An echo of Wordstar

In 1979, Wordstar was the popular word processor of the time. It boasted "what you see is what you get" (WYSIWYG) because it would reformat text on the screen as you typed.

Wordstar had a problem on some computers. It would, under the right conditions, miss characters as you were typing. The problem was documented in an issue of "Personal Computing", comparing Wordstar to another program called "Electric Pencil". The cause was the automatic reformatting of text. (The reformatting took time, and that's when characters were lost. Wordstar was busy redrawing text and not paying attention to the keyboard.)

At the time, computers were primitive. They ran CP/M on an 8080 or Z-80 processor with at most 64K RAM. Some systems used interrupts to detect keystrokes but others simply polled the keyboard from time to time, and it was easy to miss a typed character.

So here we are in 2017. Modern PCs are better then the early microcomputers, or so we like to think. We have more memory. We have larger disks for storage. We have faster processors. They cost less. Better in every way.

So we like to think.

From a blog in 2017:

Of course, I always need to switch over to Emacs to get real work done.  IntelliJ doesn't like it when you type fast.  Its completions can't keep up and you wind up with half-identifiers everywhere. 

I'm flabbergasted.

(I must also note that I am not a user of IntelliJ, so I have not seen this behavior myself. I trust the report from the blogger.)

But getting back to being flabbergasted...

We have, in 2017, an application that cannot keep up with human typing?

We may have made less progress than we thought.