It also didn't support as many languages/features and was super slow on contemporary hardware. Even my 9 year old laptop can run VSCode just as fast as my 3 ye

It also didn't support as many languages/features and was super slow on contemporary hardware. Even my 9 year old laptop can run VSCode just as fast as my 3 year old main machine. Back in 1998 when Visual Studio 6.0 (actually just the second publicly released version) was released, it took ages to load and used up quite some RAM. 6 years later, when I switched to VS.NET 2003, VS6 ran super fast on my PC. The difference was, however, that my 1998 PC was a 300MHz Pentium II with 64MB of RAM, wheras my 2003 machine was a n overclocked AMD Athlon XP at more than 2500MHz with 2GB of RAM. Now compare that with my 2011 laptop vs. my 2017 laptop: my 2011 machine has a dual core 2.5GHz CPU with 8GB of RAM. My 2017 laptop is a dual core 3.5GHz CPU with 16GB of RAM. 22 years ago, 5 years of progress meant a 10x increase in RAM and 8x increase in CPU speed. During the past 10 years we saw a doubling in RAM (barely, TBH) and maybe 1.5x in CPU speed (at the same core count). That's why the old software felt so fast - because we used it during a time when a major PC upgrade actually meant something. If you used a software package for five years, you could actually see more than a doubling in performance (e.g. Core2Duo E8600, 2008 vs Core i3-4350, 2013 [1]). That's just not the case anymore and skews our perception regarding performance heavily towards "lean" vintage apps. [1] https://www.techspot.com/article/1039-ten-years-intel-cpu-compared/page3.html https://www.techspot.com/article/1039-ten-years-intel-cpu-co...