6 ms·

A full-blown OS with an office suite fit on something like 100MB drive with everything opening and responding to user input in a snappy manner. And it didn't sh

A full-blown OS with an office suite fit on something like 100MB drive with everything opening and responding to user input in a snappy manner. And it didn't show random ads or try to track your every action. You could chose when and if to install any updates. All the while running on a 486 with a few megs of RAM. How did we get to the current state of software? Edit: I remember a few places still running 3.11 well into the 00s because it just worked for the given tasks, got out of the way and didn't require a super-computer to run. The performance difference was especially jarring when Vista came out and barely worked on contemporary hardware.

photonbeam 3y ago
Snappy is not what my memory of the IO on those machines was
- FeistySkink 3y ago
  I'm talking about general UI responsiveness. Perhaps this is just nostalgia.
  - pengaru 3y ago
    There's some truth to it just for vendor-supported graphics driver reasons alone.
  - bluedino 3y ago
    Watching 90's GUI programs is always fun because you can see the graphics as they are drawn, which I don't seem to remember from back then.
    - robinsonb5 3y ago
      If you're nostalgic for that, there's plenty of modern software with a watch-it-paint-itself UI. <coughSagecough>
      - robertlagrant 3y ago
        I have never heard anyone call Sage "modern software" before : - )
    - robertlagrant 3y ago
      Now we have spinners that twirl while we wait for graphics to transmit from another continent.
      - hulitu 3y ago
        And GUIs which redraw the whole screen when the cursor blinks. /s
  - bitwize 3y ago
    It is. Windows UIs didn't get Amiga levels of responsive until Windows 98SE or so.
    - robinsonb5 3y ago
      And then lost them again during the gap between Vista's launch and SSDs becoming ubiquitous...
      - hulitu 3y ago
        I have a SSD on my work machine. Win 10 is still slow.
      - FeistySkink 3y ago
        I had some of the first SLC SSDs. It didn't help at all. Windows 7 was a massive improvement though.
- jakewins 3y ago
  Haha I had the exact same thought. I still hear that “brrbrbrrrbrre” of the HDD arm frantically trying to deal with the overload of doing anything whatsoever.
  - junon 3y ago
    I do miss the sounds of older, more mechanical machines though. You could be doing something else in the room while your Very Long Task was running, waiting for the silence that signaled it finishing.
- garbagecoder 3y ago
  I don't recall it being snappy and I also recall it being crashy. But it was a lot better than what came before it. Given the hibernation Apple was in at the time, it was the best alternative. Between the 95 launch and OS X 10.3 was the only time I used Windows as my daily driver.
  - asveikau 3y ago
    > Given the hibernation Apple was in at the time, System 7 and Mac OS 8 were pretty good from a UI perspective, but no memory protection and no preemptive multi tasking was not great. For a long time "MacOS 9" was synonymous with classic Mac, but I always remember 8 being the last tolerable one, by the time 9 came around the foundations were more clearly inadequate, it was like the WinME of Mac OS, tiding over until OS X. > OS X 10.3 Yes. I remember some commentary on the first few versions of OS X was that they were resource hogs.
  - kragen 3y ago
    it was a lot worse than the sgi workstations i was using in 01994 also, it was a lot worse than the bsdi bsd/os ("bsd/386") workstations in the same room with them, and those were the same hardware win95 ran on. and it was a lot worse than my friend's linux box
- bluedino 3y ago
  Fast on a Pentium 75, dreadfully slow on 486/25
- mrighele 3y ago
  The IO at the time was terrible, also because,if memory serves me right, plenty of disks/controllers didn't support DMA transfers. But if you had a few megabytes to spare for caching (not everybody did, for sure) the machines would be snappy, because the UI was.
- badsectoracula 3y ago
  486 was certainly not snappy, though Win95 did technically run even on a 386 with 4MB of RAM (i know because i tried it back when Win95 was new). However on the Pentium MMX@200MHz with 32MB of RAM i had ~1996/97 it was very snappy. On the same machine i also ran my first Linux, Caldera OpenLinux 2.3 in 1999, with KDE1 where it also felt very fast.
  - alexeldeib 3y ago
    I find it hard to believe disk was snappy compared to modern devices, since original comment mentioned IO. Cpu/memory are down to program behavior in addition to hw. Disk, more size and hw. And HW improvements have dwarfed size increases (rather, facilitating them to some degree).
    - FeistySkink 3y ago
      There was plenty of software and games that could fit on a floppy or two.
    - badsectoracula 3y ago
      Depends on what sort of disk I/O you have in mind. Floppy disks were never snappy, but HDD disks were fine for the most part until the OS started using them for virtual memory. Keep in mind that things were much smaller these days - i remember thinking that my 2GB HDD would never fill up :-P. Also in the last few years disk I/O optimization took a massive nosedive, especially under Windows. My 2013 laptop has a ~5400rpm HDD was so unusable with Windows 10 that even the login screen crossfade animation stuttered from disk I/O and updates took literally hours. Meanwhile Windows 8, released only a few years prior, was able to boot my older 2008 laptop from power on to desktop in ~22 seconds (i was so impressed at the time that i uploaded a video of the boot process [0]). If you are used to the recent awful I/O performance it can be hard to imagine things not always being like that. Besides you can also check a bunch of YouTube videos with old computers running Win95, here is a short one i found that goes through the bootup process and clicks around the OS for a bit.[1] The computer in the video is actually slower than the one i personally had too. [0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ti3LQHXZ0Qg https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ti3LQHXZ0Qg [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yfh5ZcDhdZA https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yfh5ZcDhdZA
bitwize 3y ago
A 486 with a few megs of RAM coukd not run Windows 95 in a snappy manner. It would swap like bugfuck. To do Windows 95 usably, you probably need 8 MiB minimum, 12 or 16 MiB ideally. Windows 3.x you could get away with 4 MiB. And that and Office 1.0 could fit in 100 MiB. Even then, we complained about it.
- kragen 3y ago
  linux at the time could theoretically run in 2 mebibytes but worked a lot better in 4
- FeistySkink 3y ago
  According to Wikipedia, Office 95 required 28 to 88 MB of storage.
reisse 3y ago
> How did we get to the current state of software? Though playing mp3 was a heavy task consuming most of the CPU. It was hard to do anything while listening to music. Or think about how pressing Ctrl-S once a minute became a reflex, because MS Office crashed so often. Hell, anyone remembers how unstable Windows ME was? Or how desktop Linuxes were practically non-existent? Current state of software is _amazing_ compared to what was available at that time.
- hulitu 3y ago
  > Though playing mp3 was a heavy task consuming most of the CPU. It was hard to do anything while listening to music Cyrix MX166 PR200 with 32 MB of RAM was playing MP3 just fine while compiling the (linux) kernel and being snappy in the same time. The SW has just become more bloated. SW engineers those days are not constrained by resources and this leads to a lot of bad practice.
- qingcharles 3y ago
  I remember in the 90s having to actually expand my MP3s back into WAVs so my poor CPU could play them in realtime.
  - z500 3y ago
    In the 2000s once talked my mom into getting me an old Mac Centris 610 from eBay. I attempted some C programming, but I had the most success reencoding MP3s from the Final Fantasy 8 OST and copying them over to the Mac on floppies lol
- thwarted 3y ago
  Two comments in this thread (this one and a sibling) mention needing to save often due to programs crashing, as if reliability of the software is solved by showing ads and tracking activity, or is a function of the size of the program or the speed of the computers or software, the things FeistySkink had mentioned.
  - reisse 3y ago
moonchrome 3y ago
> How did we get to the current state of software? You mean how did we get to a point where : - I don't have to mash Ctrl+s because software crashers constantly - segfaults are not a daily occurrence - any random executable can't crash the OS (hell modern windows can survive a GPU driver crash) - I can use the internet relatively safely - I don't need to restart my device after every install etc. ?
- hulitu 3y ago
  > > How did we get to the current state of software? > You mean how did we get to a point where : > - I don't have to mash Ctrl+s because software crashers constantly Office 365 would like to dissagree. Not constantly but not reliable either. > - segfaults are not a daily occurrence Just because Teams just dies without writing something on the console. > - any random executable can't crash the OS (hell modern windows can survive a GPU driver crash) Yes, but a docking station is the last straw. Power management on USB is hard. > - I can use the internet relatively safely Relatively > - I don't need to restart my device after every install But after every update ... > etc. ? We are living on a planet that's revolving and evolving ...
- _ye0b 3y ago
  Completely agree. Modern software is so much better than old software. Fuck the "ooh it runs on 100MB of RAM" I don't fucking care. All I care about is that it's so much more reliable than before, I can actually get my shit done now.
  - FeistySkink 3y ago
    On rare occasions that I have to boot Windows to run some government-compatible software on a 32-core, 64GB RAM and I-don't-even-care-to-check-how-fast SSD, I have to listen to it firing on all cilinders while Defender fights Malicious Software something and Windows Updates while I'm typing some text in a barely responsive page. Truly getting my shit done. Edit: Forgot all the random software doing auto updates and notifying me about it as I go.
    - 3y ago
quotemstr 3y ago
Hot take: developers today are nowhere near as talented as those of 1995. Every single dev in 1995 was the equal of a principal SDE today. You had to be, because unless your code met that bar, it just didn't work. There were no guardrails. There was no borrow checker. There was no ASAN. There was no valgrind. Christ, you barely had a debugger. You couldn't copy and paste answers from ChatGPT or Stack Overflow: you either RTFM and comprehended it, or your code didn't work at all. Today, we spend an enormous amount of compute, memory, and latency compensating for the modal developer being unable to do safe memory management or concurrency.
wrp 3y ago
Windows 95/98 had a lot of problems due to its DOS legacy. A better focus for discussion of what was possible at the time would be BeOS or QNX.
usernew 3y ago
We got to the current state because you left out most of what the OS does now. That's like comparing a 787 to a Cessna, and stating "airplanes used to be light and easy on fuel - how did we get to the current state of the airplane? I have a work account that I can use to log into all my devices. All my docs and even the stuff on my desktop is magically synced and backed up, and I even have versions. I can open a visio on my laptop in the kitchen, draw some stuff while I wait for the coffee, then go sit on my desk and keep working on that file. When I go for a refill, it's still open in the kitchen and I keep working. Yes - one document, open at the same time on 2 machines, changes being synced live on the screen w/o closing. When I change my preferences to not select the entire word at a time, it magically saves in every outlook install on all my machines. Plug something in and the driver for it is magically downloaded and installed. Have disk? Remember that? Different sizes and shapes and density monitors? Monitors - many of them. Gramma can use the computer now - you don't need a geek. Yes, the gramma interface is annoying for the tech user, but the tech user can easily put in a new window manager or tweak registry - the new dumbed down default opened computers to everyone - not just geeks. Tracking? Hmm, don't see any. Maybe because you can (a) turn it off, and (b) you can install a version w/o it. Yes, if you install the consumer version of Windows made for gramma, it will track everything. That's because it's for gramma, and tracking helps make the next version easier for gramma. You also don't want gramma to be able to turn off updates, because she will. Updates on my machine? They were set to download and notify - never install, by default. But no, you don't get that on the gramma home version. Do you ever get into a cessna and complain they don't have room for all the 40 members of your group? That's not a valid complaint. That's a bad choice of right tool for the job. The OS is big because the 787 is big. And I say all that, as someone who hates MS and Windows with a deep, long, hard, smelly brown passion.
- FeistySkink 3y ago
  Does any of this require a supercomputer? How has the computing paradigm fundamentally change in 30 years?
  - usernew 3y ago
    [flagged]

photonbeam 3y ago

Snappy is not what my memory of the IO on those machines was

FeistySkink 3y ago
I'm talking about general UI responsiveness. Perhaps this is just nostalgia.
- pengaru 3y ago
  There's some truth to it just for vendor-supported graphics driver reasons alone.
- bluedino 3y ago
  Watching 90's GUI programs is always fun because you can see the graphics as they are drawn, which I don't seem to remember from back then.
  - robinsonb5 3y ago
    If you're nostalgic for that, there's plenty of modern software with a watch-it-paint-itself UI. <coughSagecough>
    - robertlagrant 3y ago
      I have never heard anyone call Sage "modern software" before : - )
  - robertlagrant 3y ago
    Now we have spinners that twirl while we wait for graphics to transmit from another continent.
    - hulitu 3y ago
      And GUIs which redraw the whole screen when the cursor blinks. /s
- bitwize 3y ago
  It is. Windows UIs didn't get Amiga levels of responsive until Windows 98SE or so.
  - robinsonb5 3y ago
    And then lost them again during the gap between Vista's launch and SSDs becoming ubiquitous...
    - hulitu 3y ago
      I have a SSD on my work machine. Win 10 is still slow.
    - FeistySkink 3y ago
      I had some of the first SLC SSDs. It didn't help at all. Windows 7 was a massive improvement though.
jakewins 3y ago
Haha I had the exact same thought. I still hear that “brrbrbrrrbrre” of the HDD arm frantically trying to deal with the overload of doing anything whatsoever.
- junon 3y ago
  I do miss the sounds of older, more mechanical machines though. You could be doing something else in the room while your Very Long Task was running, waiting for the silence that signaled it finishing.
garbagecoder 3y ago
I don't recall it being snappy and I also recall it being crashy. But it was a lot better than what came before it. Given the hibernation Apple was in at the time, it was the best alternative. Between the 95 launch and OS X 10.3 was the only time I used Windows as my daily driver.
- asveikau 3y ago
  > Given the hibernation Apple was in at the time, System 7 and Mac OS 8 were pretty good from a UI perspective, but no memory protection and no preemptive multi tasking was not great. For a long time "MacOS 9" was synonymous with classic Mac, but I always remember 8 being the last tolerable one, by the time 9 came around the foundations were more clearly inadequate, it was like the WinME of Mac OS, tiding over until OS X. > OS X 10.3 Yes. I remember some commentary on the first few versions of OS X was that they were resource hogs.
- kragen 3y ago
  it was a lot worse than the sgi workstations i was using in 01994 also, it was a lot worse than the bsdi bsd/os ("bsd/386") workstations in the same room with them, and those were the same hardware win95 ran on. and it was a lot worse than my friend's linux box
bluedino 3y ago
Fast on a Pentium 75, dreadfully slow on 486/25
mrighele 3y ago
The IO at the time was terrible, also because,if memory serves me right, plenty of disks/controllers didn't support DMA transfers. But if you had a few megabytes to spare for caching (not everybody did, for sure) the machines would be snappy, because the UI was.
badsectoracula 3y ago
486 was certainly not snappy, though Win95 did technically run even on a 386 with 4MB of RAM (i know because i tried it back when Win95 was new). However on the Pentium MMX@200MHz with 32MB of RAM i had ~1996/97 it was very snappy. On the same machine i also ran my first Linux, Caldera OpenLinux 2.3 in 1999, with KDE1 where it also felt very fast.
- alexeldeib 3y ago
  I find it hard to believe disk was snappy compared to modern devices, since original comment mentioned IO. Cpu/memory are down to program behavior in addition to hw. Disk, more size and hw. And HW improvements have dwarfed size increases (rather, facilitating them to some degree).
  - FeistySkink 3y ago
    There was plenty of software and games that could fit on a floppy or two.
  - badsectoracula 3y ago
    Depends on what sort of disk I/O you have in mind. Floppy disks were never snappy, but HDD disks were fine for the most part until the OS started using them for virtual memory. Keep in mind that things were much smaller these days - i remember thinking that my 2GB HDD would never fill up :-P. Also in the last few years disk I/O optimization took a massive nosedive, especially under Windows. My 2013 laptop has a ~5400rpm HDD was so unusable with Windows 10 that even the login screen crossfade animation stuttered from disk I/O and updates took literally hours. Meanwhile Windows 8, released only a few years prior, was able to boot my older 2008 laptop from power on to desktop in ~22 seconds (i was so impressed at the time that i uploaded a video of the boot process [0]). If you are used to the recent awful I/O performance it can be hard to imagine things not always being like that. Besides you can also check a bunch of YouTube videos with old computers running Win95, here is a short one i found that goes through the bootup process and clicks around the OS for a bit.[1] The computer in the video is actually slower than the one i personally had too. [0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ti3LQHXZ0Qg https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ti3LQHXZ0Qg [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yfh5ZcDhdZA https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yfh5ZcDhdZA

bitwize 3y ago

A 486 with a few megs of RAM coukd not run Windows 95 in a snappy manner. It would swap like bugfuck. To do Windows 95 usably, you probably need 8 MiB minimum, 12 or 16 MiB ideally. Windows 3.x you could get away with 4 MiB. And that and Office 1.0 could fit in 100 MiB. Even then, we complained about it.

kragen 3y ago
linux at the time could theoretically run in 2 mebibytes but worked a lot better in 4
FeistySkink 3y ago
According to Wikipedia, Office 95 required 28 to 88 MB of storage.

reisse 3y ago

> How did we get to the current state of software? Though playing mp3 was a heavy task consuming most of the CPU. It was hard to do anything while listening to music. Or think about how pressing Ctrl-S once a minute became a reflex, because MS Office crashed so often. Hell, anyone remembers how unstable Windows ME was? Or how desktop Linuxes were practically non-existent? Current state of software is _amazing_ compared to what was available at that time.

hulitu 3y ago
> Though playing mp3 was a heavy task consuming most of the CPU. It was hard to do anything while listening to music Cyrix MX166 PR200 with 32 MB of RAM was playing MP3 just fine while compiling the (linux) kernel and being snappy in the same time. The SW has just become more bloated. SW engineers those days are not constrained by resources and this leads to a lot of bad practice.
qingcharles 3y ago
I remember in the 90s having to actually expand my MP3s back into WAVs so my poor CPU could play them in realtime.
- z500 3y ago
  In the 2000s once talked my mom into getting me an old Mac Centris 610 from eBay. I attempted some C programming, but I had the most success reencoding MP3s from the Final Fantasy 8 OST and copying them over to the Mac on floppies lol
thwarted 3y ago
Two comments in this thread (this one and a sibling) mention needing to save often due to programs crashing, as if reliability of the software is solved by showing ads and tracking activity, or is a function of the size of the program or the speed of the computers or software, the things FeistySkink had mentioned.
- reisse 3y ago

moonchrome 3y ago

> How did we get to the current state of software? You mean how did we get to a point where : - I don't have to mash Ctrl+s because software crashers constantly - segfaults are not a daily occurrence - any random executable can't crash the OS (hell modern windows can survive a GPU driver crash) - I can use the internet relatively safely - I don't need to restart my device after every install etc. ?

hulitu 3y ago
> > How did we get to the current state of software? > You mean how did we get to a point where : > - I don't have to mash Ctrl+s because software crashers constantly Office 365 would like to dissagree. Not constantly but not reliable either. > - segfaults are not a daily occurrence Just because Teams just dies without writing something on the console. > - any random executable can't crash the OS (hell modern windows can survive a GPU driver crash) Yes, but a docking station is the last straw. Power management on USB is hard. > - I can use the internet relatively safely Relatively > - I don't need to restart my device after every install But after every update ... > etc. ? We are living on a planet that's revolving and evolving ...
_ye0b 3y ago
Completely agree. Modern software is so much better than old software. Fuck the "ooh it runs on 100MB of RAM" I don't fucking care. All I care about is that it's so much more reliable than before, I can actually get my shit done now.
- FeistySkink 3y ago
  On rare occasions that I have to boot Windows to run some government-compatible software on a 32-core, 64GB RAM and I-don't-even-care-to-check-how-fast SSD, I have to listen to it firing on all cilinders while Defender fights Malicious Software something and Windows Updates while I'm typing some text in a barely responsive page. Truly getting my shit done. Edit: Forgot all the random software doing auto updates and notifying me about it as I go.
  - 3y ago

quotemstr 3y ago

Hot take: developers today are nowhere near as talented as those of 1995. Every single dev in 1995 was the equal of a principal SDE today. You had to be, because unless your code met that bar, it just didn't work. There were no guardrails. There was no borrow checker. There was no ASAN. There was no valgrind. Christ, you barely had a debugger. You couldn't copy and paste answers from ChatGPT or Stack Overflow: you either RTFM and comprehended it, or your code didn't work at all. Today, we spend an enormous amount of compute, memory, and latency compensating for the modal developer being unable to do safe memory management or concurrency.

wrp 3y ago

Windows 95/98 had a lot of problems due to its DOS legacy. A better focus for discussion of what was possible at the time would be BeOS or QNX.

usernew 3y ago

We got to the current state because you left out most of what the OS does now. That's like comparing a 787 to a Cessna, and stating "airplanes used to be light and easy on fuel - how did we get to the current state of the airplane? I have a work account that I can use to log into all my devices. All my docs and even the stuff on my desktop is magically synced and backed up, and I even have versions. I can open a visio on my laptop in the kitchen, draw some stuff while I wait for the coffee, then go sit on my desk and keep working on that file. When I go for a refill, it's still open in the kitchen and I keep working. Yes - one document, open at the same time on 2 machines, changes being synced live on the screen w/o closing. When I change my preferences to not select the entire word at a time, it magically saves in every outlook install on all my machines. Plug something in and the driver for it is magically downloaded and installed. Have disk? Remember that? Different sizes and shapes and density monitors? Monitors - many of them. Gramma can use the computer now - you don't need a geek. Yes, the gramma interface is annoying for the tech user, but the tech user can easily put in a new window manager or tweak registry - the new dumbed down default opened computers to everyone - not just geeks. Tracking? Hmm, don't see any. Maybe because you can (a) turn it off, and (b) you can install a version w/o it. Yes, if you install the consumer version of Windows made for gramma, it will track everything. That's because it's for gramma, and tracking helps make the next version easier for gramma. You also don't want gramma to be able to turn off updates, because she will. Updates on my machine? They were set to download and notify - never install, by default. But no, you don't get that on the gramma home version. Do you ever get into a cessna and complain they don't have room for all the 40 members of your group? That's not a valid complaint. That's a bad choice of right tool for the job. The OS is big because the 787 is big. And I say all that, as someone who hates MS and Windows with a deep, long, hard, smelly brown passion.

FeistySkink 3y ago
Does any of this require a supercomputer? How has the computing paradigm fundamentally change in 30 years?
- usernew 3y ago
  [flagged]