A loading state within a loading state

1. One of the classic parables about loading goes as follows. A building manager had a problem: people were complaining about the elevator being too slow. But upgrading the elevator was an enormous expense, so the manager came with an alternative solution: they put a mirror next to the elevator call buttons. Even though the elevator didn’t become any faster, complaints trickled to a halt, as people were checking themselves out in the mirror and that changed their perception of how long the wait really was. 2. In the late 1970s and early 1980s, it wasn’t uncommon to equip early home computers with audio tape players, using the same cassettes designed to record and play music. Software was encoded as sound. A lot of redundancy was needed to account for many low quality cassettes and misaligned playheads, so loading times were really long. There were other disadvantages – no random access but definitely random errors, tapes wearing out and being “eaten” by the player – but tapes were so…

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