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I remember waiting at least 8 minutes going from boot to a usable desktop on windows 95. Opening up IE completely froze the computer for 2-3 minutes while it ch

I remember waiting at least 8 minutes going from boot to a usable desktop on windows 95. Opening up IE completely froze the computer for 2-3 minutes while it churned away. Minimizing mech warrior would take 45 seconds as I literally watched the desktop be slowly repainted pixel by pixel. Installing 400mb daggerfall took all of a half hour. Applying an image filter in paint shop pro took 15 seconds at a time... the idea that computers are perceptually slower today than in the 80s is just totally false. I get the sense that people parroting this kind of nonsense are simply invested in an ideological narrative that means to disparage the contemporary programmer as lazy or uninformed because they grew up at a time when you didn't have to manually manage menory... as if that was some kind of computing golden age.

marcosdumay 6y ago
That's the thing, 95 was not in 83. In 83 you'd boot into the computer ROM or an OS floopy. The floppy completed in a few seconds, for the ROM it's meaningless to talk about wait time. You wouldn't install software. You would load it from a tape, a floppy or a ROM cartige. For the cartige it would, again, be meaningless to talk about wait time. The floppy would load faster than a 95 program from the hard driver (thanks to bloat), and the tape would take minutes. No program would trash your system, because the memory management algorithms that are subject to trashing was only available for mainframes, and people didn't have disposable disk space anyway.