40 ms·

Windows NT on 600MHz machine opens apps instantly. What happened?

• reportgunner 3y ago
  Telemetry happened.
  • HackOfAllTrades 3y ago
    Nope. You can turn telemetry off and not see any improvement. Simple reason: your app isn't waiting for telemetry to be sent.
    • eimrine 3y ago
      You can not really turn telemetry off, maybe your apps just keep working against you, collecting the info to send after the next system update which use to enable all "disabled" telemetry features.
  • jeffbee 3y ago
    If anything, doesn't this demonstrate that Windows lacks a sufficient amount of telemetry? If it was sending home stats about how long it takes to draw these windows, and profiles of what the program was doing, then they could target those and make it faster.
    • yomlica8 3y ago
      I see you're operating under the assumption that the purpose of telemetry is to improve the user experience. I'm not sure that is even a business goal inside Microsoft. I think due to perverse incentives it causes the exact opposite to happen. Why did the Windows calculator need to be remade with a much slower and less responsive version? Telemetry probably showed the calculator was frequently used, so a Project Manager targeted it for "improvement" and it was then ruined.
      • jeffbee 3y ago
        I don't know since I never use the Windows Calculator but it seems probable to me that the newer version has improvements that you don't need and therefore do not perceive. Perhaps it is more accessible to the blind, or the support for Urdu numerals is new. A lot of the reasons why old versions of Windows ran apps instantly is that they excluded the entire non-European world and did not even attempt to deal with complex languages.
        • rep_lodsb 3y ago
          >A lot of the reasons why old versions of Windows ran apps instantly is that they excluded the entire non-European world and did not even attempt to deal with complex languages. There was Windows 3.2 in 1994 (not to be confused with "Win32", despite the name of the HTML file): http://toastytech.com/guis/win32.html http://toastytech.com/guis/win32.html Yes the western versions of Windows at the time didn't include support for Chinese (etc.) language. But there is really no reason why they should - if the user's language can be represented in an 8 bit codepage, why should they have to pay any price in performance for something they will never use? Conversely, would a Chinese-speaking user prefer an operating system designed to support all the other languages that exist, with an implementation that is likely not as specifically tailored to their requirements?
• kneebonian 3y ago
  Every developer for the past two decades has been banking on Moore to save them from the consequences of poorly written code and importing a boatload of 3rd party dependencies but Moore is running out of funds and the bill is coming due. That's what happened.
  • toyg 3y ago
    I think you can add a couple of decades to that statement. People were already complaining about poor C code, when you could write "proper" performant code in assembler...
• AlawamiAZ 3y ago
  Wirth's law: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wirth's_law https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wirth's_law
• ynniv 3y ago
  Software is slow because being slow isn't fatal.
• kobalsky 3y ago
  I'd love to see it booting and then cold starting the apps, for comparison.
• jamal-kumar 3y ago
  I think a lot of that could be brought back to something closer to resembling immediacy if you go and take the time to remove all the stuff they introduced along with vista (The fadein/fadeout animations especially)
  • toyg 3y ago
    I think you mean "with XP". So bloated, with all that bevelling and shadows and DRM...
    • blarghyblarg 3y ago
      Windows 2000 was peak Windows, minus security. Security is miles and miles better today. Nothing will change my mind about this, ever. It's been downhill since then.
      • vel0city 3y ago
        Does Windows 2000 handle native Bluetooth better? What about WiFi SSID management? Does it ship with good IPv6 support?
        • blarghyblarg 3y ago
          no, no, and no. Lets see if we can petition Microsoft to add them, and then we'll see if Win2000 still runs decently fast on a P4 with 4gb of ram. My guess is: yes, it will. Somehow, in the past 15 years, "progress" seems to include "software keeps getting noticeably worse, but anyone pointing this out has to be shot down because progress."
          • vel0city 3y ago
            Ah, there's another question, I'm running 32GB of RAM currently on this machine and 64GB at home. How well does Windows 2000 support >4GB RAM or SMP? Does it come with a good hypervisor? I do like running a lot of VMs in Hyper-V as well. Sure sounds like there's a ton of gaps in things I really want out of my operating system on Windows 2000...
• yomlica8 3y ago
  It blows my mind how unresponsive modern tech is, and it frustrates me constantly. What makes it even worse is how unpredictable the lags are so you can't even train yourself around it. I was watching Halt and Catch Fire and in the first season the engineering team makes a great effort to meet something called the "Doherty Threshold" to keep the responsiveness of the machine so the user doesn't get frustrated and lose interest. I guess that is lost to time!
  • sidewndr46 3y ago
    Even worse is the new trend of web pages optimizing for page load time. You wind up with a page that loads "instantly" but has almost none of the data you need displayed. Instead there are 2 or 3 AJAX requests to load the data & populate the DOM. Each one results in a repaint, wasting CPU and causing the page content to move around.
    • leidenfrost 3y ago
      There was a small accordion in some Google search results that opened around ~1 second after the results page was loaded and I think it was the most infuriating thing ever. And we are talking about Google here.
      • amaccuish 3y ago
        The one where you would go to click on the first result and it would expand seemingly perfectly timed in between and you’d end up somewhere else?
        • yomlica8 3y ago
          I want to say some webpages actually do this to make you accidentally click on ads but I have no proof.
          • michaelt 3y ago
            We A/B tested it, and the 750ms accordion produces maximum revenue. Why do you hate evidence-based decision making? /s
• 762236 3y ago
  It is such a pain to write Win32 code that you didn't have time to add all the features that would slow down program launch.
  • sidewndr46 3y ago
    As cynical as this comment may be, there may be an element of truth to it. If it is time consuming to add a bunch of visual effects and transitions, you aren't likely to spend time doing that if you could instead be adding useful features.
    • kaba0 3y ago
      Most software is not developed by a single person and adding animations have very little overlap with most functionality, so it is almost completely parallelizable.
  • pkphilip 3y ago
    I know you probably meant it in jest but as someone who wrote a bunch of desktop apps at one time, it was actually easier to develop desktop apps in tools like Delphi in the 1990s than it is to develop apps now.
    • matwood 3y ago
      For me, VB6 was the pinnacle of Windows desktop app development. When I first starting building web sites/apps it was such a huge step backwards.
      • javajosh 3y ago
        It was/is a huge step backwards in terms of DX, but an infinite step forward for distribution. Distribution is the ONLY problem, which is why the shift happened.
        • matwood 3y ago
• verall 3y ago
  A lot of people are bringing up Wirth's law or other things, but I want to get more specific. Has anyone else noticed how bad sign-on redirect flows have gotten in the past ~5 years? It used to be you clicked sign in, and then you were redirected to a login page. Now I typically see my browser go through 4+ redirects, stuck at a white screen for 10-60 seconds. I'm a systems C++ developer and I know nothing about webdev. Can someone _please_ fill me in on what's going on here and how every single website has this new slowness?
  • thefourthchime 3y ago
    OMG Yes. At my megacorp I work at they have this internal HR/401k site thing. I think it goes through 30+ redirects to get anywhere. It's INSANE. We have something called "Pitstop" and clicking on the list of tickets takes 30s+ to load.
    • verall 3y ago
      My record is Jira successfully loading a page in around 8 minutes. It seriously sat on a white screen for 8 minutes, then boom there's the page - no interaction or F5. What on earth could it have been doing for that long??
      • mschuster91 3y ago
        IME that's usually because: - the database and/or the Tomcat server have way too low RAM and start swapping like no end - way too many people had admin access in Jira and installed a metric shit ton of plugins - the AD configuration is messed up and instead of only user accounts it loads (and verifies) tens of thousands of user and machine accounts at each login
        • verall 3y ago
          It's probably the plugins, but even then I would have assumed that timeouts would have made it impossible to load a page that slow.
• luciusdomitius 3y ago
  I am using xfce with a minimal set of services and all the system apps and most others open instantly. Alt+tab is also always instant. It is an MS, Apple, Gnome/KDE problem, not modern computers one.
  • roomey 3y ago
    Absolutely, after using xfce for years I find windows very frustrating to use, to the point I can see my colleagues using it and I can see the lag they just think is normal. Imagine if you work on computers for hours everyday what the cumulative impact is
• jeffbee 3y ago
  Only Windows has this issue. There's nothing about my Mac or my Chromebook that is anything less than immediate. You can quibble about whether the compositor introducing an extra frame of latency was worth the tradeoff, but that is on the margins.
  • spatulon 3y ago
    The Mac is no better, in my experience. I just timed how long it takes to open the Calculator app – the simplest app I could think of – on my 2019 MacBook Pro, and the window appears 600ms after clicking on the dock icon. I would not call that immediate, and it only gets worse when you try more complex applications, especially those written in Electron.
    • jeffhuys 3y ago
      VSCode is ~1s. Terminal ~300ms. iTerm ~400ms. Calculator ~300ms. Firefox ~1s. Textedit ~200ms. Slack ~1s to appear, ~5s to load. Sequel Ace ~800ms. Fork ~500ms. All my subjective experience, but it's basically instant in experience. I think it also helps that it doesn't show fade in/out animations, which LOOK sluggish to me. M1 MacBook Pro from 2020...
    • jeffbee 3y ago
      Code comes from the same shop that writes Windows. However, I would compare that with older software of similar purpose and capability. How long does it take to launch Visual Studio '97? According to some youtube screen recordings, VS '97 needs over a minute to draw a window even with a hot file cache, which is consistent with my memory.
    • crazygringo 3y ago
      On my M1 MBA, I just tried measuring opening Calculator using QuickTime screen recording, and then the "trim" function to determine 10 ms precision. It takes 260 ms. Definitely fast enough for me.
• me551ah 3y ago
  Electron is probably the biggest culprit. There are still a few native apps that I use like mIRC, foobar2000 and they always feel very snappy.
  • garganzol 3y ago
    Electron feels snappy on modern machines as well. If only it took a bit less RAM than it currently takes to run an app. I read somewhere that Webkit and specifically Chrome are optimized towards more efficient CPU usage in the expense of a larger RAM use. Probably makes sense in terms of energy consumption but you need more RAM.
• SirMaster 3y ago
  Apps got a lot larger? Also they added desktop compositing animations. Opening a command prompt or mspaint is not exactly demanding and opens instantly on modern computers too when all desktop compositing animations are turned off.
  • agilob 3y ago
    >Apps got a lot larger? This guy is also comparing old HDD to SSD, RAM speed is also magnitudes faster
  • casey2 3y ago
    Instantly? Are we watching the same video? Have you not used any version of Windows past 2000? It took well over a second for explorer to open (and even longer to load) on the modern laptop; It even took over a second for the terminal to load. Having native programs open in under a frame on modern hardware would be trivial just ask the kernel team to write the application software.
    • SirMaster 3y ago
      I literally just tested it on my Win10 PC and it's instant (I have all compositing animations turned off).
• waboremo 3y ago
  We just rely on layers and layers of cruft. We then demand improvements when things get too bad, but we're only operating on the very top layer where even dramatic improvements and magic are irrelevant. Windows is especially bad at this due to so much legacy reliance, which is also kind of why people still bother with Windows. Not to claim that Linux or MacOS don't have similar problems (ahem, Catalyst) but it's not as overt. A lot of the blame gets placed on easy to see things like an Electron app, but really the problem is so substantial that even native apps perform slower, use more resources, and aren't doing a whole lot more than they used to. Windows Terminal is a great example of this. Combine this with the fact that most teams aren't given the space to actually maintain (because maintaining doesn't result in direct profits), and you've got a winning combination!
  • leidenfrost 3y ago
    Not only that. It's not Wirth's Law. It's the fact that manpower can't keep up with the exploding amount of complexity and use cases that happened to computing in the last decades. We went from CLI commands and a few graphical tools for the few that actually wanted to engage with computers, to an entire ecosystem of entertainment where everyone in the world wants 'puters to predict what could they want to see or buy next. To maintain the same efficiency in code we had in the 90-2000s, we would need to instantly jump the seniority of every developer in the world, right from Junior to Senior+. Yes, you can recruit and train developers, but how many Tanenbaums and Torvalds can you train per year? The biggest amount of cruft not only went to dark patterns and features in programs like animations and rendering that some people regard it as "useless" (which is debatable at minimum). But the layers went also to improve "developer experience". And I'm not talking about NodeJS only. I'm talking about languages like Python, Lua, or even the JVM. There's a whole universe of hoops and loops and safeguards made so that the not-so-genius developer doesn't shoot themselves in the foot so easily. I'm sure that you can delete all of that, only leave languages like Rust, C and C++ and get a 100x jump in performance. But you'd also be annihilating 90% of the software development workforce. Good luck trying to watch a movie in Netflix or counting calories on a smartwatch.
    • hcarvalhoalves 3y ago
• garganzol 3y ago
  It's cheaper to beef up the hardware than to fine-tune the software. Fine-tuning may be excruciating because it hinders all other activities related to the software development.
• II2II 3y ago
  They're loading the toy applications that came with Windows 3.51 an operating system developed when 486's were common and first generation Pentiums were the bleeding edge, so around 100 MHz. (Also, using clock speed alone discounts any generational bumps in efficiency.) Of course it will be fast.
  • mrkeen 3y ago
    The same apps were opened on his modern machine for comparison. Are windows explorer, notepad and command prompt toy apps?
    • dtx1 3y ago
      > Are windows explorer, notepad and command prompt toy apps? Yes.
    • II2II 3y ago
      Please don't take my excuses the wrong way, since I wish the performance in software reflected the increased performance of hardware, but we are comparing the performance of an operating system released five years prior to the CPU it is being run on to the performance of an operating system contemporary to the CPU. A couple of other things to note: the comparison uses a bleeding edge Intel processor for Windows NT and, to try to be polite about it, a processor optimized for energy efficiency for Windows 11. (If the tests depended upon CPU performance alone, the benchmarks for processor in the Surface Go 2 are comparable to my 11 year old i5 3330. That i5 wasn't even a high end processor at the time.) The second thing to consider is that performance gains were much more dramatic back then, so even if we could test Windows 11 on a 2026 processor, I wouldn't expect such dramatic results.
  • a2tech 3y ago
    Windows 95 running on a 133mhz computer would open Excel (I believe from Office 98) essentially instantly once the machine was up and running. Which unless you had AV running took under a minute.
  • michaelt 3y ago
    Modern OSes have the technology to make even the calculator app load slowly https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/gnome-calculator/+bug/1797734 https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/gnome-calculator/+...
• beardog 3y ago
  See also "input lag" by dan luu: https://danluu.com/input-lag/ https://danluu.com/input-lag/ It is not the main thing going on in this twitter post, but it does show a way modern computers feel slower than older machines.
• deadletters 3y ago
  Open the task manager n00b.
  • jimjimjim 3y ago
    In modern windows the task manager takes much much longer to open than it did 10years ago
    • deadletters 3y ago
      Sometimes, but opening it shows you what you is making things go slow.
• dstaley 3y ago
  I use WinMerge[1] a lot, and it's always impressed me how it immediately opens to a useable state. So it's absolutely still possible to write Windows software that can open instantly. I think the biggest issue, which multiple other comments have identified, is that people just don't care. Apps open fast enough these days, and no one is pushing back on developers to improve their app's startup performance. [1]: https://winmerge.org https://winmerge.org
• NovemberWhiskey 3y ago
  Some additional things to note: Windows NT 3.51 minimum hardware requirements were a i386 or i486 processor at 25MHz or better and 12MB of RAM for the workstation version. So the 600MHz machine with 128MB RAM is exceeding the minimum requirement by (conservatively) 24x in CPU speed and 10x in RAM, along with all the architectural improvements from going from the i386 to what's presumably a Pentium III-class machine. If that's actually a Surface Go 2 running Windows 11 - well, it doesn't have a quad-core i5 as the tweet claims - the Surface Go 2 came with a Pentium Gold or a Core m3; both with only two cores and of those is an ultra-low power variant. As such, that exactly meets the minimum CPU specification for Windows 11 and only doubles the minimum 4GB RAM requirement. I'm not trying to apologize for the difference here, but it's not an entirely like-for-like comparison.
  • a2tech 3y ago
    If you ran Windows NT on the bare minimum it was not as slow (barring hitting swap) as Windows 11 on the bare minimum hardware. Not even close. Windows NT on the minimum hardware wasn't a joy exactly but it was certainly workable. If you run Win11 on the bare minimum you'll very quickly learn to hate everything.
    • deleted 3y ago
      [deleted]
    • philistine 3y ago
      Are you sure this applies to laptops from back then? The minimal laptop that could run NT must have been so much worse than a desktop.
      • bamfly 3y ago
        The min specs would be the same, laptop or desktop. A laptop with those kind of specs back then probably just had terrible battery life and was really big & heavy, didn't throttle down or anything. Not like today when you'd expect the "same part" or "same clock speed" to not really be the same, between a mobile and desktop chip.
• Aloha 3y ago
  Well of course it does. WinNT 3.51 was released in 1995 - the fastest PC in 1995 was either a Pentium or Pentium Pro at ~100 MHz - in 2000 a 600 MHz machine is likely a Coppermine PIII. A fairly common amount of RAM in 1995 to Run WinNT would have been around 32 megs of ram, 64 megs would be especially generous. 128 megs is a high end workstation amount of memory. The ATA interface also doubled in performance between 1995 and 2000. There were significant security and stability improvements between NT 3.51 and Windows 2000 - particularly with changes to the driver model that increased stability. (even more so between 2000 and Windows 10/11)
  • madars 3y ago
    That's right, Windows 95 on a 600 MHz machine would be even snappier. However, later down the thread the author demonstrates Windows 2000: >For those thinking that the comparison was unfair, here is Windows 2000 on the same 600MHz machine. Both are from the same year, 1999. Note how the immediacy is still exactly the same and hadn’t been ruined yet. https://twitter.com/jmmv/status/1672073678102872065 https://twitter.com/jmmv/status/1672073678102872065
    • Aloha 3y ago
      I tested on my own local win10 VM, and I get similar performance for the inbuilt windows apps. cmd, control panel, and most of the things in admin tools launch virtually instantly. This is for a machine that is running on relatively slow spinning disks too.
    • grork 3y ago
      As someone who was hardcore into Windows around that time, all my memory has is waiting desperately for windows to open & apps to load. I remember watching the left-side of explorer paint before the icons came in, and how the icons would paint in order; some days you’d see black squares paint, then the icon. This was running on some dual-socket, 192mb, 7200rpm spinning disk - it wasn’t a slouch. I also struggle with the comparison between high-end hardware of yesteryear, and low end hardware of today and comparing. Try running win2k in 16mb, 300mhz P2, and a 4800rpm drive. The only times I remember experiencing things this fast in my computing career were (a) with a fair wind, and a fully warmed cache that didn’t hit the disk & was a trivial app (b) the first time I used my Apple M1 Max MBP.
• cmiles74 3y ago
  Back in the day I had a Windows NT 3.51 machine sitting on my desk, right next to a HP 9000 workstation (PA-RISC) running HP-UX; I do not remember the NT machine being this responsive. It wasn't terrible but I did most of my work on the 9000 because it felt faster than the NT machine. I wonder if the 600MHz machine in this video is fitted with an SSD of some sort, this would load applications far faster than the average hard drive from 1998.
  • unregistereddev 3y ago
    You might be onto something. As P3 class hardware started to age, IDE to CompactFlash adapters came on the market as an option to replace aging mechanical hard drives.
• pacifika 3y ago
  iOS is pretty fast though.
  • jimjimjim 3y ago
    Everything in ios has animations that gives the appearance of sluggishness
• raldi 3y ago
  Wait’ll you hear about changing TV channels in 1985.
  • elbac 3y ago
    'What is a TV channel?' (said by my daughter to me recently)
  • reaperducer 3y ago
    Wait’ll you hear about changing TV channels in 1985. Turning on a TV in 1975: wait 60 seconds for the tube to warm up. Turning on a TV in 1985: wait 10 seconds for the tube to warm up. Turning on a TV in 1995: wait 2 seconds for the tube to warm up. Turning on a TV in 2023: stare at the LG logo for 20 seconds, then wait another 30 seconds "for Smart Services to become available" in order to change the channel.
    • sgt 3y ago
      Or for my nearly brand new Samsung smart TV - starts up in about 5 seconds, then you can happily watch TV and I did for a few months until it forced an update, which slowed things down. Now things still work, but the TV needs a restart about once a week if I use the built in apps like YouTube or Netflix. Finally bought an Apple TV 4K and it "boots" directly into it. Such a relief! (Well, except for that bizarre touch remote that came with the Apple TV, but that's a small price to pay!)
  • rirze 3y ago
    It's asinine how slow service provider's boxes work nowadays. Our Xfinity cable box has a .5-1.0 input lag, (more like 2secs for ff/rw/play) and it's the same even after customer service replaced it with another unit. What a waste of resources...
• matwood 3y ago
  People bring up cruft and lack of optimization, but leave out the user demand for features.
  • mrkeen 3y ago
    Did notepad and command prompt really get that many more features?
    • vel0city 3y ago
      Command prompt (now Terminal)? Yes, tons. A massive amount of new features really. Notepad? Kind of. Newer UI library so it handles display scaling a lot better. Handles different line endings and encodings much better now. Handles the system UI dark mode. The interface supports tabs.
      • moralestapia 3y ago
        >Command prompt (now Terminal)? Yes, tons. A massive amount of new features really. Can you name a few that could explain the 1,000x performance cost? Also, have you heard the story about the guy who told MS that their terminal was shit and could be fixed, only to be ridiculed by a fleet of "super elite 500k/year engineers" that in the end turned out to be ... wrong?
        • vel0city 3y ago
          Display scaling support Tabbed interface Support for command interpreters other than just CMD Multiple profiles for different interpreters and settings Support for a much wider range of console control characters and terminal emulations (ssh'ing into linux boxes works really well) Way better resizing support Clickable URL detection More (and customizable) keyboard shortcuts Support for background images Support for transparency Configurations as easy to transfer JSON files Copying text is a way better experience Just a few of the features that I use all the time. I can't stand using cmd.exe anymore, its an absolutely miserable experience in comparison.
• themitigating 3y ago
  Windoes NT on a machine from the day was incredibly slow. I remember opening Netscape Navigator and took minutes.
• markus_zhang 3y ago
  TBF I have been using a Windows 10 machine on a 2017 lenovo laptop for a couple of years and I like the experience. Once I managed to turn off all those widgets Windows 10 brought with it the experience improved a lot. Of course I'm not using any heavy duty applications, and I only play classic games for which even a Pentium is a bit of overkill.
• andsoitis 3y ago
  Opening Notepad, a DOS prompt, and Paint do not faithfully represent the app load speed experience on that hardware. Try Microsoft Office, or CorelDraw, etc.
  • BaseballPhysics 3y ago
    Yup. Meanwhile I can fire up nvim or Gnumeric and they also launch basically instantaneously. Selection bias, it's a thing.
  • _dain_ 3y ago
    You can open notepad, a terminal prompt, and paint on modern Windows and it will be sluggish.
  • hollandheese 3y ago
    Word 97 opens instantly on my Pentium MMX 200 Mhz with Windows 98 SE (64MB PC66 SDRAM, 8 GB CF Card running in PIO Mode 4). This is a little faster than my Surface Pro 9 opening Word 365.
• whywhywhywhy 3y ago
  What disgusts me the most is on the modern system every single window either animates in a glitched empty then flickers to redraw properly or animates in an interface but then flashes as it redraws to show what it’s supposed to be. Resizing makes the windows flicker disgustingly. Even the mouse cursor changing to the resize widget often draws a large glitched cursor for a single frame on every windows machine I’ve used sometimes. If someone ever fixed this trash and made the OS feel solid and not a flickering glitchy mess I’d be in their debt.
• mydriasis 3y ago
  Not gonna lie, my memory serves me well. I remember using Windows 98 on an old PC, and it was hot garbage. It took generations to boot up, and applications took generations to open. My story is anecdata, but so it this twitter post. These days I have an infinitely snappy experience with desktop linux on an SSD.
  • dehrmann 3y ago
    SSDs and adequate memory were the two things that happened where PCs finally started feeling snappy.
    • mydriasis 3y ago
      Another anecdote: I fixed up a computer running vista for a secretary once. It had been running with a hard disk and would take upwards of a minute to load. After replacing the HDD with an SSD, it booted so fast that you got thrown onto the desktop and all of the "startup sounds" played all at once, the system seemingly booting faster than it could cope with!
    • 0xbadcafebee 3y ago
      PCs were incredibly snappy before SSDs, and didn't need much RAM at all. Gnome 1.4 was like lightning, whereas KDE was noticeably slower. You don't need fast hardware to have snappy apps. Most of the microcontrolled devices you deal with day to day are clocked between 4 and 25MHz. Hard drives are only needed to access files once and load them into memory, and microcontrolled devices have like 256kB-4mB of memory. The only reason apps aren't snappy is programmers fail to make proper use of the hardware and OS.
  • mike_hearn 3y ago
    A good way to reality check this is to think about how frequently we saw loading splash screens then vs now. Back then it was common. Office suites, IDEs, browsers, pretty much any non-trivial app would show you a splash screen whilst it loaded. Some even had progress bars in the splash screens. Nowadays even web apps don't have splashes (though you could argue that grey loading flashers are the modern equivalent).
• throw7 3y ago
  Simple answer: It's abstractions all the way down. With an old machine, you can feel the "slowness" doing a similar test with something coded in assembly vs compiled. The reality is, to be fast, do less.
  • jayd16 3y ago
    Abstraction is maybe the incidental reason start up is slow but the real reason is because no one cares. You don't toggle apps open and closed so an initial wait to load up more features just isn't a priority.
• Solvency 3y ago
  And yesterday I was mercilessly downvoted for saying VSCode is slow compared to software from decades ago.
  • cmcaleer 3y ago
    At least you’re getting a lot for that, though I don’t love Electron either. What does notepad.exe of today have over notepad.exe of 25 years ago? UTF-8 I guess. Not sure if find and replace was a thing in the olden days. Better line ending support too. I’m really wracking my brains here to think of stuff
    • toast0 3y ago
      Line numbers came in with XP, I think.
  • SkeuomorphicBee 3y ago
    I'll have to agree to disagree. In my experience IDEs are the one type of software that were always slow, Eclipse is two decades old, and it's slowness was on a whole different level.
    • Mystery-Machine 3y ago
      I guess you never heard of Sublime text?
    • atchoo 3y ago
      Visual Studio 6 was very fast even on my PoS machine at the time. Faster than Jetbrains on an M1. Not used VS for a while but holy shit that crapped the bed in 2002 performance wise.
      • SkeuomorphicBee 3y ago
        I remember differently, I remember visual studio 6 bringing my PC to is knees (although to be fair I was a broke student and my PC was a potato).
• dataflow 3y ago
  I'm gonna guess here that the biggest chunk is the antivirus. Turning off Windows Defender's protection(s) should give the first visible speed boost, if that's what you prefer. Another big chunk of this likely happened when they hardened the graphics subsystem for security. Win32 user calls are unbelievably expensive nowadays. SendMessage etc. have a ton of overhead. Another chunk is likely the sheer number of expensive DLLs that need to be loaded and initialized with most apps. For example, IIRC, the moment you load COM or WinSock DLLs, your app stops loading snappily. Pretty much anything will load COM even without intending to. Another chunk is IMM - the ctfmon process you love, for multi-language/keyboard support. ImmDisable(0) can make loading a bit snappier, but then good luck with keyboard switching and the like. It uses window hooks, which are slow Win32 calls as mentioned. People think it's just a matter of writing plain Win32, but that's not the whole story, although it certainly helps compared to more heavyweight frameworks.
  • Narishma 3y ago
    > Turning off Windows Defender's protection(s) should give the first visible speed boost, if that's what you prefer. It's extremely hard to do that in recent versions of Windows. The most I managed to do the last time I tried was to disable it temporarily but it always comes back after a while.
    • dataflow 3y ago
      Yeah, unfortunately you need to do it with group policy.
      • Dylan16807 3y ago
        As far as I can tell they've removed the ability to turn off real-time scanning with group policy, so you have to disable the entire thing and not get on-demand or scheduled or download scans.
        • eppsilon 3y ago
          Defender will disable itself if it detects another AV product is installed...maybe someone should make one that acts as a no-op AV scanner.
• roomey 3y ago
  This is hard to understand, windows is slow, and you are complaining that windows is what, slower than it used to be? Why not use something faster? I get no lag with xfce
• GeekyBear 3y ago
  I'm of the opinion that the Windows NT family went downhill after Microsoft moved Dave Cutler from running Windows NT development to running other projects (Windows x64, XBox, Azure). Dave's no excuses attitude towards performance and stability is sorely missed. I know people who ran Windows Server 2003 as a client OS, which was the last version of NT that Dave was in charge of.
  • EvanAnderson 3y ago
    I ran Server 2003 on a Thinkpad T20 as a daily driver. It was a joy to use-- all of the XP kernel enhancements w/o any of the bloat.
  • HeckFeck 3y ago
    If I could, I would use NT 3.51 as my daily driver today. I know a lot of 32 bit software would still work on it well into the late 90s/early 2000s.
    • EvanAnderson 3y ago
      The pre-Windows 2000 NT OS's all suffer from needing too many reboots and the whole "re-apply the latest service pack after adding optional components" lunacy. I'm partial to the Windows 95-style interface so I jumped ship on NT 3.51 as soon as I could for NT 4.0. Jumping to Windows 2000 was, likewise, an easy decision if only for not having to reboot after making IP address changes, and having USB and plug 'n play support. Moving frm Windows 2000 to XP was less of a "no brainer". I continued to use Windows 2000 for quite awhile after XP came out. I skipped Vista entirely but Windows 7 was too nice not to jump on immediately. (It was the first MSFT OS I ran as a daily driver in beta, actually.)
  • smackeyacky 3y ago
    I ran windows server 2016/2019 as a development workstation for a couple of years. It was great compared to windows 10. If docker hadn't dropped support for desktop on windows server I might still be running it.
• navjack27 3y ago
  "the same apps" are not the same. Totally different binaries that load different compiled programs with different features and code and linked libraries.
• dale_glass 3y ago
  Eh... a bit inaccurate, I think. First, he's probably running those OSes on a monster of a machine, relatively speaking. Stuff is snappy on my desktop too, which has a PCIe4 NVMe drive and 128 GB RAM. Chromium, which is a huge and very complex application starts up in maybe a second or less. When you're doing old school computing today it's easy to max out the specs to a point that would be unrealistic in that time. You can put 128MB RAM into a machine when most people in the day might have had 16MB. NT4 is from 1996, and that machine is from 2000, so seems likely. I remember computers back in the day. Windows 2000 ran slowly on the hardware I had. Second, modern software does way more in the name of convenience. Eg, nobody really uses notepad. We use VS Code for instance, which is an enormous application, the sort that would have seriously challenged a computer back then. And really everything grew in the same manner. Discord is big, but Discord draws its own widgets and includes a web browser. If you did Discord with native widgets, plain text and without all the fancy stuff like animated emoji and special effects, it'd be much lighter and faster to start too.
  • abwizz 3y ago
    > very complex application starts up in maybe a second or less nailed it. a second is a very long (noticeable) time and as a user i don't really care, i want it fast and consistent.
    • dale_glass 3y ago
      And very short for a big thing you load once. Back in the day plenty things like Photoshop had splash screens, and you got to stare at them for quite a while.
      • TeMPOraL 3y ago
        Except we're not talking about loading something big like Photoshop. We're talking about starting the modern versions of system Notepad or Calculator. The big stuff like Photoshop loads roughly as long as it did before. This is a good indicator of how bad most software is - if applications like Photoshop followed the same performance/feature curve, they'd take hours to start.
• bee_rider 3y ago
  My system pops up a terminal pretty much instantaneously, maybe he just needs to turn off transparency or something? I mean I’m on Linux but I’m sure Windows can be configured somehow…
• asciimov 3y ago
  I remember those days, Win 3 was never that snappy. You had to wait and it was really happy to crash if more than a couple of programs were running. Win9x was better, you could run a few more apps without too many issues. But blue screens were super common. But it was fairly responsive if you didn't have too much running. Win2000, yeah it could be that responsive. What stands out to me, is Windows is very responsive the less stuff that is running, even today. Once those older machines had to do anything else you had to wait. Those old apps sat much closer to the metal. I can't imagine how many layers sit between windows apps today, worse if they off Electron.
• sodimel 3y ago
  Network call are incredibly slow compared to a processor call to L1, L2 (damn even L3 cache, an ssd or ram!), so I assume that every telemetry option is putting this computer in a state of "I will waste billions of cycles waiting for an answer from a server for something I could launch right away if I wanted to".
• malexw 3y ago
  I'll share a memory circa 2010 from my time at BlackBerry that comes to mind when people point out performance problems like this. Around that time, whenever a new BlackBerry device was rebooted, it would take about 45 seconds for the OS to fully boot and become usable. I'm making up the actual times in this story because I can't remember the exact details now. Like in this video, the oldest devices would start up nearly instantly, but the boot sequence for modern devices was agonizing. Especially when you were an engineer trying to run a test that required rebooting the device! One day, a pair of engineers finally became annoyed and curious enough to look into it and profile the problem. They found that a substantial portion of the boot time was spent parsing XML files that contained descriptions for device themes - that is, information about colors, icons, and text styles that users could choose from to customize their device. Something like a full 15 seconds was spent just on this one feature as part of the boot sequence! So what happened? I suppose that no other engineers felt they had the responsibility or the time available to look into the long boot times until that point. But imagine being an engineer at a company like Microsoft, and one day saying to your manager or product manager: "Hey, can I spend a week on understanding why it takes a full second for Terminal to boot on Windows and see if we can speed that up?" How many managers are going to be enthusiastic about that when they're staring down a kanban board with enough tasks to fill 4 quarters? The only reason these engineers at BlackBerry were able to look into the bootup times was because they didn't have to answer to anyone responsible for product. The team lead for this team at the time was "Engineer #2" at BlackBerry who had written all the apps for the first devices. His team was given permission to pursue whatever ideas or prototypes interested them, so they had the breathing room to chase leads like this that wouldn't necessarily pay off. So part of the answer is that I don't think we as an industry are prioritizing performance. Once the performance is good enough, it's time to ship and move on to the next feature. But the other side is that we're building in more dynamic behaviour to our software. More customization, more flexibility, more behaviour that's defined at run-time. And this all probably makes software more useful and makes it easier for engineers to build more complex software. I think it's a similar kind of trade-off to choosing between python or Rust for a tool you're working on. What kind of performance do you need, and what kind of developer experience do you want?
• kaivi 3y ago
  Can someone recommend a modern Linux DM/WM and maybe a set of applications which would be as responsive? I have been running a bare XMonad for a couple of years with `xset r rate 300 40`, and it's okay but far from perfect. The WM seems to process its mouse events with a delay sometimes, and often focuses the wrong window whenever the mouse pointer moves.
  • qart 3y ago
    I have been a Linux single-booter since at least 15 years, and have used a wide variety of DM/WM as my primaries for years. All my biases are in favour of Linux. I don't think I've ever had the mouse event delay issues that you're talking about, and I don't use focus-follows-mouse. But I still marvel at how quickly light programs open on all versions of Windows. I mean programs like terminal, notepad, various control panel stuff, MS default games, etc. I don't think you will find anything that runs on X that will be as responsive as Windows. I don't know if the Wayland universe is any better.
    • bitwize 3y ago
      Equivalent light apps (e.g., xterm) come up near instantaneously for me. Even Emacs opens in just a few hundred ms. Back in the day when I was rocking a Pentium, it impressed me how God damn FAST X was. Windows NT (3.51 and 4.0) seemed sluggish in comparison.
• phendrenad2 3y ago
  This isn't exactly a fair comparison. When Windows 3.1 was released, that machine would have seemed like an absolute monster. (Remember when Moore's Law actually got us speed improvements, not just more cores?) Regardless, to answer "what happened?", people started demanding more from apps (dark mode, UI parity with web editions, rapid prototyping, simple development, cross-platform) and it became cheaper to use Electron (or Qt, or WinForms) than simple win32 calls.
  • Dwedit 3y ago
    "Dark Mode" isn't a resource hog. Even back in Windows 3.1, you could customize the colors. Hot Dog Stand anyone?
    • sgt 3y ago
      There should be a CSS framework for Hot Dog Stand. Such a marvel! Screenshot: https://blog.codinghorror.com/content/images/uploads/2005/07/6a0120a85dcdae970b0120a86d4df2970b-pi.png https://blog.codinghorror.com/content/images/uploads/2005/07...
• ibobev 3y ago
  This reminds me of [this](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pW-SOdj4Kkk https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pW-SOdj4Kkk) talk by Jonathan Blow. He compared the startup time of an older and newer version of Photoshop. The newer one was several times slower despite basically being the same program.
• bcon 3y ago
  There's pretty clearly a law of conserved latency, that users will gladly suffer x latency for y capability, with capability complexifying until things are too slow, requiring then hw/sw stack upgrades to make it all fast again, while overall capability utilization decreases
• TheDesolate0 3y ago
  [dead]
• bityard 3y ago
  For contrast, my daily driver is Debian/KDE on a typical 9-year-old laptop and opening/interacting with absolutely everything is immediate and snappy.
  • Narishma 3y ago
    Yes, in my experience Linux (at least KDE and xfce) is better at being responsive than recent Windows versions on low end machines.
• realo 3y ago
  At the speed of light, photons travel about 1 foot per nanosecond. In other words, a modern 2 GHz processor would have time to execute at least one instruction between the time photons leave the screen, and the moment they reach your retina. Probably more than one, with multicore pipelined processors. And yet today we wait and wait and wait for Windows to open a simple program. Indeed... what happened?
  • masswerk 3y ago
    Let's assume, 10 milliseconds = 1 CPU year. (If dogs can have their own years, why not CPUs, as well?) So, there you sit, waiting hundreds and hundreds of years…
    • okwhateverdude 3y ago
      I already struggle with waiting for the rube goldberg-esque build-deploy-to-dev loop at my current gig. Thanks for the additional disgust.
      • masswerk 3y ago
        I hear, the British Heath Robinson version (by Tommy Flowers) was quite fast… ;-)
  • atomlib 3y ago
    > At the speed of light, photons travel about 1 foot per nanosecond. Americans have this disgusting way of embedding their sexual fetish into even the physical constants.
• metalforever 3y ago
  I agree with the post. My first computer had worse specs than this and was a perfectly usable experience. I actually used it to edit videos. It had 128mb RAM and shipped with Windows 98.
• AdamH12113 3y ago
  As others have pointed out, Windows 2000 would probably be a better comparison than NT 3.51. Apps did not open instantly on most computers in ~2000, and larger apps like Word could take a few seconds. On the other hand, a large part of the delay was due to the slow seek time of the magnetic hard drive (milliseconds). The CPUs only had one core, and RAM was both smaller and much slower. Modern SSDs make seek time negligible, ancient PassMark scores suggest a >10x improvement in single-core CPU performance, and there's been a >20x improvement in RAM transfer rate and a >40x improvement in RAM size. Residential internet bandwidth has seem something like a 100x improvement. None of that hardware improvement seems visible in modern PCs, except for nicer graphics and (especially) higher-resolution displays. But comparing video games from ~2000 to video games today reveals just how small that graphical difference is in the OS/application space. MS Office was a lot more responsive in the early 2000s, too. In the early days of Firefox, the developers bragged that every new release was smaller than the previous one. Maybe one day there will be a fad for more responsive software in general.
  • anthk 3y ago
    He already did.
  • TehShrike 3y ago
    If you scroll down a little bit, he demos Windows 2000 on the same machine. https://twitter.com/jmmv/status/1672073678102872065 https://twitter.com/jmmv/status/1672073678102872065
• vasili111 3y ago
  I have never worked on modern Mac. Does they have same UI lag as UI in modern Windows or UI on modern Mac reacts instantly?
  • accrual 3y ago
    I used my friend's M1 Air for a bit when it was new, the UI was so fast or almost instant that it felt like a huge leap in general computing power. It also was getting like 20 hours of battery life. That's my only recent experience with macOS on modern hardware though. I otherwise use a 2015 MBPr which is showing its age on current macOS.
• sneak 3y ago
  Windows has a lot more telemetry and spyware and advertising code in it now that is constantly running. There's probably 10x the number of running processes on a modern Microsoft OS, most of them useless to you. Also all of the support APIs and libraries for text editing and image display are orders of magnitude more complex now: eg Notepad supports unicode and emoji.
• bitwize 3y ago
  That hardware is a few generations ahead of even high-end server hardware when Windows NT 3.51 dropped. Of course, any OS is going to be snappy when running on much faster hardware with much more RAM than it was designed for. Put Windows 2000 on that thing and see if it runs just as well.
  • Narishma 3y ago
    They did exactly that if you scroll a bit down. It's just as fast as Windows NT 3.51.
• sys_64738 3y ago
  Not just that, the transition from spinners to SSD brought a dramatic speed in the OSs of that day but the speed gain has since been rolled back by the garbage layers in the OS. A prime example is macOS which gets slower with each release and it's a tragic level of neglect that there are no mandatory equivalent tests to the last OS release.
• guestbest 3y ago
  Applications and operating systems can be a lot faster when there is no layered security and everything runs with admin privileges.
• ankurdhama 3y ago
  Windows 11 is doing all these desktop effects (transparency, animations, rounded corners etc) in the compositor. You can disable all those and it will improve things. Also the security related stuff that Windows 11 does is something that was not there in the past.
• guardiangod 3y ago
  Things Windows 10 has to content with when executing a new binary, that Windows 3.51 didn't 1. Windows Defender anti-virus checking the binary and contacting MS' server for binary signing/black list 2. Kernel32 trampolines 3. All sorts of security mitigation techniques such as stack cookies setup etc. 4. Telemetry 5. Hardware accelerated GUI initiation vs 'dump everything to frame buffer in kernel GUI32 library' 6. Load fonts, graphics etc. that can work well beyond 640x480 7. Deal with the scheduler juggling hundreds of processes that let you from accessing winsock2 lib immediately, to have multiplex sound mixing, to system restore, all in the background.
  • chinathrow 3y ago
    > Windows Defender anti-virus checking the binary and contacting MS' server for binary signing/black list Are you sure this happens every time you start an executable? I assumed the definition list gets updated in fixed intervals instead of whenever you launch a program.
    • abwizz 3y ago
      i would assume that the information "when does user start program" is valuable and the list is finite, so there is some incentive to go for something in between.
  • abwizz 3y ago
    sure, makes me wonder how much of this list could be scratched w/o anyone noticing. PS: ran w2k on a 1600x1200 21" crt
    • pixl97 3y ago
      It depends, fonts sucked bad in windows those days.
  • Krssst 3y ago
    8. Maybe out of topic but animations delaying the display of the window (can be disabled but is not on the video)
• cptskippy 3y ago
  How much of that latency is down to DWM (the compositor) doing fancy transitions? It seems like there's at least a 1/4 second dedicated to the grow/fade in. If you search the startmenu for "advanced system settings" it will pull up a control panel era System Properties app with an Advanced > Performance option. Turning off visual effects there dramatically increases responsiveness.
• Joeri 3y ago
  600 mhz is quite the machine for NT. I remember running NT4 on a 233 mhz pentium II with 128 MB RAM and everything felt instant and limitless. Windows 2000 was quite the hog compared to NT4 and all it added that I had a use for was USB support. I think by that point Dave Cutler was no longer running the show and windows performance slowly started degrading.
  • tapoxi 3y ago
    He shows Win 2000 later in that thread, still snappy.
  • jaclaz 3y ago
    I remember a HP machine (@600Mhz) which my company bought circa 2001 that came with an install CD that had both NT 4.00 and Windows 2000 and the user could decide to install the one or the other, a few machines had initially NT 4.00 due to some accounting software that did not run (for whatever reasons) on Windows 2000, while some had 2K installed. Of course the NT 4.0 was a bit faster, but not that much with "common" programs (Office and similar). The occupation on disk of the OS was however 3x (NT 4.00 was around 180 MB, 2K around 650 MB).
  • masswerk 3y ago
    I think, the most important factor isn't so much the CPU, but loading binaries from disk. And that (I/O) improved quite massively over the 1990s. (And anything written for spinning disks will start nearly instantly using solid state storage.) To illustrate the CPU/disk-access ratio: There's a reason for scripting languages becoming prevalent for web backends in the 1990s. Loading a script source from disk and precompiling it on the fly was still faster than loading a much bigger binary from disk – which had to be done on each CGI request. (E.g., with Perl, you could have your normal script, but you could also produce an executable binary from a core. But nobody did the latter for the exact reason.)
• wkat4242 3y ago
  What happened? Apps got huge. OSes got huge. More and more security checks are needed now that every computer is connected 24/7. But yeah responsiveness does not seem to be a design goal anymore these days.
• edu 3y ago
  Where's the sound of the HDD spinning to read the executables? Has he opened them before and are cached or is he using an SSD (would that be possible?)?
• EVa5I7bHFq9mnYK 3y ago
  With the apps shown - paint, explorer, cmd and notepad, it's still instant today. Web and electron stuff, on the other hand ..
• c00lio 3y ago
  Misunderstood or intentionally misapplied "wisdom" like "premature optimisation is the root of all evil". Programmer comfort, unified frameworks, higher level languages over user experience. Focus on end users instead of professional users. Stupider programmers and programming through "good enough", "everyone can code" and "salaries are too high, hire someone cheaper". Computers getting cheaper, therefore users buying new machines to run software faster, instead of programmers trying to get stuff running fast on current hardware.
  • javajosh 3y ago
    Yes, and there is never, ever time to go back and address the weaknesses of the initial fast and dirty approach. If you prove out a product, it's proved, and any further work addressing tech debt is pure overhead, from the perspective of the business. Like so many problems, the ultimate solution is large scale collapse. We are now open to a super-virus that renders all of our (internet connected) compute worthless, or worse. It's a good opportunity to learn a trade, like carpentry, pottery or (pre-2005) auto repair.
• 0xbadcafebee 3y ago
  I have been saying this for a decade. Technology is getting worse as a whole. Hardware is continuing to improve, but the software is getting worse at a faster rate, making the overall product suck more. One of the reasons is the whole "software is a gas" thing. As long as there is faster hardware, more memory, more storage, software will get slower, more bloated, and take up more space, just because a gas always fills its container. But another reason is there's more people in tech who don't know what they're doing. More people who took a bootcamp and jumped into a job, or came from some other career and barely know how to use a computer, never used Linux/UNIX. Some newer roles have very specific niches, where they don't know much about tech, and then they're asked to write code, which they have almost no idea how to do. I've recently worked with colleagues who were contributing code, and getting in the way of building the product, who shouldn't have been within 10 miles of an IDE. And when the senior developers don't know how environment variables work, I weep.
  • moonshinefe 3y ago
    Out of curiosity, what did you do to work with (or around) said people? I guess your penultimate sentence implies you moved on.
    • 0xbadcafebee 3y ago
      I resign myself to let things be terrible. Leadership won't care to fix it until it becomes a problem for them, and that won't happen if I'm running around trying to plug the holes in the dyke. Since it's a big paycheck I stay and mentally check out, casually searching for something better.
  • MagicMoonlight 3y ago
    The newest generations of children can barely read and write let alone use a computer. It’s going to be fascinating watching what happens when there’s nobody left capable of updating things like linux. It will be like a black box, people can maybe scrape together an electron app but they don’t go any deeper.
    • 3y ago
• calibas 3y ago
  I recently watched a junior dev casually add this hideously bloated and slow library so he could save an hour or so of programming. Part of his reasoning was that "everybody else does it that way". And that's why modern hardware keeps getting faster while modern software stays the same speed (or slower).
  • lionkor 3y ago
    I'm very curious which library it was
• Tade0 3y ago
  I have a related issue to report: high power usage at idle(or should I say: no user interaction). In the past it was understandable, because those primitive 130nm, single-core CPUs had to keep spinning since performance scaling was still a relatively new thing back then. Despite all the advancements in the field it seems like more often than not each of those cores is up to something at all times. First thing I do with a new Android device is to limit the number of background processes. This causes occasional crashes of some apps, but the difference in general smoothness is noticeable. Meanwhile my laptop draws 30W seemingly doing nothing in particular. Launching HWiNFO halves that number which, if actually true, is properly insane.
  • kaba0 3y ago
    I think this is one area where long-standing assumptions underlying key architecture decisions are no longer true. Another one would be security, which is laughable in the desktop space.
• stcroixx 3y ago
  The next generation of devs became focused on their tools. Explosion of programming languages and frameworks. Cloud and all its vendor lock in. Agile. CI/CD pipelines. K8. Constant re-invention of the wheel just because. Lunatics are running the asylum. It's embarrassing, frankly.
• majormajor 3y ago
  I'd like to see them open Photoshop or something chunky. That's what I recall taking much longer on my G3 Macs than it does on my M1 Pro Macbook. They should probably run some sort of antivirus too; this is built-in for Windows now, ya? That'd be my first guess for the small programs. My memory of those days doesn't feel any faster than today, but I never had anything as top-of-the-line as a 600Mhz chip in 1999, more like half of that.
• asylteltine 3y ago
  [dead]
• chungy 3y ago
  There was a marked difference between Windows 2000 and XP. Windows 2000: Everything opens instantly, no delays. Felt nice. Windows XP: Noticably more sluggish than Windows 2000. They've never recovered.
• classified 3y ago
  What happened? Ads, surveillance, virus scanners. And webshit.
• nunez 3y ago
  Windows NT 3.51 min specs: 25MHz CPU, 16MB memory (for the server edition), 90MB disk space Windows 11 min specs: 1GHz 64-bit CPU, 4 GB RAM, 64GB disk space. This is a horribly unfair comparison. We were complaining about systems being slow AF back then too. (Insert _turbo button_ meme here)
  • blablabla123 3y ago
    That's true, during the time I had a 486 SX 33 with 4 MB and 200 MB HDD. Windows 3.1 ran fine, I tried OS/2 Warp and it was unbearably slow. Never tested Windows 95 on that computer but of course NT was completely out-of-reach. On the other hand "NT" was unusable for anything fun until XP. Still, there's a point to make about bloat but the comparison seems to be between Apples and Oranges
    • anthk 3y ago
      Windows 2000 used to run lots of games. Also, you have a compat mode for w95/98 a la Windows XP prompt, but only for desktop shortcuts.
• stavros 3y ago
  That OS is five years old when that computer was made. Here's a much more apt comparison (still really snappy): https://twitter.com/jmmv/status/1672073678102872065/mediaViewer?currentTweet=1672073678102872065&currentTweetUser=jmmv https://twitter.com/jmmv/status/1672073678102872065/mediaVie...
• justinator 3y ago
  In 2000, I would turn on my Pentium MMX 233Mhz machine running Windows 95, and then go and make popcorn while it started up.
• martythemaniak 3y ago
  For those who were not around, or forgot: A fresh install was indeed glorious. Fast, clean, snappy, but everything invariably slowed down to a crawl within a few months and you had to reinstall and reformat about once a year go get your shit under control because it became unbearable.
• qsantos 3y ago
  I am always frustrated with the usual answer to these kinds of demonstrations: “Yes, but these new apps are doing so much more. Also, security.” Except, that they are not, not at the time they are launched at least. And even if they were, we have a hundred-fold more compute power, with a hundredth of the latency for memory and storage. Regarding security, it should have negligible effect in most cases. At least, effects should not be perceptible to the human mind. It really is just a consequence of the way we develop software nowadays. We do not need to optimize programs to make them work at all, so we just do not. We work on new features, and we hire people who can churn new features. And we decided to optimize for developer time, instead of user time. So, instead of painstakingly developing a Web site, a native application, an Android app, and an iOS app, we just push Web apps everywhere.
  • KMnO4 3y ago
    > And we decided to optimize for developer time, instead of user time That’s exactly it, and there’s no shame in that. I can, as a solo developer, build a fully featured app with a responsive UI and produce artifacts that run on Windows, Linux, and Mac. I can do that in a weekend, because of the technologies we have at our disposal. Something that would have taken a team of developers several months to do. On the other hand, the fact that we’re abstracting everything except the business logic away is a big advantage. As soon as Chrome pushes a performance update we can see apps across the board performing 10% faster.
  • tracker1 3y ago
    And when computers will be 30% faster in a couple years, vs. multiplying the developer time/cost it's a trade off.
    • rahen 3y ago
      What the hardware gives, the developer takes away. Developers will get computers 30% faster, then release 30% slower software, in a never ending cycle. Right now, an M1 is pretty fast, but wait until all developers use it and it starts to become barely adequate. Rephrasing Wirth's law: It takes slow hardware to develop fast software.
• Dwedit 3y ago
  Have we tried running the old Windows NT apps on the new Windows system?
• Melatonic 3y ago
  I am currently using Windows 10 LTSC (the newest version) and after some basic configuration it is INSANE how responsive it is. It boots basically instantly and apps launch instantaneously. I hand the laptop to random people and they are always amazed and how well it works. This is on a decently fast Dell XPS laptop but nothing insane. All the crap has been stripped out. Seriously recommend trying it out - more responsive than any OS I have ever used - even a lean running Ubuntu or OSX
  • anthk 3y ago
    If you think that's responsive you haven't seen my XFCE setup.
    • _dain_ 3y ago
      I'd like to see it. I'm running XFCE now, I wouldn't call it slow but it's not quite as snappy as I'd like it to be.
      • shrimp_emoji 3y ago
        Turn off composition (if Xfce allows you to, like KDE does). Then drag a window around your screen on a high framerate monitor and feel the difference.
        • _dain_ 3y ago
          just tried it, gives nasty looking black bars around the outside of firefox. latency is still there. e.g. pressing super has about a 100ms wait before the application launcher appears, same as with compositing on.
          • anthk 3y ago
            I think GTK has a setting on setting up the menu spawning speed.
          • anthk 3y ago
• x3874 3y ago
  But the worst part: people contributing on this site are contributing to this hell too.
• HumblyTossed 3y ago
  Ok, so the NT machine has no opening animations. The W11 machine has opening animations. Those things have a fixed running time. They're used so that the opening isn't so jarring to the eye, but yes, it slows shit waaaay down.
  • memalign 3y ago
    I suspect that these animations make launch feel faster much of the time by hiding the true launch time of the app. And I think this is a primary purpose of launch animations. Compare to iPhone OS 1: apps had static launch images that the OS animates to be visible so an app has hundreds of milliseconds to load before the user feels a hang.
• wordsarelies 3y ago
  My old Windows 98SE box on a 200Mhz MMX processor was perfect responsiveness. We say that today, and remember the best part of the experience... but we do forget, it was all at the mercy of your (maybe if you're lucky) UltraATA/33mhz bus.
• dathinab 3y ago
  Good question. Linux also opens apps instantly, at least for me and if you ignore that some app after being opened instantly don't get instantly ready to work. But that isn't fault of the OS. Through some OSes used some tricks to hide this loading time. A good example is cold starting a web browser. Modern web browsers have to handle so much that just loading the amount of code they have all at once can lead to a noticeable delay. I mean e.g. the network code your browser runs is likely a few hounded to thousand times more complicated then what you put into a simple HTTP server. There is also the rule of thumb that the difference between something working in your use-case and it working in as many situations as possible for as many people as possible might look small from an external POV but in general comes with an explosion in complexity and code. And for browsers that is not just the case for networking but also rendering HTML+CSS, executing JS, storage handling, window handling, handling boundaries and security, extensions, caching, input handling etc.
• deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
• jmmv 3y ago
  Hey folks, author of the Twitter thread here. It's pretty funny how a pair of crappy videos I recorded in 5 minutes have gone viral and landed here. I obviously did not expect that this would happen and is why I didn't give a second thought to the comparison. There are many wrong things in there (including inaccuracies, as some have reported), and Twitter really doesn't give room to nuance. (Plus my notifications are now unusable so I can't even reply where necessary.) I don't want to defend the "computers of 20 years ago" because they sucked in many aspects. Things have indeed gotten better in many ways: faster I/O, better graphics and insanely fast networks are a few of them, which have allowed many new types of apps to surface. Better languages and the pervasiveness of virtual machines have also allowed for new types of development and deployment environments, which can make things safer. Faster CPUs do enable things we couldn't do, like on-the-fly video transcoding and the like. The existence of GPUs gives us graphics animations for free. And the list goes on. BUT. That still doesn't mean everything is better. UIs have generally gotten slower as you can see. There is visible lag even in fast computers: I noticed it on a ~2021 Z4 workstation I had at work, I noticed it on an i7 Surface Laptop 3 I had, and I still notice it on the Mac Pro I'm running Windows 11 on (my primary machine). It's mind-blowing to me that we need super-fast multi-core systems and GBs of RAM to approach, but not reach, the responsiveness we used to have in native desktop apps before. And this is really my pet peeve and what prompted the tweets. Other random thoughts: * Some massive wins we got in the past, like the switch from HDDs to SSDs, have been eaten away and now SSDs are a requirement. * Lag is less visible on macOS and Linux desktops as they still feature mostly-native apps (unscientific claim as well). * The Surface Go 2 isn't a very performant machine indeed, but note it ships with Windows 11 and the lag exists out of the box, so that makes it enough to qualify as a fair comparison. The specs I quoted were wrong though because I misread them from whichever website returned them to me. I don't care though because this is the experience I get on all reasonably-modern machines. * Yes, I had opened the apps in both computers before running the video, so they were all cached in memory (which puts the newer system in a worse light?). * One specific thing that illustrates the problem is Notepad: the app was recently "rewritten" (can't recall exactly what the changes were). It used to open instantaneously on the Go 2, but not any more. * NT 3.51 wasn't truly fair game because it was years-older than the machine. But if you scroll down the thread you'll see the same "test" rerun on Windows 2000 (released same year as the hardware). I might come back to extend the list of random thoughts. A proper follow-up blog post would be nice, but I'm not going to have time to write one right away.
• mo_42 3y ago
  Because we cannot accept a certain piece of software as finished. It doesn't mean there aren't any updates. However, in the iOS store I can update some apps every week. On the other hand, I very much like the F-Droid store. There are so many useful and user-friendly apps. They work and stay like this for a long time. I suspect the underlying topic here is money. Open source apps don't get much funding. So the developers need to focus on the essentials and get them right. On the other hand, subscription-based apps have a steady inflow of money. For some reason, they need to constantly work on these and add new features with marginal utility. I regret having updated some iOS apps. They were working perfectly fine in 2018 but have added bloat and bugs since then.
• 29athrowaway 3y ago
  You could play SNES games with zero loading screens. And it was awesome. Now, loading screens are everywhere. Like the Atari + cassette era.
• elzbardico 3y ago
  Running notepad is easy. I still shiver remembering running Visual Age for Java as my IDE with Windows 2000. it felt like molasses.
• roody15 3y ago
  Same with MacOS 10.6.x Snow leopard with a intel dual core 4 gigs of ram and a SSD performs as well as a MacBook 2019 i7 running 11.x Monterrey. So much unnecessary processes in the background IMO Keep it simple stupid whenever possible
• p0w3n3d 3y ago
  New software is written cheap. I know what you think, when you hear it, but it's much cheaper to create some functionalities that backdays. We have c# in Windows and Java on servers. This is an abstraction layer which makes things working very slow. We have JavaScript applications each running in it's own Electron sandbox. This is huge help and huge cost of performance. And it's a huge help for developer. Entry level is much lower, one does not need winapi anymore (at least in most cases), animations, rendering, typesafety for free, no coredumps, no segfaults, no guru meditation. It's different world now. And a single hello world application weights 200MB... And another thing: security. Security on old Windows was poor. There are many things that need to be taken care of, but they used to not exist or were simply unsafe. This is another thing, one need to keep in mind, if one wants to just install windows 7 or XP and play games (as I did)
  • p0w3n3d 3y ago
    And another thing: security. Security on old Windows was poor. There are many things that need to be taken care of, but they used to not exist or were simply unsafe. This is another thing, one need to keep in mind, if one wants to just install windows 7 or XP and play games (as I did)
  • kaba0 3y ago
    Why would C# or Java make things “very slow”? The code ends up running as well-optimized machine code for the majority of its lifetime.
    • p0w3n3d 3y ago
      Ends up is the keyword here. Virtual machine takes time to start and warm up. There is an indirection layer between CPU commands and c# bytecode. Of course programmers stronger than me and you (maybe not you? But me for sure) are working constantly on how to improve this, how to make just in time translations etc. But These things take time. Native is faster on startup. Later java/c# wins unless the native code is done by a very skillful programmer. we're speaking on app startup time, right?
• notorandit 3y ago
  What happened? Normal hyperbloat between os, libraries and network.
• cmrdporcupine 3y ago
  I'm curious what's on that system for storage. Is it using the original hard drive, or does he have some kind of solid state medium hooked up? Because I do not recall things loading that fast. Yes, input latency back then was far better. But actually launching things came with appreciable pauses. Because disks back then _sucked_.
• MagicMoonlight 3y ago
  I would never use Windows again for my own computer. It loads shit like candy crush in the background and keeps it in memory 24/7. You cannot disable that. Candy crush… I don’t know how people work at microsoft unironically. Compare that to Mint which looks exactly the same as Windows and now runs 100% of Windows games and it’s just unfair. It’s like running candy crush in a barrel.
• lionkor 3y ago
  I'm convinced that most closed source software made by big companies has sleep() everywhere. Theres just no other explanation. Maybe synchronous animations.
  • MagicMoonlight 3y ago
    If you get a bonus for improving performance then you’d certainly make sure there are some ready to remove before the next financial year
• pushedx 3y ago
  This wasn’t my experience back in ~2002 running my Windows NT variant of choice, Windows 2000. Especially due to the mechanical disk, everything seemed to take 2 to 10 times longer than it does today the first time it had to be done after a reboot, and if physical memory was exhausted and the OS started swapping, forget it, you might be staring at an hour glass for multiple minutes to open a web browser or something of the sort. I love SSDs and multicore machines of today.
• elenaferrantes 3y ago
  In France in conforama stores salesman use a ascii terminal GUI connected to AIX shells. Fast as hell to take your order. I’m always amazed at how marketing BS lead us to vastly sub optimal solution.
• mehh 3y ago
  On my work machine it’s all the ‘helpful’ software IT have added for info sec and asset management and god knows what, they just love to pile this crap on until the machine runs like a dog!
• kgbcia 3y ago
  We all know what happened as programmers. there's layers and layers of abstraction.
• rfwhyte 3y ago
  There's always a brief window in time with any new technology where it's new enough that the suits haven't entirely gotten their hooks into it, so it's broadly made to be as effective as possible at doing what it's supposed to do. We unfortunately now live well down the enshitification curve of computing and now most everything is made not simply to be as good as possible at it's intended purpose, but rather to make the companies that make it is as much money as possible while performing it's intender purpose at whatever minimum standard will annoy users ever so slightly less than the amount it would require them to stop paying money for it.
• refurb 3y ago
  When I was running a windows machine, I kept reinstalling MS Office 2000. Why? It was snappy and did everything I need it to do. MS Office is now a 2GB install, when 20 years ago it was 100MB. Of course there are plenty of new features, but I don't use them.
• hahajk 3y ago
  I just reloaded Big Sur on a 10 year old Macbook (the last OS version it supports), and it runs like that video. My 2 year old HP laptop running Windows, on the other hand, runs the way we're thinking about.
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• convery 3y ago
  Reminds me of finding an old laptop in the attic (IBM ThinkPad 760LD). 90MHz Pentium, 8MB of RAM, 810MB of HDD, with Win98 installed. I could boot it and start Excel 4 times in the time it took for my workstation to even get to the desktop. Really nice and snappy usage experience. Sidenote, look up the ThinkPad 760 series, it had some really cool features. Raise-able keyboard so you could have it at an angle, physical sliders for sound and backlight, easy access to the internals and hot-swappable battery.
  • magios 3y ago
    thinkpad 760xl here, svga+ screen, 166mhz pentium mmx, 64mb of ram, 2.1gb hdd, typically use it as a dos machine, tho it does have old slackware linux installed. if you still have the laptop, hold on to it, or if you don't want it, please give it one of the many retro groups who can maintain and keep these things going.
• deleted 3y ago
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• HeavyStorm 3y ago
  I upgraded my system less than 24 months ago, up from 8gb to 16gb of RAM. My main reason for that was gaming, but I also expected a speed-up on the usual OS tasks. A month ago I realized that my RAM was topping at 95% capacity when running the usual suspects (vscode, edge, etc). I bought an additional 16Gb, and I'm already at 55%. Now, RAM optimizations aside, what the hell... I blame us, or the current generation of us. Performance (CPU and RAM) is so cheap that I feel we don't optimize anything anymore. Many of my colleagues don't have a clue on how to run a profiler, let alone actually optimize a system. And we are always turning to more productive yet less performant platforms such as nodejs etc. It's a valuable trade off, but maybe we have gone all to an extreme...
• chemmail 3y ago
  Smart really, they cannot make things too fast or there is no reason for us to upgrade every year to reach that unobtainable top.
  • archon810 3y ago
    Just like the light bulbs: https://youtu.be/j5v8D-alAKE https://youtu.be/j5v8D-alAKE.
• oofbey 3y ago
  Completely agree with the key point here. An example that blows my mind is the incredibly unresponsive UI built in to my $2,000 television. How does a very expensive device like that end up with a series of clickable boxes that lag so much I frequently wonder if it’s working or not.
• vondur 3y ago
  Yep. I used to run NT 4 on a P3 550 with 128MB of Ram with an Adaptec 80MB/s SCSI hard disk and A Matrox Millennium video card. Adobe apps even launched almost instantly. Browsing the web with Netscape on our University LAN was super fast too.
• datavirtue 3y ago
  Shoe-horned and duct-taped "security."
• nojvek 3y ago
  “What Andy giveth, Bill taketh”
• idonotknowwhy 3y ago
  I recently fired up a windows 7 VM to interface with some old hardware. Everything opens in less than 500ms,just like I remembered it was like once I got an SSD. Using windows 10+ is infuriating with all the ui latency.
• Zardoz84 3y ago
  forget Windows NT on a 600Mhz CPU. My Amiga A1200 runs AmigaOS and launch programs from his old rust harddrive, faster that Windows 10 or 11. Everything feels more faster and fluid. And is a machine running at 20MHz with a few megabytes of ram
• Zuiii 3y ago
  Also blame OS vendors refusal to standardize on the graphical GUI equivalent of stdio/ascii. All I want is bare-minimal GUI support (pixel placement and "pointer" events. That's all. Instead we get apple, google, microsoft, and gnome/qt all doing their incompatible thing. So until they do, expect the beatings to continue. /shrugs
• darksim905 3y ago
  This has nothing to do with snappy apps and everything to the complication of graphics sublayers, along with the difference of VGA vs HDMI, etc.
• wellanyway 3y ago
  Cargo cult happened. 99% of 'improvements' and 'revolutionary new ideas' are hype and horseshit logic.
• jokoon 3y ago
  I remember when I was asking people why my computer was slow with a HDD as it was not slow before. People got annoyed with my question (and told I did not have the knowledge), it was a weird experience I will never forget. NEVER FORGET Wirth's Law: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wirth's_law https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wirth's_law > Wirth's law is an adage on computer performance which states that software is getting slower more rapidly than hardware is becoming faster. My main suspicion is that OS have some kind of agreement with hardware vendors under the excuse of "it's new innovation which requires more CPU power". It's a hand in hand system where you need new software for the new hardware AND VICE VERSA. It is veeeery hard to prove it, but it's similar to house appliances using designs and parts that wear out easily. Capitalism and growth DICTATES that it must sell, so it's impossible for a company to survive if it produces durable stuff. It's economically impossible to compete. It's how the whole industry works (part manufacturing, etc), so it's not possible for a company to go against it. Capitalism cannot allow it.
• andrewstuart 3y ago
  Is this even true? How many applications were tested?