11 ms·

The idea that software wasn't bloated and slow 20,30+ years ago is just myth. Everything was bloated and slow. MS Word in the 90s and 00s would regularly crash

The idea that software wasn't bloated and slow 20,30+ years ago is just myth. Everything was bloated and slow. MS Word in the 90s and 00s would regularly crash and take your file with you, and it often took minutes to start up. Yes, there were some brilliant counterexamples, just as there are today. But most software today is far more enjoyable and rapid to use than that from previous eras. While the software isn't as snappy as it theoretically could be, that is mostly because the market finds the tradeoff between features and speed. I'd rather have a search take a second or two longer if it is able to handle synonyms and different word forms. VS Code is so much better than Visual Studio from around 2000. Usually, the truly bloated software (like a lot of edutech) is just because of regulatory capture. Most of edutech isn't judged by the market, but by committees of corrupt idiots, who always exist and for which the open market is the solution for.

amalcon 4y ago
> MS Word in the 90s and 00s would regularly crash and take your file with you, It's an old joke at this point that you can tell when a person first became a serious computer user based on how frequently they save their work. My muscle memory for ctrl+s is so ingrained that I type it every minute or two in things like Google Docs that literally ignore it.
- baxtr 4y ago
  I remember playing “Maniac Mansion” for 12h without saving. Right before the end my computer crashed. All was lost. But at least I did the second run in 8h.
- ehnto 4y ago
  My IDE auto-saves as you make changes, yet I still mash ctrl+s frequently. I think it's mostly games that gave me the habit though. PC gaming has always been a gauntlet.
  - agloe_dreams 4y ago
    > My IDE auto-saves as you make changes This gave me shutters. Maybe it is some sort of manual transmission-type feeling of control, but that is terrifying to me. Something about that feeling of owning when the source file is changed.
    - godshatter 4y ago
      The most annoying thing for me is that the idea of take something similar, make my changes to it, and save it under a different name only mangles the original file in today's world.
      - Our_Benefactors 4y ago
        “Save” vs “Save as” is such a terrible convention…
        TeMPOraL 4y ago
        It is, because arguably the more common case is wanting to save a snapshot under a different name and continue editing the original. "Save as", unfortunately, does the opposite.
        godshatter 4y ago
        I, personally, want save to act like committing a transaction. I don't like making changes to something and having every key typed or item clicked on be an immediate change to the file. The common case for me is to start making changes, then save them when I'm ready, sometimes as another file name. At least 30 years of this behavior has been ingrained into my workflows. We have undo, but I'd also like to have a revert changes option that acts like rolling back a transaction. The simple rollback is to just close the file without saving, but that doesn't work if every change big or small is a commit.
    - Sinidir 4y ago
      Felt the same way after first going from eclipse to intellij. This fear, this lack off. But after a while i didn't notice anymore and i have never run into a situation where something important was lost. In the opposite. Saving and making copies and even duplicating code in a file like an older version of an sql statement is some kind of fear/hoarding impulse, that doesn't seem to pay off at all.
- unclad5968 4y ago
  Pretty much every time I finish typing something I end with ctrl+S. Its muscle memory from the old days, but now it triggers vs code to format whatever I just wrote, which is a convenient side effect.
- layer8 4y ago
  I still can’t get used to Confluence exiting edit mode upon Ctrl+S.
- Waterluvian 4y ago
  I still have this total distrust about closing Google documents without any sort of save operation.
- SilasX 4y ago
  To this day I always copy comments to the clipboard before submitting them or after I feel like I've put a lot of work into them -- owing to dubious browser UI[2] c. 2000, where e.g. you might accidentally lose focus of the text field, and then the backspace button would navigate backwards[1] and lose everything you had typed up. So my muscle memory is a lot of ctrl-a, c. [1] A mistake that Chrome adopted afterward and didn't reverse until 2016: https://tech.slashdot.org/story/16/05/19/2041232/google-chrome-to-disallow-backspace-as-a-back-button https://tech.slashdot.org/story/16/05/19/2041232/google-chro... [2] Wasn't the only cause, of course. The request could fail as well.
  - touisteur 4y ago
    This is my Jira trauma resurfacing thanks. I'm quite heavy on technical explanations, like to put a lot of context, links, references, alternatives, notes in my tickets. Now I just write with outlook (less formatting options than word, actually saves my 35-pages-long shit while typing and people can read it without logging into some slow monster, and I can insert images really fast inline) and save to add an attachment to Jira.
  - eviks 4y ago
    Still possible to lose data in the modern dubious UI on the web, so you could an extension like GhostText and type comment in a regular text editor where you. get recovery for free even if both apps crash
    - ornornor 4y ago
      > GhostText How did I not know about this?? And it supports Firefox + (neo)vim!
- dalmo3 4y ago
  I may have lost days on aggregate from just waiting many seconds for the browser to respond after an accidental Ctrl+s that triggers "Save Page" - why is that operation so slow anyway?
  - marcosdumay 4y ago
    It seems to list a bunch of directories. It is slower on Windows. It may also make sense to cache some search data and ping some network resources, because those dialog boxes don't just show directories nowadays. Surely I would prefer them to do those asynchronously, but the UI designers seem to all disagree.
- Swenrekcah 4y ago
  Open office had autosaving functionality about 15 years before MS Office managed to figure it out, despite loss of work due to unexpected power outages or Office freezing up was a regular occurrence for everyone I knew back then.
- inglor_cz 4y ago
  I wrote my first program in 1994 in Turbo Pascal. Yes, you're right, Ctrl-S is so deeply embedded in my subconsciousness that I will be probably pressing those keys on my deathbed.
- bobwaycott 4y ago
  This explains everything.
tgv 4y ago
Well, MS Word 5.1a on a mac ran really fine, as did all the Apple/ClarisWorks software. Word Perfect on a PC ran fine, too. Then came the inevitable bloat. Later versions of MS Word didn't run that smooth anymore, ClarisWorks became unsufferable. WP killed itself. There's still lean software. Mellel (for macOS, https://www.mellel.com https://www.mellel.com) is a very responsive editor, with a style edit model that's a bit different from Word. But it takes a lot of work to make something increasingly capable and keep performance.
- vlvdus 4y ago
  Interesting...I remember MS Word 5.1 on Mac being slow and crashing so often I was saving a new document every minute or so. Word Perfect (on the same mac) was stable and fast. But feature-wise both were complete for me - then and today I guess.
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
radicalbyte 4y ago
That is only partially true. Office 2000 and 2003 were great releases, the main applications (Word, Excel, Access, PowerPoint and Outlook) were fast and stable as long as you weren't running some weird corporate domain deployment. Earlier and later versions were worse, and Outlook was horrible if you were stuck on a domain. Excel always had issues if you were doing something stupid like using it as a database and all of the apps had issues if you were being stupid with OLE via copy/paste or were using Internet Explorer.
- mananaysiempre 4y ago
  > Office 2000 and 2003 were great releases, the main applications (Word, Excel, Access, PowerPoint and Outlook) were fast and stable as long as you weren't running some weird corporate domain deployment. Or tried to use Microsoft Equation more than a couple of times inside a single document. The thing was ridiculously prone to crashing on top of producing butt-ugly typesetting. Of course, that falls under “using OLE”, but IIRC so does using WordArt, which was rock solid (albeit much simpler and in particular incapable of in-place editing).
- anonymouskimmer 4y ago
  > Excel always had issues if you were doing something stupid like using it as a database I remember a long, long time ago firing up Access. I quickly closed it and continued to use Excel as a database. As it was only for personal use this wasn't an issue.
  - lkbm 4y ago
    When I first started using spreadsheets professionally (Excel 2009), I was confused—how do I name the columns? Surely you don't just enter the column names in the first row! I also tried putting my data into Access. I hated Access and eventually abandoned it. Meanwhile, I pretty quickly decided that Excel is the fastest and overall best Microsoft product by a mile. I now just use Google Sheets, but if you have Windows and need to do lots of spreadsheeting, Excel is just by far the way to go. Far, far better than Libre Office, Numbers, or Google Sheets. To be fair, I was rarely dealing with more than a couple thousand rows. If it were millions, and complicated joins, maybe Access (or probably SQLite) would be better, but oh my god, how is Excel so much faster and more polished than everything else? (Rhetorical question: Joel on Software has some stories that help answer.)
ot 4y ago
When people say 20-30 years ago they actually mean 40-50 years ago, because it's the same people that have been saying the same thing for 20 years, picturing in their head the handcrafted assembly QuickDraw routines.
j_leboulanger 4y ago
I would tend to disagree. In the 1990s System 7 would start in a few seconds from hard disk on a Mac SE/30. Word would start in less than a second (not sure which version it was), and most features we use today were available. Adobe Photoshop 3.0 would start in less than 3 seconds, and same with Premiere 1.0. Of course you lacked some memory protection features which could make the whole computer crash because of a single program failure, but daily experience was much better on old systems. They felt way faster because they have less input lag and because UI was less bloated. I'm not saying 1990s computer and software were better, but they were way faster than what we use today.
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
- crazygringo 4y ago
  I'm pretty sure you're exaggerating quite a bit. Anyone can watch this video [1] to see how long it actually took to boot up or launch Word. But bootup seems to take 20 seconds, and launching Word took 7 seconds. Which roughly matches my memory. So about an order of magnitude slower than you're describing. (The SE/30 had a clock speed twice that of the SE, but launching things is mostly bound by the hard drive speed.) Other things like saving a 3-line Word document took 6 seconds. Quitting Word took 6 seconds. Basically, everything was pretty slow back then. In contrast, I just tried launching Word on my M1 MacBook, and it took about three quarters of a second. While saving a file is simply instantaneous, as is quitting. And launching Photoshop takes 7 seconds. Edit: here's another video [2] opening Photoshop 2 which takes a full 28 seconds. [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=g0O7heFHA-k https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=g0O7heFHA-k [2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LP_JNatS2Sg https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LP_JNatS2Sg
  - harry8 4y ago
    >but launching things is mostly bound by the hard drive speed. which got slower and slower taking swap speed with it, which slowed down everything you were actually using. You'd defrag the drive regularly and that wouldn't do it so you'd have to wipe and reinstall from scratch. And that was some hours of work but like having a brand new machine again when you were done. You couldn't believe how bad it had degraded to. The good old days or selective memories?
citrin_ru 4y ago
How bloated software can become is limited by available hardware resources. 20-30 years ago typical RAM size / CPU core count where much smaller than nowadays. If you run desktop software written 20 years ago on modern hardware it would work much faster than modern desktop software with comparable functions (not always, but quite often). But I'd agree that there was plenty bloated software which run slow on hardware most people afforded at that time. May be this happens because software is typically developed on top of the line hardware but users on average spend less on hardware then developers.
- ChrisMarshallNY 4y ago
  That reminds me of the old @bruised_blood comic: https://twitter.com/iamdevloper/status/926458505355235328 https://twitter.com/iamdevloper/status/926458505355235328
  - abakker 4y ago
    its really a perfect continuation of the Mark Twain, “I didn't have time to write a short letter, so I wrote a long one instead.” Really succinct fast code probably takes more time than verbose, slow code.
    - ChrisMarshallNY 4y ago
      Brevity is difficult. It takes me a lot longer to write small code, than big code (CTRL-C -> CTRL-V). A big part of my refactoring, is looking for copy/pasta, and trying to do things like refine base classes or protocols, and whatnot.
- another_kel 4y ago
  > with comparable functions (not always, but quite often). Is that really the case? Are 2010 skype and 2022 discord comparable in terms of functionality? Are 2000 winamp and 2022 spotify app comparable? Todo app 15 years ago was a simple CRUD app. Today todo app has to do CRUD, sync, offline mode, public API, integrations with popular services, collaborative projects and support 6 platforms. People whine about bloated web tech in app, and how good it was with native while forgetting that availability and feature parity on all platforms is a feature too. I still remember how bad it was before electron as a windows user. Half the apps that seemed cool(omnifocus, bear notes) had mac only desktop version, other(1password, evernote) had a native windows version that felt ugly and unpolished.
prmph 4y ago
Really disagree on this one. It's true lots of software were unreliable back in the day. But: - Crashes sometimes != Slow, bloated, and unreliable. I'd rather have something simple and responsive that crashes every now and then, than something that is aggravating to use all the time. - With the massive increase in hardware performance, there's just no excuse at all for slow unresponsive software now, especially from the big vendors. The reasons are not even usually technical; the bloat is from ads and tracking and more > I'd rather have a search take a second or two longer if it is able to handle synonyms and different word forms. I'm not sure people are complaining abut search being slow. Most complaints about search is that is lower quality than it used to be. > VS Code is so much better than Visual Studio from around 2000. VSCode and Visual Studio are two completely different products, one is a code editor, and the other is a full blown IDE. There were very good editors back in the day. And VSCode has started showing signs of a decrease in quality.
- Freedom2 4y ago
  What are examples of VSCode dropping in quality? Aside from some extension oddness, it has been a solid performer in my toolkit for many years.
- quicklime 4y ago
  > VSCode and Visual Studio are two completely different products, one is a code editor, and the other is a full blown IDE What does Visual Studio from around 2000 have that VSCode doesn't? I get that VSCode offloads a lot of work to the language server and extensions, but it offers IDE-like features including auto-completion, code navigation, and the UI is more than just code editing - it integrates version control, a test runner, debugging, etc. What is it missing that makes it not a full blown IDE?
  - prmph 4y ago
    > What does Visual Studio from around 2000 have that VSCode doesn't? A visual GUI designer, for example. Also a visual database model designer. Code generation too, and more These are resource demanding features
- 4y ago
bob1029 4y ago
> The idea that software wasn't bloated and slow 20,30+ years ago is just myth All you need to do to prove to yourself how bad things have gotten is to find an old PC (or VM) and load up a copy of Windows XP. The amount of bullshit between mouse click & updated photons arriving back at your eyeballs is insane in 2023. Software used to be much faster than me. Now, it is significantly slower. The only things that are reliably better are our networks and hardware. I saw a recent talk on Blazor wherein Steve Sanderson ran through an example in an old version of visual studio. Watching how fast the project loaded actually made me depressed in a real and deep way: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2nRDdeIMGVo https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2nRDdeIMGVo (@ 45:15)
- anthk 4y ago
  Days ago I ran W2k, something I missed between Windows 98 and Windows XP, just for fun, under a VM, with no Direct3D hardware acceleration, just KVM accelerated virt-manager. The virtual machine ran faster than the GL accelerated Mate DE in the host.
- s17n 4y ago
  He's running 20 year old software on today's hardware, of course it's going to be fast. The idea that software is slower now is nonsense, if anything it's faster in general. It's using orders of magnitude more hardware, of course, but how is that a problem?
  - AnIdiotOnTheNet 4y ago
    Because it isn't providing orders of magnitude more utility in exchange. Compare what the latest greatest word processor does vs the equivalent from the 90s to what a computer game today does vs the equivelent from the 90s. The latter is what orders of magnitude of improvement looks like.
    - pixl97 4y ago
      See this is a particular problem.... You don't use 100% of the features of your software, hell, you might not even use 50% of the features. The problem here is one of measuring YOUR net utility of the gross utility realized by all users. Now, in an ideal world you could get an 'idiot' version that would meet all your needs and run nothing extra and be nice and fast. Of course now you have countless different versions of software to release and test and hope nothing fun happens. Or, you do like everyone does and releases a big old binary of fun that does everything and give QA a few less things to do. I won't say about word process, but spreadsheets?, well not many years ago many of them would stop working at 65k rows and say tough luck, and these days we have absolutely huge datasets running in them.
nirvdrum 4y ago
> While the software isn't as snappy as it theoretically could be, that is mostly because the market finds the tradeoff between features and speed. I don't know how much the market really has a say in this. I don't use Slack because I want to. I use it because I must. When we had open protocols, you really could choose the best client. Nowadays everything is a walled garden. It's amazing just how poorly we've managed to make a chat application run. Across the board companies are using JS-based apps not because it necessarily leads to a better user experience but because it reduces their costs. Running a couple might be fine. Running more than that really slows things down. And developers tend to forget that most of the world isn't running a machine with the specs that they run with and many don't bother testing their stuff on machines with more limited resources. I routinely have to kill applications when trying to build software or pair program because our video conferencing tools aren't light on resources either. I can't just add more RAM to my laptop because everything is soldered on now. That's another big difference from the past couple of decades. People could cheaply upgrade their hardware every couple of years. Now, you have to buy a brand new device, so people naturally hold on to their hardware longer. Mobile phone users are hanging on to their devices longer. Just yesterday we saw news that GitHub employees can only refresh laptops every four years. We should be working to make more efficient use of resources instead of targeting everything at the latest hardware specs. Obviously there was old, bloated software. I think most of what people remember as being slow had a lot to do with spinning disks. I upgraded a family member's computer to something more modern not too long ago. He's pretty set in his ways and still uses old versions of MS Money and the like. It was amazing how much faster they ran. I can't know for certain, but I don't see that sort of future for JS apps. They're slow on considerably more advanced hardware. While more memory would help, more CPU cores likely won't. I wish performance would be taken more seriously in the UX world. But, it costs less to cut corners and when you have a captive market, who cares? Once one company starts doing it, others do too, making it a race to the bottom. I'm thankful there are still indie developers building high quality, platform-native applications.
- anthk 4y ago
  Kopete did the same Slack does today (with inline Youtube videos and LaTeX equations) with KDE3 running in the background under a machine with 256MB of RAM.
pvg 4y ago
There's another difference which is a stretch of time in which personal computers got faster a lot faster - often faster than than bloat could catch up (for a bit). That produced periods in which some previously slow-seeming software got quite snappy. This naturally stopped happening with the same regularity but it still does, occasionally - e.g. the excitement over M-series Macs.
wolpoli 4y ago
Microsoft Word 97 might have felt laggy when I ran it on a first-generation Pentium CPU, but the race to the GHz bailed it out. Now that Moore's Law is running out of room, what's going to bail out this generation of software bloat?
- tremon 4y ago
  The widespread availability of high-bandwidth and low-latency Internet access is what's been bailing out the latest generation of software bloat, not individual CPU performance.
M95D 4y ago
I remember using Corel 8 on a 486 with 8MB of memory. I would write the text in notepad and paste it into Corel, otherwise it would take 2s for each letter to appear. I still find it amaizing that it worked. A 486 is something like half the speed of a single core ESP32 today...
- Narishma 4y ago
  CorelDRAW 8 came out in 1998. That it even runs on a 486 is a miracle.
  - anthk 4y ago
    Lots of peple used 486s back them. Even in 2003, lynx and gv/xv/mpg123 were perfectly usable on a FreeBSD desktop with FVWM. If it had 16MB of RAM, or 32, it could run better. A 486DX133 would be fine.
fmajid 4y ago
No. MS Word 5.1 on my 1990 vintage Mac Plus felt subjectively faster than the current version, and it had all the features I needed.
JohnFen 4y ago
> The idea that software wasn't bloated and slow 20,30+ years ago is just myth. It's not entirely a myth. MS Word is not a representative example, though. It's been pretty awful from the start. Today's software, on average, is very much larger and less performant than software from the olden days, and generally is not more featureful. What is is, is cheaper to produce and modern software tends to have a much prettier (and graphical!) user interface.
jaclaz 4y ago
Only as a corollary, to put things in perspective, in the early '90's that was Windows 3.x on a 33-66-100 Mhz CPU with 4, maybe 8 MB (yes megabytes) of RAM and programs had a splash screen to mask the fact that they were very slow loading. With at least 20x processor speed, double the bits, and 1000x memory (let alone SSD's) I would have expected something better than what we have.
- branweb 4y ago
  exactly correct. The question is not: "was software bloated in the 90s". It's: "given that hardware capability increased in by several orders of magnitude, did software quality/speed see a similar increase?" The answer is a resounding no. It would be like moving from a tricycle to a supersonic car and somehow taking longer to get from point a to point b.
  - NegativeK 4y ago
    I'll concede that we're not going supersonic, but our speed is maybe more at 100mph than slower. Computers (including phones, accomplishing the same tasks that desktops were) are absolutely faster than they were. We also have better UX, more functionality, and better quality. If people want to run the software of the mid-90s on modern hardware, I'm sure they can figure out a way. The upside is that when it crashes or you have to switch back and forth with modern software with greater functionality, the underlying system will let you do that very quickly.
- gilbetron 4y ago
  I dunno, we have ridiculously amazing displays, live video, amazing audio, intuitive, reactive interfaces, and profound knowledge at our fingertips. Seems like we're doing pretty good!
  - funcDropShadow 4y ago
    > intuitive, reactive interfaces Really? Do you think modern user interfaces are great? Everybody implements their widgets from scratch using html, css and Javascript. The boring old ui toolkits standardized a lot of features that are today non existent or different everywhere. For example a plain old list widget where you could select multiple items had standard ways to select ranges, to add ranges to a selection, to toggle the selection of single items, to select all of them. Most modern software doesn't have those actions. And even if it has some of them you have to find out how. Whereas such things used to be commonplace. Regularity of boring features is actually intuitive. Nice looking is not intuitive.
josephcsible 4y ago
> The idea that software wasn't bloated and slow 20,30+ years ago is just myth. Everything was bloated and slow. MS Word in the 90s and 00s would regularly crash and take your file with you, and it often took minutes to start up. Yes, there were some brilliant counterexamples, just as there are today. But most software today is far more enjoyable and rapid to use than that from previous eras. Install Windows 2000 and Office 97 in a VM. Word will be blazingly fast compared to the latest version. What features do you ever use in the latest version of Word that weren't present back then?
- 8note 4y ago
  On today's hardware, or on hardware of the time? Things like word used to be much better in speed of the interface - it used to take fewer clicks to do stuff
  - josephcsible 4y ago
    On today's hardware. The point is just to show that modern software is slower and less efficient than older software.
    - pixl97 4y ago
      Honestly this is the worst take yet. Go open that Excel 97 with a spreadsheet containing 65,537 rows.... Oh, you can't. People aren't building modern software that does the same set of things so attempting to measure it is much more difficult than opening up a zillon year old VM.
      - josephcsible 4y ago
        How many spreadsheets are that big? And how much bloat do you think supporting that accounts for?
        pixl97 4y ago
        This is an irrelevant question if you're in the business of selling most software. Most people don't care if their spreadsheet takes 1 second or 10 seconds to open. What they do care about is "Bob sent me a spreadsheet and I can't open it" or "The app crashed and lost all my data" (and technically I've seen spreadsheets crash plenty, but they tend to have a recent copy of the data saved which is eating up resources to monitor and do this). And things like "I want to hit undo 50 bajillion times". And that is just feature bloat. There is a ton more 'just import a library' for that bloat because adding libraries is generally much easier when it comes to fixes then finding the place in your source code and fixing it.
Wowfunhappy 4y ago
> MS Word in the 90s and 00s [...] often took minutes to start up. And how quickly would the latest version of Microsoft Word start up on 90s-era PC? Okay, so it wouldn't start up at all because the computer would not have enough memory, among other things. Let's say we built the absolute closest computer that could still technically run modern MS Office. We'd choose the absolute slowest CPU that can still boot Windows 10, the smallest amount of memory, and so on. It would still be many times faster than a 90s-era PC. How quickly would modern Office open on that hardware? What about Office 95?
blauditore 4y ago
I think part of the reason for this myth is that if you run old software on a modern computer, it's blazingly fast. That doesn't mean it was fast back in the day too.
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
marcus_holmes 4y ago
Disagree. VS in 2000 was the most productive environment I've ever worked in. I was writing VB applications and could get the UI done in minutes, script it up and attach it to DCOM objects running on servers in hours. Whole applications done and dusted in a few days. It was easily the most productive environment I've ever worked in. Now I'm writing Go in VSCode, and the language server + plugins + tools take forever (well, multiple tens of seconds). I have to run the UI in a browser, the server in a container, and the database in another container (with all the pain that entails). It's a mess and it's just not nearly as productive.

amalcon 4y ago

> MS Word in the 90s and 00s would regularly crash and take your file with you, It's an old joke at this point that you can tell when a person first became a serious computer user based on how frequently they save their work. My muscle memory for ctrl+s is so ingrained that I type it every minute or two in things like Google Docs that literally ignore it.

baxtr 4y ago
I remember playing “Maniac Mansion” for 12h without saving. Right before the end my computer crashed. All was lost. But at least I did the second run in 8h.
ehnto 4y ago
My IDE auto-saves as you make changes, yet I still mash ctrl+s frequently. I think it's mostly games that gave me the habit though. PC gaming has always been a gauntlet.
- agloe_dreams 4y ago
  > My IDE auto-saves as you make changes This gave me shutters. Maybe it is some sort of manual transmission-type feeling of control, but that is terrifying to me. Something about that feeling of owning when the source file is changed.
  - godshatter 4y ago
    The most annoying thing for me is that the idea of take something similar, make my changes to it, and save it under a different name only mangles the original file in today's world.
    - Our_Benefactors 4y ago
      “Save” vs “Save as” is such a terrible convention…
      - TeMPOraL 4y ago
        It is, because arguably the more common case is wanting to save a snapshot under a different name and continue editing the original. "Save as", unfortunately, does the opposite.
        godshatter 4y ago
        I, personally, want save to act like committing a transaction. I don't like making changes to something and having every key typed or item clicked on be an immediate change to the file. The common case for me is to start making changes, then save them when I'm ready, sometimes as another file name. At least 30 years of this behavior has been ingrained into my workflows. We have undo, but I'd also like to have a revert changes option that acts like rolling back a transaction. The simple rollback is to just close the file without saving, but that doesn't work if every change big or small is a commit.
  - Sinidir 4y ago
    Felt the same way after first going from eclipse to intellij. This fear, this lack off. But after a while i didn't notice anymore and i have never run into a situation where something important was lost. In the opposite. Saving and making copies and even duplicating code in a file like an older version of an sql statement is some kind of fear/hoarding impulse, that doesn't seem to pay off at all.
unclad5968 4y ago
Pretty much every time I finish typing something I end with ctrl+S. Its muscle memory from the old days, but now it triggers vs code to format whatever I just wrote, which is a convenient side effect.
layer8 4y ago
I still can’t get used to Confluence exiting edit mode upon Ctrl+S.
Waterluvian 4y ago
I still have this total distrust about closing Google documents without any sort of save operation.
SilasX 4y ago
To this day I always copy comments to the clipboard before submitting them or after I feel like I've put a lot of work into them -- owing to dubious browser UI[2] c. 2000, where e.g. you might accidentally lose focus of the text field, and then the backspace button would navigate backwards[1] and lose everything you had typed up. So my muscle memory is a lot of ctrl-a, c. [1] A mistake that Chrome adopted afterward and didn't reverse until 2016: https://tech.slashdot.org/story/16/05/19/2041232/google-chrome-to-disallow-backspace-as-a-back-button https://tech.slashdot.org/story/16/05/19/2041232/google-chro... [2] Wasn't the only cause, of course. The request could fail as well.
- touisteur 4y ago
  This is my Jira trauma resurfacing thanks. I'm quite heavy on technical explanations, like to put a lot of context, links, references, alternatives, notes in my tickets. Now I just write with outlook (less formatting options than word, actually saves my 35-pages-long shit while typing and people can read it without logging into some slow monster, and I can insert images really fast inline) and save to add an attachment to Jira.
- eviks 4y ago
  Still possible to lose data in the modern dubious UI on the web, so you could an extension like GhostText and type comment in a regular text editor where you. get recovery for free even if both apps crash
  - ornornor 4y ago
    > GhostText How did I not know about this?? And it supports Firefox + (neo)vim!
dalmo3 4y ago
I may have lost days on aggregate from just waiting many seconds for the browser to respond after an accidental Ctrl+s that triggers "Save Page" - why is that operation so slow anyway?
- marcosdumay 4y ago
  It seems to list a bunch of directories. It is slower on Windows. It may also make sense to cache some search data and ping some network resources, because those dialog boxes don't just show directories nowadays. Surely I would prefer them to do those asynchronously, but the UI designers seem to all disagree.
Swenrekcah 4y ago
Open office had autosaving functionality about 15 years before MS Office managed to figure it out, despite loss of work due to unexpected power outages or Office freezing up was a regular occurrence for everyone I knew back then.
inglor_cz 4y ago
I wrote my first program in 1994 in Turbo Pascal. Yes, you're right, Ctrl-S is so deeply embedded in my subconsciousness that I will be probably pressing those keys on my deathbed.
bobwaycott 4y ago
This explains everything.

tgv 4y ago

Well, MS Word 5.1a on a mac ran really fine, as did all the Apple/ClarisWorks software. Word Perfect on a PC ran fine, too. Then came the inevitable bloat. Later versions of MS Word didn't run that smooth anymore, ClarisWorks became unsufferable. WP killed itself. There's still lean software. Mellel (for macOS, https://www.mellel.com https://www.mellel.com) is a very responsive editor, with a style edit model that's a bit different from Word. But it takes a lot of work to make something increasingly capable and keep performance.

vlvdus 4y ago
Interesting...I remember MS Word 5.1 on Mac being slow and crashing so often I was saving a new document every minute or so. Word Perfect (on the same mac) was stable and fast. But feature-wise both were complete for me - then and today I guess.

deleted 4y ago

[deleted]

radicalbyte 4y ago

That is only partially true. Office 2000 and 2003 were great releases, the main applications (Word, Excel, Access, PowerPoint and Outlook) were fast and stable as long as you weren't running some weird corporate domain deployment. Earlier and later versions were worse, and Outlook was horrible if you were stuck on a domain. Excel always had issues if you were doing something stupid like using it as a database and all of the apps had issues if you were being stupid with OLE via copy/paste or were using Internet Explorer.

mananaysiempre 4y ago
> Office 2000 and 2003 were great releases, the main applications (Word, Excel, Access, PowerPoint and Outlook) were fast and stable as long as you weren't running some weird corporate domain deployment. Or tried to use Microsoft Equation more than a couple of times inside a single document. The thing was ridiculously prone to crashing on top of producing butt-ugly typesetting. Of course, that falls under “using OLE”, but IIRC so does using WordArt, which was rock solid (albeit much simpler and in particular incapable of in-place editing).
anonymouskimmer 4y ago
> Excel always had issues if you were doing something stupid like using it as a database I remember a long, long time ago firing up Access. I quickly closed it and continued to use Excel as a database. As it was only for personal use this wasn't an issue.
- lkbm 4y ago
  When I first started using spreadsheets professionally (Excel 2009), I was confused—how do I name the columns? Surely you don't just enter the column names in the first row! I also tried putting my data into Access. I hated Access and eventually abandoned it. Meanwhile, I pretty quickly decided that Excel is the fastest and overall best Microsoft product by a mile. I now just use Google Sheets, but if you have Windows and need to do lots of spreadsheeting, Excel is just by far the way to go. Far, far better than Libre Office, Numbers, or Google Sheets. To be fair, I was rarely dealing with more than a couple thousand rows. If it were millions, and complicated joins, maybe Access (or probably SQLite) would be better, but oh my god, how is Excel so much faster and more polished than everything else? (Rhetorical question: Joel on Software has some stories that help answer.)

ot 4y ago

When people say 20-30 years ago they actually mean 40-50 years ago, because it's the same people that have been saying the same thing for 20 years, picturing in their head the handcrafted assembly QuickDraw routines.

j_leboulanger 4y ago

I would tend to disagree. In the 1990s System 7 would start in a few seconds from hard disk on a Mac SE/30. Word would start in less than a second (not sure which version it was), and most features we use today were available. Adobe Photoshop 3.0 would start in less than 3 seconds, and same with Premiere 1.0. Of course you lacked some memory protection features which could make the whole computer crash because of a single program failure, but daily experience was much better on old systems. They felt way faster because they have less input lag and because UI was less bloated. I'm not saying 1990s computer and software were better, but they were way faster than what we use today.

deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
crazygringo 4y ago
I'm pretty sure you're exaggerating quite a bit. Anyone can watch this video [1] to see how long it actually took to boot up or launch Word. But bootup seems to take 20 seconds, and launching Word took 7 seconds. Which roughly matches my memory. So about an order of magnitude slower than you're describing. (The SE/30 had a clock speed twice that of the SE, but launching things is mostly bound by the hard drive speed.) Other things like saving a 3-line Word document took 6 seconds. Quitting Word took 6 seconds. Basically, everything was pretty slow back then. In contrast, I just tried launching Word on my M1 MacBook, and it took about three quarters of a second. While saving a file is simply instantaneous, as is quitting. And launching Photoshop takes 7 seconds. Edit: here's another video [2] opening Photoshop 2 which takes a full 28 seconds. [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=g0O7heFHA-k https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=g0O7heFHA-k [2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LP_JNatS2Sg https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LP_JNatS2Sg
- harry8 4y ago
  >but launching things is mostly bound by the hard drive speed. which got slower and slower taking swap speed with it, which slowed down everything you were actually using. You'd defrag the drive regularly and that wouldn't do it so you'd have to wipe and reinstall from scratch. And that was some hours of work but like having a brand new machine again when you were done. You couldn't believe how bad it had degraded to. The good old days or selective memories?

citrin_ru 4y ago

How bloated software can become is limited by available hardware resources. 20-30 years ago typical RAM size / CPU core count where much smaller than nowadays. If you run desktop software written 20 years ago on modern hardware it would work much faster than modern desktop software with comparable functions (not always, but quite often). But I'd agree that there was plenty bloated software which run slow on hardware most people afforded at that time. May be this happens because software is typically developed on top of the line hardware but users on average spend less on hardware then developers.

ChrisMarshallNY 4y ago
That reminds me of the old @bruised_blood comic: https://twitter.com/iamdevloper/status/926458505355235328 https://twitter.com/iamdevloper/status/926458505355235328
- abakker 4y ago
  its really a perfect continuation of the Mark Twain, “I didn't have time to write a short letter, so I wrote a long one instead.” Really succinct fast code probably takes more time than verbose, slow code.
  - ChrisMarshallNY 4y ago
    Brevity is difficult. It takes me a lot longer to write small code, than big code (CTRL-C -> CTRL-V). A big part of my refactoring, is looking for copy/pasta, and trying to do things like refine base classes or protocols, and whatnot.
another_kel 4y ago
> with comparable functions (not always, but quite often). Is that really the case? Are 2010 skype and 2022 discord comparable in terms of functionality? Are 2000 winamp and 2022 spotify app comparable? Todo app 15 years ago was a simple CRUD app. Today todo app has to do CRUD, sync, offline mode, public API, integrations with popular services, collaborative projects and support 6 platforms. People whine about bloated web tech in app, and how good it was with native while forgetting that availability and feature parity on all platforms is a feature too. I still remember how bad it was before electron as a windows user. Half the apps that seemed cool(omnifocus, bear notes) had mac only desktop version, other(1password, evernote) had a native windows version that felt ugly and unpolished.

prmph 4y ago

Really disagree on this one. It's true lots of software were unreliable back in the day. But: - Crashes sometimes != Slow, bloated, and unreliable. I'd rather have something simple and responsive that crashes every now and then, than something that is aggravating to use all the time. - With the massive increase in hardware performance, there's just no excuse at all for slow unresponsive software now, especially from the big vendors. The reasons are not even usually technical; the bloat is from ads and tracking and more > I'd rather have a search take a second or two longer if it is able to handle synonyms and different word forms. I'm not sure people are complaining abut search being slow. Most complaints about search is that is lower quality than it used to be. > VS Code is so much better than Visual Studio from around 2000. VSCode and Visual Studio are two completely different products, one is a code editor, and the other is a full blown IDE. There were very good editors back in the day. And VSCode has started showing signs of a decrease in quality.

Freedom2 4y ago
What are examples of VSCode dropping in quality? Aside from some extension oddness, it has been a solid performer in my toolkit for many years.
quicklime 4y ago
> VSCode and Visual Studio are two completely different products, one is a code editor, and the other is a full blown IDE What does Visual Studio from around 2000 have that VSCode doesn't? I get that VSCode offloads a lot of work to the language server and extensions, but it offers IDE-like features including auto-completion, code navigation, and the UI is more than just code editing - it integrates version control, a test runner, debugging, etc. What is it missing that makes it not a full blown IDE?
- prmph 4y ago
  > What does Visual Studio from around 2000 have that VSCode doesn't? A visual GUI designer, for example. Also a visual database model designer. Code generation too, and more These are resource demanding features
4y ago

bob1029 4y ago

> The idea that software wasn't bloated and slow 20,30+ years ago is just myth All you need to do to prove to yourself how bad things have gotten is to find an old PC (or VM) and load up a copy of Windows XP. The amount of bullshit between mouse click & updated photons arriving back at your eyeballs is insane in 2023. Software used to be much faster than me. Now, it is significantly slower. The only things that are reliably better are our networks and hardware. I saw a recent talk on Blazor wherein Steve Sanderson ran through an example in an old version of visual studio. Watching how fast the project loaded actually made me depressed in a real and deep way: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2nRDdeIMGVo https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2nRDdeIMGVo (@ 45:15)

anthk 4y ago
Days ago I ran W2k, something I missed between Windows 98 and Windows XP, just for fun, under a VM, with no Direct3D hardware acceleration, just KVM accelerated virt-manager. The virtual machine ran faster than the GL accelerated Mate DE in the host.
s17n 4y ago
He's running 20 year old software on today's hardware, of course it's going to be fast. The idea that software is slower now is nonsense, if anything it's faster in general. It's using orders of magnitude more hardware, of course, but how is that a problem?
- AnIdiotOnTheNet 4y ago
  Because it isn't providing orders of magnitude more utility in exchange. Compare what the latest greatest word processor does vs the equivalent from the 90s to what a computer game today does vs the equivelent from the 90s. The latter is what orders of magnitude of improvement looks like.
  - pixl97 4y ago
    See this is a particular problem.... You don't use 100% of the features of your software, hell, you might not even use 50% of the features. The problem here is one of measuring YOUR net utility of the gross utility realized by all users. Now, in an ideal world you could get an 'idiot' version that would meet all your needs and run nothing extra and be nice and fast. Of course now you have countless different versions of software to release and test and hope nothing fun happens. Or, you do like everyone does and releases a big old binary of fun that does everything and give QA a few less things to do. I won't say about word process, but spreadsheets?, well not many years ago many of them would stop working at 65k rows and say tough luck, and these days we have absolutely huge datasets running in them.

nirvdrum 4y ago

> While the software isn't as snappy as it theoretically could be, that is mostly because the market finds the tradeoff between features and speed. I don't know how much the market really has a say in this. I don't use Slack because I want to. I use it because I must. When we had open protocols, you really could choose the best client. Nowadays everything is a walled garden. It's amazing just how poorly we've managed to make a chat application run. Across the board companies are using JS-based apps not because it necessarily leads to a better user experience but because it reduces their costs. Running a couple might be fine. Running more than that really slows things down. And developers tend to forget that most of the world isn't running a machine with the specs that they run with and many don't bother testing their stuff on machines with more limited resources. I routinely have to kill applications when trying to build software or pair program because our video conferencing tools aren't light on resources either. I can't just add more RAM to my laptop because everything is soldered on now. That's another big difference from the past couple of decades. People could cheaply upgrade their hardware every couple of years. Now, you have to buy a brand new device, so people naturally hold on to their hardware longer. Mobile phone users are hanging on to their devices longer. Just yesterday we saw news that GitHub employees can only refresh laptops every four years. We should be working to make more efficient use of resources instead of targeting everything at the latest hardware specs. Obviously there was old, bloated software. I think most of what people remember as being slow had a lot to do with spinning disks. I upgraded a family member's computer to something more modern not too long ago. He's pretty set in his ways and still uses old versions of MS Money and the like. It was amazing how much faster they ran. I can't know for certain, but I don't see that sort of future for JS apps. They're slow on considerably more advanced hardware. While more memory would help, more CPU cores likely won't. I wish performance would be taken more seriously in the UX world. But, it costs less to cut corners and when you have a captive market, who cares? Once one company starts doing it, others do too, making it a race to the bottom. I'm thankful there are still indie developers building high quality, platform-native applications.

anthk 4y ago
Kopete did the same Slack does today (with inline Youtube videos and LaTeX equations) with KDE3 running in the background under a machine with 256MB of RAM.

pvg 4y ago

There's another difference which is a stretch of time in which personal computers got faster a lot faster - often faster than than bloat could catch up (for a bit). That produced periods in which some previously slow-seeming software got quite snappy. This naturally stopped happening with the same regularity but it still does, occasionally - e.g. the excitement over M-series Macs.

wolpoli 4y ago

Microsoft Word 97 might have felt laggy when I ran it on a first-generation Pentium CPU, but the race to the GHz bailed it out. Now that Moore's Law is running out of room, what's going to bail out this generation of software bloat?

tremon 4y ago
The widespread availability of high-bandwidth and low-latency Internet access is what's been bailing out the latest generation of software bloat, not individual CPU performance.

M95D 4y ago

I remember using Corel 8 on a 486 with 8MB of memory. I would write the text in notepad and paste it into Corel, otherwise it would take 2s for each letter to appear. I still find it amaizing that it worked. A 486 is something like half the speed of a single core ESP32 today...

Narishma 4y ago
CorelDRAW 8 came out in 1998. That it even runs on a 486 is a miracle.
- anthk 4y ago
  Lots of peple used 486s back them. Even in 2003, lynx and gv/xv/mpg123 were perfectly usable on a FreeBSD desktop with FVWM. If it had 16MB of RAM, or 32, it could run better. A 486DX133 would be fine.

fmajid 4y ago

No. MS Word 5.1 on my 1990 vintage Mac Plus felt subjectively faster than the current version, and it had all the features I needed.

JohnFen 4y ago

> The idea that software wasn't bloated and slow 20,30+ years ago is just myth. It's not entirely a myth. MS Word is not a representative example, though. It's been pretty awful from the start. Today's software, on average, is very much larger and less performant than software from the olden days, and generally is not more featureful. What is is, is cheaper to produce and modern software tends to have a much prettier (and graphical!) user interface.

jaclaz 4y ago

Only as a corollary, to put things in perspective, in the early '90's that was Windows 3.x on a 33-66-100 Mhz CPU with 4, maybe 8 MB (yes megabytes) of RAM and programs had a splash screen to mask the fact that they were very slow loading. With at least 20x processor speed, double the bits, and 1000x memory (let alone SSD's) I would have expected something better than what we have.

branweb 4y ago
exactly correct. The question is not: "was software bloated in the 90s". It's: "given that hardware capability increased in by several orders of magnitude, did software quality/speed see a similar increase?" The answer is a resounding no. It would be like moving from a tricycle to a supersonic car and somehow taking longer to get from point a to point b.
- NegativeK 4y ago
  I'll concede that we're not going supersonic, but our speed is maybe more at 100mph than slower. Computers (including phones, accomplishing the same tasks that desktops were) are absolutely faster than they were. We also have better UX, more functionality, and better quality. If people want to run the software of the mid-90s on modern hardware, I'm sure they can figure out a way. The upside is that when it crashes or you have to switch back and forth with modern software with greater functionality, the underlying system will let you do that very quickly.
gilbetron 4y ago
I dunno, we have ridiculously amazing displays, live video, amazing audio, intuitive, reactive interfaces, and profound knowledge at our fingertips. Seems like we're doing pretty good!
- funcDropShadow 4y ago
  > intuitive, reactive interfaces Really? Do you think modern user interfaces are great? Everybody implements their widgets from scratch using html, css and Javascript. The boring old ui toolkits standardized a lot of features that are today non existent or different everywhere. For example a plain old list widget where you could select multiple items had standard ways to select ranges, to add ranges to a selection, to toggle the selection of single items, to select all of them. Most modern software doesn't have those actions. And even if it has some of them you have to find out how. Whereas such things used to be commonplace. Regularity of boring features is actually intuitive. Nice looking is not intuitive.

josephcsible 4y ago

> The idea that software wasn't bloated and slow 20,30+ years ago is just myth. Everything was bloated and slow. MS Word in the 90s and 00s would regularly crash and take your file with you, and it often took minutes to start up. Yes, there were some brilliant counterexamples, just as there are today. But most software today is far more enjoyable and rapid to use than that from previous eras. Install Windows 2000 and Office 97 in a VM. Word will be blazingly fast compared to the latest version. What features do you ever use in the latest version of Word that weren't present back then?

8note 4y ago
On today's hardware, or on hardware of the time? Things like word used to be much better in speed of the interface - it used to take fewer clicks to do stuff
- josephcsible 4y ago
  On today's hardware. The point is just to show that modern software is slower and less efficient than older software.
  - pixl97 4y ago
    Honestly this is the worst take yet. Go open that Excel 97 with a spreadsheet containing 65,537 rows.... Oh, you can't. People aren't building modern software that does the same set of things so attempting to measure it is much more difficult than opening up a zillon year old VM.
    - josephcsible 4y ago
      How many spreadsheets are that big? And how much bloat do you think supporting that accounts for?
      - pixl97 4y ago
        This is an irrelevant question if you're in the business of selling most software. Most people don't care if their spreadsheet takes 1 second or 10 seconds to open. What they do care about is "Bob sent me a spreadsheet and I can't open it" or "The app crashed and lost all my data" (and technically I've seen spreadsheets crash plenty, but they tend to have a recent copy of the data saved which is eating up resources to monitor and do this). And things like "I want to hit undo 50 bajillion times". And that is just feature bloat. There is a ton more 'just import a library' for that bloat because adding libraries is generally much easier when it comes to fixes then finding the place in your source code and fixing it.

Wowfunhappy 4y ago

> MS Word in the 90s and 00s [...] often took minutes to start up. And how quickly would the latest version of Microsoft Word start up on 90s-era PC? Okay, so it wouldn't start up at all because the computer would not have enough memory, among other things. Let's say we built the absolute closest computer that could still technically run modern MS Office. We'd choose the absolute slowest CPU that can still boot Windows 10, the smallest amount of memory, and so on. It would still be many times faster than a 90s-era PC. How quickly would modern Office open on that hardware? What about Office 95?

blauditore 4y ago

I think part of the reason for this myth is that if you run old software on a modern computer, it's blazingly fast. That doesn't mean it was fast back in the day too.

deleted 4y ago
[deleted]

deleted 4y ago

[deleted]

marcus_holmes 4y ago

Disagree. VS in 2000 was the most productive environment I've ever worked in. I was writing VB applications and could get the UI done in minutes, script it up and attach it to DCOM objects running on servers in hours. Whole applications done and dusted in a few days. It was easily the most productive environment I've ever worked in. Now I'm writing Go in VSCode, and the language server + plugins + tools take forever (well, multiple tens of seconds). I have to run the UI in a browser, the server in a container, and the database in another container (with all the pain that entails). It's a mess and it's just not nearly as productive.