I’ve been wondering this recently. I grew up on atari/nes/snes and so of course almost all of those games (pretty sure all) are written in assembly and are rock solid smooth and responsive for the most part. I wonder if this has affected how I cannot stand to play badly optimized games eith even a hint of a laggy feel to it. I’ve always been drawn to quake and cs for that reason: damn smooth. And no, it doesn’t just need to be FPS games either. I cant play beat saber with a modicum of lag or i suck massively, but others can play just fine and not even notice the lag.
Its odd. I feel like a complainer but maybe I just notice it more easily than others?
Oh, you sweet summer child…
Up to the 90s my friend. Then 3.5 floppy"s took over (1.44 MEGAbyte!) then came zip (100MB) but only for rich people, then it became the era of CD and later dvd burning. Internet was not measured in mbits back then and most of the time not even in kbits. The internet was not a valid delivery system. It was slow and very expensive. Also the first memory cards (CF) around the millennium and from there it went on to the 10s and around there you got the pivot to what we have now.
Tape is still around in computing; its cheap, it’s cheerful, dependable and has quite a throughput. Seeking on it is still horrible though. But anyway, watching a real mechanised tapelibrary do it’s thing backing up computer systems is still mesmerizing.
You left out 5 1/4 floppy disks that were actually floppy. Yes, I know there are 8" floppies but those were mostly business use and specialized drives that you didn’t really get in the home computer market. Atari, Commodore, Radio Shack, etc all had 5 1/4" floppy drives, and when I got my first box of floppies, it was $50 of early 1980’s money for 10 disks. And on my Atari they held about 90K worth of space.