3 ms·
Complexity. Size. Windows 95 was about 50MB installed with most features. Windows 2000 fit on a CD for the install. Current Windows 10 installers won't even
by Syonyk 3y ago
Complexity. Size.
Windows 95 was about 50MB installed with most features.
Windows 2000 fit on a CD for the install.
Current Windows 10 installers won't even fit on a single layer DVD anymore, and forget doing the install with a FAT32 USB stick (some older UEFIs won't handle exFAT yet).
The fastest computer I've ever used, perceptually, was a dual Pentium 3 866, with Rambus, booting XP (probably SP1 or so) on 15k U320 SCSI disk. The thing was telepathic.
- morelisp 3y agoThe P3 era was really a golden age. Clock speeds were still rapidly doubling, you could get SMP but most people didn't so everything had to optimize single-threaded perf, and likewise "normal" memory spanned 32MB to 512MB so you could really keep multiple programs' full working sets ready at once.
- water9 3y agoI would've said P4 era with hyperthreading opening the door to multi-core programming paradigms. Clock speeds mostly capped around 5ghz since that era
- jorvi 3y agoI’d rather call that the Athlon era. P4’s ran like (literal) hot garbage, Athlon’s absolutely crushed them.
- Affric 3y agoAthlon was amazing.
- cmrdporcupine 3y agoIf we're going back to that time period... Alpha. How I coveted my roommate's machine that had one in it.