Is there a ballpoint pen in your pocket? How fast is it?
What do you mean, you don’t know? You didn’t ask the salesman?
There is indeed a maximum speed at which the little ball in the pen can roll and still leave a satisfactory trace of ink upon the page. Would you pay extra for a faster model? If not, why not? What would you do if someone were to sell you a costly yet noticeably slow pen?
Despite a multi-billion-dollar propaganda industry’s best efforts, it remains obvious that computers come in just two speeds: slow and fast. A slow computer is one which cannot keep up with the operator’s actions in real time, and forces the hapless human to wait. A fast computer is one which can, and does not.
Today’s personal computers (with a few possible exceptions) are only available in the “slow” speed grade. Modern word-processing bloatware would make a time-traveling salesman of Underwood manual typewriters retch in disgust: it is not rare to see a palpable (and all the more so for its unpredictability) delay between pressing a key and the drawing of a symbol on the screen.
Millions of people have been bamboozled into thinking that editing a letter in real time requires a supercomputer.
The GUI of my 4MHz Symbolics 3620 lisp machine is more responsive on average than that of my 3GHz office PC. The former boots (into a graphical everything-visible-and-modifiable programming environment, the most expressive ever created) faster than the latter boots into its syrupy imponade hell. And this is true in spite of an endless parade of engineering atrocities committed in the name of “speed.”
Computer systems could in principle have the reasonable, sane design we expect of all other everyday objects. The bloat-free, genuinely fast computer is not some marvel of a far-off quasi-mystical science fiction future – it existed decades ago. And could exist again.