important when users were interacting via slower serial terminals. I worked in some backwater manufacturing shops very early in my career and got to use some old tech and I'm very glad I did. Was a great experience and it gave me some appreciation for how things can be done, and what can be done.
One can do a whole lot at a few Mhz of computing power. Even just a single megahertz is useful!
WordPerfect 5 buffered the keystrokes and it was possible to run it keyboard only. On a local console, one would not notice much due to the display throughput being more than enough to keep up with pretty much anyone.
Run it, and others from that era, on a 9600 Baud terminal and things are different! Skilled users know the flow and will just deliver input regardless of the state of the display, which does catch up and reconcile with the state of the text being edited.
> There is one area where newer hardware lags behind older gear: latency.
> That's the time it takes for a press on the keyboard to show up on the screen, and Luu found that the Apple IIe, first launched in 1983, beat out a collection of more modern computers with its latency response of 30 milliseconds. A 2014 MacBook Pro was lagging behind on 100ms, while a Windows machine running an Intel i7 processor took 200ms.
> So why do older computers register key presses faster than newer ones, on the whole? It's all to do with the complexity of the systems – while older machines are nowhere near as powerful, they also have much less to handle in terms of inputs, outputs and all the various processes along the way.
https://www.techradar.com/news/youre-not-crazy-in-some-ways-...