sheets.works · the data drop 00 · the proof
latency

Your computer
got slower.

It is over a thousand times faster than a 1983 Apple IIe. And yet the gap between pressing a key and seeing the letter has grown. Type one sentence below, into all three at once, and watch the forty-year-old machine win.
click here and type anything
Apple IIe198330 ms
]
Gaming PC · 144Hz201750 ms
>
Web / Electron app2024~150 ms

The machine is faster.
The keystroke is slower.

A 1983 Apple IIe puts a letter on screen about 30 milliseconds after you press the key. A modern web app, running on a processor a thousand times quicker, often takes five times longer. We spent forty years of Moore's Law and handed the budget to abstraction: layers of frameworks, compositors, network round-trips and animation, each adding a few milliseconds between your finger and your eye.

You feel it without naming it. The faint mush when you type into a chat box. The beat before a key registers. It is not your imagination, and it is not nostalgia. It was measured.

Measured key-to-screen latency
lower is better · ms from keypress to pixel
Desktop figures from Dan Luu's measurements, danluu.com/input-lag (each device tested with a 240fps camera). The modern web/Electron figure is representative: real apps commonly measure 100–200 ms. Even today's fastest gaming setups barely match a machine from 1983.

— end of slice —

Nothing on this page was sent anywhere. The lag you felt was simulated locally,
from real measured numbers, just to make four decades tangible.