6 ms·

That's not how I remember it. Windows 9x was slow and constantly crashing. Booting and launching programs took ages. To be fair, the performance problems had mo

That's not how I remember it. Windows 9x was slow and constantly crashing. Booting and launching programs took ages. To be fair, the performance problems had more to do with the available hardware back then, but still.

ekianjo 3y ago
> Windows 9x was slow because hard drives. Now we have SSDs and the desktop is slower than ever still.
- squarefoot 3y ago
  Desktop became slow when windows and widgets became objects, as in the OOP sense. The transition from hardcoded primitives to objects that would be created and destroyed on the fly slowed things down a lot, but that is the price to pay to have code that runs on very different platforms, also adapting itself to different screen sizes and resolutions, dynamic objects, etc.
  - winrid 3y ago
    In C++ it would still be very fast. I doubt you'd notice the difference. The turning point was MS switching to C# for everything. Now built in apps load slow because the code is not JIT compiled yet, and I bet other issues...
  - regularfry 3y ago
    So we should expect the introduction of MFC in 1992 to draw the dividing line between the halcyon "fast desktop" days and modern slowness?
  - circuit10 3y ago
    I doubt it makes much difference. At least in C++ objects are just structs unless you’re using polymorphism, and tracking a few things like the position of a window can’t be very intensive anyway. It’s probably more things like loading assets and rendering effects and background tasks that slow it down
  - nvm0n1 3y ago
    Has there ever been a non Oop GUI toolkit in those days? Even Win32 was kinda "c with objects".
    - bitwize 3y ago
      One of the interesting things about Apple vs. Microsoft in the early days was how differently the two companies handled the mindblow that was the GUI work at Xerox PARC. Apple adopted the UI conventions, and refined, polished, and extended them to create first the Lisa system and then the Mac. But early Mac OS ("System" in those days) was very much based on a procedural, Pascal-based API without much in the way of object orientation. Your app had to handle the close button and the resize grabber itself, for instance -- actually listen for mouse events, determine if there was a click in the appropriate region, and close the window or buzz in a loop drawing the resize rectangle. Utility functions were provided to help with this process, but it still had to be part of your main loop. Dialog boxes were defined with Pascal records. Microsoft, by contrast, hired some of the Xerox PARC engineers away -- guys like Charles Simonyi. The design of Windows reflects this, as Windows more closely reflects the Xerox PARC work at an architectural level. It had from the very earliest days something like an object system. A window belonged to a window class, which contained a single method (the window procedure or WndProc), that processed messages from a flexible and extensible message system. Windows could even be "subclassed" by substituting a different window procedure. This more flexible design allowed the system to provide the necessary decorations (minimize and maximize buttons, a system menu, resize grips and even scrollbars) and the client window would receive messages from them to let it know that, for example, it had been resized or scrolled. The actual mechanics of how these decorations worked could be delegated to the system. The API was still in C, not OO like we know it today, and was a bit cumbersome to use -- but it had more of those object-oriented ideas than early Mac did. Of course, Steve Jobs didn't make the same mistake twice, and for his first post-Mac system, NeXT, he had it based all around object orientation.
- safety1st 3y ago
  Chicago95 is a theme for XFCE. I run XFCE with i3wm on a SSD and it is insanely, perversely fast. Most of the default apps bundled with XFCE start instantly. The system boots within seconds, no need to consider any type of fast boot, hibernation etc. Native apps boot within seconds. Electron apps are slower, because Electron. A typical XFCE system on startup will allocate around 500MB of RAM, but with the way memory management works on Linux I think it doesn't really need all of that and lets go of it if something else does. It is kind of a barebones desktop environment, but certainly has a lot more stuff packed in than Win9x did and for a little extra disk space you can cherry pick whatever Gnome and KDE utilities you want anyway. So I think this phenomenon of slow modern desktops is a Windows/Mac problem, if you want one that's lightning fast, they're out there.
  - stavros 3y ago
    I do want one that's lightning fast, thank you. If it launches a terminal and a browser, I'm good. I'll try this for my new NUC, thanks for the tip!
    - pocketarc 3y ago
      I'll second the parent's experience, it's actually kind of insane how fast XFCE is. With the Chicago95 theme, the feeling you end up with is: "how fast would Windows 95 be if you ran it on modern hardware" It is actually just astounding, to the point that you end up feeling "jesus is my hardware really that fast?".
      - stavros 3y ago
        Is it stock XFCE, or do I need anything else? Can I just install xubuntu-desktop and that's it?
        KronisLV 3y ago
        Xubuntu was mentioned, which is nice. Some folks might also enjoy the Linux Mint XFCE version, which I personally run: https://linuxmint.com/edition.php?id=307 https://linuxmint.com/edition.php?id=307 (more or less Ubuntu sans snaps, though their Cinnamon desktop is also reasonably okay, even if not quite as snappy as XFCE)
troupo 3y ago
Windows 2000 though... I think it was the pinnacle of Windows.
- dherikb 3y ago
  Oh yeah... I always prefer to use it instead of Windows XP
JohnBooty 3y ago
That's not how I remember it. Windows 9x was slow and constantly crashing. It was like... both. If you had a did your own clean Windows installs, had an extra $100 of RAM, defragged the HDD regularly, and disabled crapware and unnecessary services etc. the UI felt real sharp and instant. However this was not the typical experience. Typical experience for most people was that you clicked the Start menu and then listened to the HDD grind away.
reacharavindh 3y ago
True that crashes were more frequent and annoying. However, that’s not what I was talking about. While it worked, the UX felt responsive. Moving the mouse around clicking things, opening files and folders, dragging stuff, scrolling, window switching, even the clicks felt responsive. These days the whole thing feels like “smooth” in a bad slow way. As if every action spends a good 20% of time first doing some animation and then doing what you really intended.
tracker1 3y ago
I think it largely came down to how much RAM you had in your system.. 4MB was mostly okay, and sluggish, 8-16 much more usable... 32+ was downright snappy. I recall using an AMD 5x86@133 with 64mb ram with Win95 then NT4 and it was very usable at the time. It wasn't the best for gaming, my cpu/gpu weren't great, but for general work/productivity use it was pretty great for the time. I had received the wrong ram by mistake, and it worked... was supposed to be 16mb. edit: I also recall paying extra to add in a cache module on that mb.
MrBuddyCasino 3y ago
IO was slow. Once stuff was in RAM, it was quite fast.
- mrighele 3y ago
  At least at the beginning not everybody had hardware that supported DMA for disk access (and those that had it, not always had it configured properly). That meant burning CPU cycles just for doing IO.
- JD557 3y ago
  This. I was recently backing up some stuff from an old Mac OS 8 machine and it was amazing how snappy a lot of things feel. But if something is not on RAM you can clearly notice it.
  - ben_w 3y ago
    Ah, I remember those days. Around that era, dragging windows around the screen was switching from "draw outline" to "draw the actual window".
    - deleted 3y ago
      [deleted]
- cout 3y ago
  Drawing to the screen was also slow until accelerated 2D cards came along.
wanderingstan 3y ago
Hard to believe that a few system crashes per day was the norm. You just hoped you hadn’t lost too much, would re-boot and go get a drink while you waited. Due to that “training” I still hit CTRL-S obsessively even when it hasn’t been needed for years.
- rob74 3y ago
  Contrast that to today, when you have editors like Sublime Text which will reliably keep your editor tabs (or "buffers") around for as long as you need them, even if you never save them (yourself - of course the editor does that behind the scenes).
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
- mbwgh 3y ago
  For me, my Ctrl+S moment was with Apple's Writer, on my first Macbook back in 2005 or so. Lost a whole evening's worth of work due to a crash. I'm mostly in the `:w` camp now, but still...
  - stavros 3y ago
    <Esc>:w is muscle memory by now, and it'll never change.
    - gcoakes 3y ago
      A quirk in my config that I haven't bothered to fix makes it so my formatter runs post write. I've unfortunately picked up the habit of <esc>:w<cr>:w<cr> in rapid succession.
      - stavros 3y ago
        Oof, my condolences. At least you make doubly sure it's saved.
- LoganDark 3y ago
raffraffraff 3y ago
I had a carefully crafted 98SE CD that was created using a tool called (I think) 98lite. It let you remove components and set defaults. That was rock solid for me, and used so few resources. Boot times were very quick considering the hardware at the time. The all-important post-install defrag made a difference. I didn't switch away from 98SE on my home computer until XP SP2 (which I immediately theme to look like 98 because I hated the primary colour nonsense). Actually, every Windows installation from then until I switched to Linux was "shrunk" and tweaked (can't remember what tool I used, but it wasn't an official MS thing). Having a full licenced copy of InstallShield at work was extremely handy too - every app was repackaged into a fully automatic installer and bundled with the OS. It almost felt like a cloned PC. In fact when I got a job managing fleets of PCs, that XPCD Builder script was like a superpower.
- gsich 3y ago
  XP had a Classic theme from the beginning.
- accrual 3y ago
  Maybe you used nLite? I credit this tool for making me into a Windows power user. Taking the OS apart checkbox-by-checkbox gave me a good understanding of how the pieces fit together and what is required vs optional. https://www.nliteos.com/ https://www.nliteos.com/
  - andrepd 3y ago
    Ohh man, nlite! The memory you just unlocked for me ahahaha
    - raffraffraff 3y ago
      Same! That was the one!
dehrmann 3y ago
If you're bored, you should see how Windows 9x does on a Vortex86 CPU with an SD card.
seabass-labrax 3y ago
My Intel Pentium 4 machine usually runs reliably and responsively, but you have to be careful: the default Windows picture viewer instantly freezes the PC if you click 'next image' before the current one has finished loading!
- winrid 3y ago
  In XP it would be fine. Are you running win10 on a P4? Madman :)
  - seabass-labrax 3y ago
    Haha not Windows 10 :) Actually it was Windows XP... I cannot remember which Service Pack, but I believe it is the second. One day I'll try NetBSD on it...
bitwize 3y ago
Indeed. It took nearly a full decade for Windows to match the responsiveness of, say, an Amiga 2000.
qbasic_forever 3y ago
The terrible performance you remember is from slow hard drives and just a couple megabytes of RAM. Retro computing enthusiasts today have win 95 running on solid state flash disks and 32 megabytes of memory and it flies.
- afavour 3y ago
  Right but the OP said: > sure do feel nostalgic how fast and responsive the desktop “felt” back in those days Wasn’t referring to the retro computing setups of today.

ekianjo 3y ago

> Windows 9x was slow because hard drives. Now we have SSDs and the desktop is slower than ever still.

squarefoot 3y ago
Desktop became slow when windows and widgets became objects, as in the OOP sense. The transition from hardcoded primitives to objects that would be created and destroyed on the fly slowed things down a lot, but that is the price to pay to have code that runs on very different platforms, also adapting itself to different screen sizes and resolutions, dynamic objects, etc.
- winrid 3y ago
  In C++ it would still be very fast. I doubt you'd notice the difference. The turning point was MS switching to C# for everything. Now built in apps load slow because the code is not JIT compiled yet, and I bet other issues...
- regularfry 3y ago
  So we should expect the introduction of MFC in 1992 to draw the dividing line between the halcyon "fast desktop" days and modern slowness?
- circuit10 3y ago
  I doubt it makes much difference. At least in C++ objects are just structs unless you’re using polymorphism, and tracking a few things like the position of a window can’t be very intensive anyway. It’s probably more things like loading assets and rendering effects and background tasks that slow it down
- nvm0n1 3y ago
  Has there ever been a non Oop GUI toolkit in those days? Even Win32 was kinda "c with objects".
  - bitwize 3y ago
    One of the interesting things about Apple vs. Microsoft in the early days was how differently the two companies handled the mindblow that was the GUI work at Xerox PARC. Apple adopted the UI conventions, and refined, polished, and extended them to create first the Lisa system and then the Mac. But early Mac OS ("System" in those days) was very much based on a procedural, Pascal-based API without much in the way of object orientation. Your app had to handle the close button and the resize grabber itself, for instance -- actually listen for mouse events, determine if there was a click in the appropriate region, and close the window or buzz in a loop drawing the resize rectangle. Utility functions were provided to help with this process, but it still had to be part of your main loop. Dialog boxes were defined with Pascal records. Microsoft, by contrast, hired some of the Xerox PARC engineers away -- guys like Charles Simonyi. The design of Windows reflects this, as Windows more closely reflects the Xerox PARC work at an architectural level. It had from the very earliest days something like an object system. A window belonged to a window class, which contained a single method (the window procedure or WndProc), that processed messages from a flexible and extensible message system. Windows could even be "subclassed" by substituting a different window procedure. This more flexible design allowed the system to provide the necessary decorations (minimize and maximize buttons, a system menu, resize grips and even scrollbars) and the client window would receive messages from them to let it know that, for example, it had been resized or scrolled. The actual mechanics of how these decorations worked could be delegated to the system. The API was still in C, not OO like we know it today, and was a bit cumbersome to use -- but it had more of those object-oriented ideas than early Mac did. Of course, Steve Jobs didn't make the same mistake twice, and for his first post-Mac system, NeXT, he had it based all around object orientation.
safety1st 3y ago
Chicago95 is a theme for XFCE. I run XFCE with i3wm on a SSD and it is insanely, perversely fast. Most of the default apps bundled with XFCE start instantly. The system boots within seconds, no need to consider any type of fast boot, hibernation etc. Native apps boot within seconds. Electron apps are slower, because Electron. A typical XFCE system on startup will allocate around 500MB of RAM, but with the way memory management works on Linux I think it doesn't really need all of that and lets go of it if something else does. It is kind of a barebones desktop environment, but certainly has a lot more stuff packed in than Win9x did and for a little extra disk space you can cherry pick whatever Gnome and KDE utilities you want anyway. So I think this phenomenon of slow modern desktops is a Windows/Mac problem, if you want one that's lightning fast, they're out there.
- stavros 3y ago
  I do want one that's lightning fast, thank you. If it launches a terminal and a browser, I'm good. I'll try this for my new NUC, thanks for the tip!
  - pocketarc 3y ago
    I'll second the parent's experience, it's actually kind of insane how fast XFCE is. With the Chicago95 theme, the feeling you end up with is: "how fast would Windows 95 be if you ran it on modern hardware" It is actually just astounding, to the point that you end up feeling "jesus is my hardware really that fast?".
    - stavros 3y ago
      Is it stock XFCE, or do I need anything else? Can I just install xubuntu-desktop and that's it?
      - KronisLV 3y ago
        Xubuntu was mentioned, which is nice. Some folks might also enjoy the Linux Mint XFCE version, which I personally run: https://linuxmint.com/edition.php?id=307 https://linuxmint.com/edition.php?id=307 (more or less Ubuntu sans snaps, though their Cinnamon desktop is also reasonably okay, even if not quite as snappy as XFCE)

troupo 3y ago

Windows 2000 though... I think it was the pinnacle of Windows.

dherikb 3y ago
Oh yeah... I always prefer to use it instead of Windows XP

JohnBooty 3y ago

That's not how I remember it. Windows 9x was slow and constantly crashing. It was like... both. If you had a did your own clean Windows installs, had an extra $100 of RAM, defragged the HDD regularly, and disabled crapware and unnecessary services etc. the UI felt real sharp and instant. However this was not the typical experience. Typical experience for most people was that you clicked the Start menu and then listened to the HDD grind away.

reacharavindh 3y ago

True that crashes were more frequent and annoying. However, that’s not what I was talking about. While it worked, the UX felt responsive. Moving the mouse around clicking things, opening files and folders, dragging stuff, scrolling, window switching, even the clicks felt responsive. These days the whole thing feels like “smooth” in a bad slow way. As if every action spends a good 20% of time first doing some animation and then doing what you really intended.

tracker1 3y ago

I think it largely came down to how much RAM you had in your system.. 4MB was mostly okay, and sluggish, 8-16 much more usable... 32+ was downright snappy. I recall using an AMD 5x86@133 with 64mb ram with Win95 then NT4 and it was very usable at the time. It wasn't the best for gaming, my cpu/gpu weren't great, but for general work/productivity use it was pretty great for the time. I had received the wrong ram by mistake, and it worked... was supposed to be 16mb. edit: I also recall paying extra to add in a cache module on that mb.

MrBuddyCasino 3y ago

IO was slow. Once stuff was in RAM, it was quite fast.

mrighele 3y ago
At least at the beginning not everybody had hardware that supported DMA for disk access (and those that had it, not always had it configured properly). That meant burning CPU cycles just for doing IO.
JD557 3y ago
This. I was recently backing up some stuff from an old Mac OS 8 machine and it was amazing how snappy a lot of things feel. But if something is not on RAM you can clearly notice it.
- ben_w 3y ago
  Ah, I remember those days. Around that era, dragging windows around the screen was switching from "draw outline" to "draw the actual window".
  - deleted 3y ago
    [deleted]
cout 3y ago
Drawing to the screen was also slow until accelerated 2D cards came along.

wanderingstan 3y ago

Hard to believe that a few system crashes per day was the norm. You just hoped you hadn’t lost too much, would re-boot and go get a drink while you waited. Due to that “training” I still hit CTRL-S obsessively even when it hasn’t been needed for years.

rob74 3y ago
Contrast that to today, when you have editors like Sublime Text which will reliably keep your editor tabs (or "buffers") around for as long as you need them, even if you never save them (yourself - of course the editor does that behind the scenes).
deleted 3y ago
[deleted]
mbwgh 3y ago
For me, my Ctrl+S moment was with Apple's Writer, on my first Macbook back in 2005 or so. Lost a whole evening's worth of work due to a crash. I'm mostly in the `:w` camp now, but still...
- stavros 3y ago
  <Esc>:w is muscle memory by now, and it'll never change.
  - gcoakes 3y ago
    A quirk in my config that I haven't bothered to fix makes it so my formatter runs post write. I've unfortunately picked up the habit of <esc>:w<cr>:w<cr> in rapid succession.
    - stavros 3y ago
      Oof, my condolences. At least you make doubly sure it's saved.
LoganDark 3y ago

raffraffraff 3y ago

I had a carefully crafted 98SE CD that was created using a tool called (I think) 98lite. It let you remove components and set defaults. That was rock solid for me, and used so few resources. Boot times were very quick considering the hardware at the time. The all-important post-install defrag made a difference. I didn't switch away from 98SE on my home computer until XP SP2 (which I immediately theme to look like 98 because I hated the primary colour nonsense). Actually, every Windows installation from then until I switched to Linux was "shrunk" and tweaked (can't remember what tool I used, but it wasn't an official MS thing). Having a full licenced copy of InstallShield at work was extremely handy too - every app was repackaged into a fully automatic installer and bundled with the OS. It almost felt like a cloned PC. In fact when I got a job managing fleets of PCs, that XPCD Builder script was like a superpower.

gsich 3y ago
XP had a Classic theme from the beginning.
accrual 3y ago
Maybe you used nLite? I credit this tool for making me into a Windows power user. Taking the OS apart checkbox-by-checkbox gave me a good understanding of how the pieces fit together and what is required vs optional. https://www.nliteos.com/ https://www.nliteos.com/
- andrepd 3y ago
  Ohh man, nlite! The memory you just unlocked for me ahahaha
  - raffraffraff 3y ago
    Same! That was the one!

dehrmann 3y ago

If you're bored, you should see how Windows 9x does on a Vortex86 CPU with an SD card.

seabass-labrax 3y ago

My Intel Pentium 4 machine usually runs reliably and responsively, but you have to be careful: the default Windows picture viewer instantly freezes the PC if you click 'next image' before the current one has finished loading!

winrid 3y ago
In XP it would be fine. Are you running win10 on a P4? Madman :)
- seabass-labrax 3y ago
  Haha not Windows 10 :) Actually it was Windows XP... I cannot remember which Service Pack, but I believe it is the second. One day I'll try NetBSD on it...

bitwize 3y ago

Indeed. It took nearly a full decade for Windows to match the responsiveness of, say, an Amiga 2000.

qbasic_forever 3y ago

The terrible performance you remember is from slow hard drives and just a couple megabytes of RAM. Retro computing enthusiasts today have win 95 running on solid state flash disks and 32 megabytes of memory and it flies.

afavour 3y ago
Right but the OP said: > sure do feel nostalgic how fast and responsive the desktop “felt” back in those days Wasn’t referring to the retro computing setups of today.