In truth, the Atari 8-bits I used from that era had trouble keeping up with fast typing and would drop characters, which is worse than just a delay.
The nature of the development process then was necessarily centered on hardware development: the amount of computing logic to run Pong was a small multiple of the amount needed to run a contemporaneous electromechanical pinball, and the amount needed to run Donkey Kong was a few multiples of that for Pong: but the basic premise of "video games" remained close to the pinballs, still built on using timers, state flags and simple lookup tables to do almost everything, which is why the jump arc computation is notable for going into the realm of a real simulation and allowing the software aspect to "flex" a little more. They could have gone with a binary jump using a timer - there were games well after Donkey Kong that did that.
The problems we face now are primarily ones of technical dependency in that configuring a system that does well at typing tests or any other specific metric is weighed against being able to access the standards that require a slower path - we generalized everything to USB and Unicode and JSON and other "not all that fast" standards, and we don't want to give them up, but they also lead to software that is complicated and hard to build.
The nature of the development process then was necessarily centered on hardware development: the amount of computing logic to run Pong was a small multiple of the amount needed to run a contemporaneous electromechanical pinball, and the amount needed to run Donkey Kong was a few multiples of that for Pong: but the basic premise of "video games" remained close to the pinballs, still built on using timers, state flags and simple lookup tables to do almost everything, which is why the jump arc computation is notable for going into the realm of a real simulation and allowing the software aspect to "flex" a little more. They could have gone with a binary jump using a timer - there were games well after Donkey Kong that did that.
The problems we face now are primarily ones of technical dependency in that configuring a system that does well at typing tests or any other specific metric is weighed against being able to access the standards that require a slower path - we generalized everything to USB and Unicode and JSON and other "not all that fast" standards, and we don't want to give them up, but they also lead to software that is complicated and hard to build.