Requirements change. A search field in a local application opening instantly is not the same as a search field searching orders of magnitude more data on a mac

Requirements change. A search field in a local application opening instantly is not the same as a search field searching orders of magnitude more data on a machine thousands of miles away. Things were "faster" because so much _blocked_. Modal windows suspended applications. Now in the ~100ms it takes to open a window your computer is still doing other things in that application, in other applications, in the kernel, on other cores. We may have traded latency for _throughput_ in some cases, but that's not necessarily a bad thing, and often perceptually much faster still. Lastly much of the speed back then came from things that are not practical for security reasons now. Shared memory makes a lot of stuff possible, and quickly. Temple OS (for all the faults of the author) demonstrates that today there are still really neat (and fast) things that can be done when you don't have to worry about security at all, but unfortunately we don't live in that world anymore, and a cost of our connected world is that security must be a design principle from the outset, and there are performance costs to that at every level of the stack, whether it's memory protection, ASLR, stack canaries, SSL/encryption, process sandboxing, containerisation, etc.