4 ms·

> 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

> 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.
    - AnIdiotOnTheNet 4y ago
      > 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 If I'm not using it, why is it slowing the application down? I don't buy this reasoning. Binaries are not big in modern terms and they don't go slower for including code that never runs.
      - pixl97 4y ago
        If by never runs, you mean things like automatic grammar and spell checking, which way back when were things you'd click a menu to run, and now are constantly running reassessing your lifes worth every time you click a new key. There tend to be any number of 'small' things like this that add up over time and suddenly we're running slow. It also doesn't help many applications followed the Apple school of thought and remove any configuration options so you're unable to disable much of this. This is ignoring the plethora of bad decisions in the past we're paying for now. Your word processor is likely running in a virtualized environment in your operating system because 30 years ago running full blowin programming applications with no security in your document was a good idea. Then you'll have another layer or two of anti-virus on top of it.
        AnIdiotOnTheNet 4y ago
gilbetron 4y ago
Having spent years and years with visual studio, I can guarantee it didn't function like that on the computers of the time with the typical software/driver load. He's running that on a VM that is vastly faster than what you could get at the time.
- touisteur 4y ago
  Running Visual C++ 6 long past its prime was qiote a nice experience, before I had to switch to VS2005. Sure was nice to be able to have for-loop variables not spill out the loop scope but it was depressing as hell to see a very nice and responsive machine keel over. Spending hours upon hours every day getting an app snappier and snappier and watching the VS hog making everything so slow and sad.

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.
  - AnIdiotOnTheNet 4y ago
    > 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 If I'm not using it, why is it slowing the application down? I don't buy this reasoning. Binaries are not big in modern terms and they don't go slower for including code that never runs.
    - pixl97 4y ago
      If by never runs, you mean things like automatic grammar and spell checking, which way back when were things you'd click a menu to run, and now are constantly running reassessing your lifes worth every time you click a new key. There tend to be any number of 'small' things like this that add up over time and suddenly we're running slow. It also doesn't help many applications followed the Apple school of thought and remove any configuration options so you're unable to disable much of this. This is ignoring the plethora of bad decisions in the past we're paying for now. Your word processor is likely running in a virtualized environment in your operating system because 30 years ago running full blowin programming applications with no security in your document was a good idea. Then you'll have another layer or two of anti-virus on top of it.
      - AnIdiotOnTheNet 4y ago

gilbetron 4y ago

Having spent years and years with visual studio, I can guarantee it didn't function like that on the computers of the time with the typical software/driver load. He's running that on a VM that is vastly faster than what you could get at the time.

touisteur 4y ago
Running Visual C++ 6 long past its prime was qiote a nice experience, before I had to switch to VS2005. Sure was nice to be able to have for-loop variables not spill out the loop scope but it was depressing as hell to see a very nice and responsive machine keel over. Spending hours upon hours every day getting an app snappier and snappier and watching the VS hog making everything so slow and sad.