9 ms·
The thing that always strikes me with these kinds of demos is how absurdly efficient old OSs were / had to be. It's obviously not an apples to apples comparison
by nippoo 3y ago
The thing that always strikes me with these kinds of demos is how absurdly efficient old OSs were / had to be. It's obviously not an apples to apples comparison, as modern operating systems have to handle a lot more, but even Windows XP (which handled a lot of the same basic Internet browsing tasks as I still use now!) is almost comically fast on modern hardware.
- herbst 3y agoIt's a fair comparison IMO. There are Linux flavours still making my 15 year old hardware faster with every other update. And any standard flavor still works like a charm. There is no real reason OSes get more shitty with every version
- hsbauauvhabzb 3y ago> There is no real reason OSes get more shitty with every version The reason is that there’s profit to be squeezed out with all the additional bloat.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- tonoto 3y agoBut still, during the time of Windows 95/98 I could hardly play even a 128kbps MP3 with WinAmp in my Pentium 133MHz with 12MB of Ram where I had got rid of lots of bloatware. At the same time I could play it smoothly in Linux with a full blown desktop environment (Window Maker) running. So it was a bad performer in comparison even back then.
- liotier 3y agoLet's not exaggerate: Winamp .mp3 playback was just fine on any Pentium running Windows 9x - though I concede that even my Pentium 75 had 16 MB RAM and I have never seen a Pentium with less than that. On the other hand, extracting a CD and compressing it's .wav to .mp3 was a whole day of computing, and sending the files as attachments through SMTP was enough to elicit flowery vehement objections from my university's sysadmins and my friend's small ISP alike...
- znpy 3y agoAh the times when the netiquette dictated not to attach large files to emails directed to mailing lists, but to upload them to some ftp server and only paste the link… The whole industry was had more attention to performance and resources consumption.
- liotier 3y agoNetiquette aside, a bunch of .mp3 as SMTP attachments hogged the single 64 kb/s that was my whole school's single link to the Internet and they entirely filled the receiving side's mail server storage, resulting in an outage... Both valid basis for criticism of my obnoxious behaviour in 1996 !
- tonoto 3y agoAlright, it might be that the memory fades and that it was OGG that I were struggling with, nevertheless the music playback worked way better in Linux. My issue I had were modelines/vertical refresh rate and having the graphics card recognized as it were my first computer and as a newbie with no friends to ask it felt rather steep to understand XFree86. But it was the IBM Aptiva K23 (basically this https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sEhYumJiEbY https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sEhYumJiEbY ) with 12MB onboard. Later upgraded to the K6-2 (500?) with a real speed bump.
- inferiorhuman 3y agoOGG would make a lot more sense. Even back in the Pentium days I believe there were optimized integer decoders that would handily outperform OGG stuff which only had a floating point decoder. Wikipedia is showing the og Pentium at 0.5 FP ops per clock cycle vs 1.88 integer ops. Of course by the time you get to the Core architecture you're in the opposite situation where Sandy Bridge is at 16 FP ops and 6.2 integer ops per clock cycle.
- ta1243 3y ago> sending the files as attachments through SMTP was enough to elicit flowery vehement objections from my university's sysadmins The more things change.... OK they don't complain as much about 500kb attachments, but a lot of corporate direction for 20 years is about stopping that behaviour
- bzzzt 3y agoStrange. I used a dual boot configuration back in the day and found the Windows experience a lot more efficient than the Linux desktop then. It was less stable and secure of course, but Linux drivers were not really optimized and if you wanted a comparable desktop feel you needed something like KDE which needed a lot more memory and felt sluggish compared to Windows. Also, there was rapid development in MP3 decoders at the time, they went from requiring about 100% of the CPU to less than 10% on about every Pentium system.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- dspillett 3y ago> I used a dual boot configuration back in the day and found the Windows experience a lot more efficient than the Linux desktop then. That was often due to driver support, some hardware not performing as quickly (or sometimes not being as stable) under generic OSS drivers compared to their behaviour with the manufacturer's proprietary binaries (which were quite likely not available for Linux at all). It could be very hit-and-miss, with two otherwise very similar machines performing quite differently due to one controller on the motherboard. Sometimes it was due to the generic driver not knowing for sure that a given device supported faster modes well so erring on the side of caution, a not uncommon example being a drive/controller combination ending up running in PIO mode or an old DMA mode despite supporting something much faster, in which case you could get the performance back with a little “magic” configuration manually telling it to use that better mode. Generic drives in Windows often had the same problems, but manufacturers tended to make device-specific drivers readily available (usually in the box) for those OSs. Other times it came down to differing defaults for things like cache modes (write-through or write back, etc), power-saving options, and so forth, which again could be tweaked with config (though the discoverability of these config options was typically not very high).
- bzzzt 3y agoIt was also the awful amount of indirection of X(Free86/org) which made sure you had to jump through hoops to get anything on the screen. Even with accelerated hardware X doesn't feel as fast as Windows/macOS due to the insane amount of round-trips for perceived 'network transparency' which doesn't work that great and almost nobody uses. I find it very disappointing some people are still fighting Wayland which, while not perfect, at least tries to get Linux desktops graphics stack 'on par' with macOS versions from 20 years ago...
- darksim905 3y agoI call bullshit. Windows 95/98/2000 did not have any bloatware....
- tonoto 3y agoIt got worse with Windows ME but yes I felt that Windows 98 had lots of stuff to be removed. I were impressed at first glance with Windows Memphis until I realized it was the same as Windows 95 and I started to explore different shells as alternative to explorer.exe and I believe it was Litestep with a simple skin I got my best performance from.. but as I, had a better experience in Linux (besides graphics resolution) which I hade newly explored I booted into Windows less, and less...
- exitb 3y agoI remember being able to watch bootleg movies on a Windows 2000, while Windows 98 was too slow on the same hardware. I suspect that had nothing to do with bloatware, but rather some internal inefficiencies while dealing with heavy CPU/memory/IO load.
- gattilorenz 3y agoHah! I remember watching the first Matrix as DivX on a P200MMX with a 14” Compaq CRT. I had to use a Dos movie player (without starting Windows), as in Windows 98 it was way too slow.
- M95D 3y agoQVPro? It's still on the internet! http://www.multimediaware.com/qv/ http://www.multimediaware.com/qv/
- gattilorenz 3y agoPossibly, it seems to ring a bell but I should launch it to confirm. I’m pretty sure teenager me didn’t actually buy the pro version :)
- 3y ago
- hospitalJail 3y agoI was just amazed that my super old laptop could run youtube/games for my 2 year old. It had Windows but was too slow to really use. Fedora Silverblue was too heavy, but MX Linux made that computer run like my main. No slowdowns ever. Moments like this make me wonder who/what is leading us.
- andix 3y agoEven standard Ubuntu runs very smooth on old hardware (if it has enough memory and a ssd). I installed windows 10 on my 15 year old think pad, it was usable, but quite slow. Switched to Ubuntu and everything felt snappy again.
- FirmwareBurner 3y ago>but even Windows XP (which handled a lot of the same basic Internet browsing tasks as I still use now!) is almost comically fast on modern hardware. Why is it surprising that an old OS built for late 90's hardware runs "comically fast" on 2020's hardware? Just look at XP system requirements: - Pentium 233-megahertz (MHz) processor or faster (300 MHz is recommended) - At least 64 megabytes (MB) of RAM (128 MB is recommended) - At least 1.5 gigabytes (GB) of available space on the hard disk. How would anyone expect that not to be much faster on a modern quad+ core, 4GHz system with 8GB+ RAM?
- creshal 3y agoBasic desktop interaction is the same as 22 years ago, yet modern desktop environments are orders of magnitude slower at performing those same basic tasks.
- FirmwareBurner 3y agoSure, but how is it surprising that an old OS built for late 90's hardware runs fast on 2020's hardware? I'm failing to see the surprise. Isn't it a a given that old SW runs faster on modern HW when you factor in how far HW evolved since then.
- jraph 3y agoOP used the phrase "strikes me", that's not quite the same as being surprised. Something can strike you without you being surprised. For instance the amount of ads on youtube when it's running on a smart TV at someone else's always strikes me, but I'm not in the least surprised.
- paulmooreparks 3y agoWhat is striking is the fact that the interactions are the same between old and new shells/applications/syscalls/whatever, but modern software on modern hardware feels so much slower. The only reason for this is that modern software is doing a lot more stuff in the nooks and crannies of those interactions that it didn't used to do. Perhaps some of that stuff is useful, but some of it has to be code that is just less efficient or was just shoveled in because the CPU was faster and the RAM was more spacious.
- creshal 3y agoThe main downside is that those OSes were also really quick to hack, and the smallest problem bluescreen'd the system and lost all your work. But you can get a reasonably close experience with Linux or the BSDs and a simple GUI environment like the *box window managers. They're modern and snappy even on things like older generation RasPis.
- MrBuddyCasino 3y agoWindows 2000 was memory protected, and still had very modest hardware requirements. IMO the pinnacle of Windows UX, everything after that was downhill.
- jeremycarter 3y agoAll of my computer muscle memory is from Windows 2000. It was surprisingly accessible for it's time. Modern macOS still can't use the tab key correctly to tab focus between certain buttons, inputs and actions.
- znpy 3y ago100% agree, windows 2000 was the best windows ever.
- mips_r4300i 3y agoWin2k was peak windows. Though, it did need a lot more RAM than 98 did - it was happy only at 128mb, and 256mb was optimal. Meanwhile, 98 could run most things all day at 64meg. 98's swap and caching agent was definitely not as good as 2k though. You absolutely had to reboot at least daily or the chance of hitting swap would only increase upwards.
- pjmlp 3y agoIf only it had a proper UNIX subsystem, instead of something to make DoD happy. That was Microsoft's biggest mistake regarding GNU/Linux adoption. I only cared about Slackware in 1995, because Windows NT POSIX wasn't enough for university work.
- gwervc 3y agoEven functionally it's very comical because of how we were able to do on Win98 (even 95) almost everything we are doing today: editing documents, browsing the web (with images), playing games, watching videos, printing documents, listening to music. The only functional improvements I can note over two decades are: Unicode support, higher resolution of everything (from hardware to content), and system reliability thanks to driver isolation.
- signal11 3y agoHigher resolutions (and the accompanying resource sizes) would be hell for 32-bit OSes though. Also, it’s kind of amazing that many web pages these days are larger than Doom shareware’s zip size.
- M95D 3y agoNot true. Or it's true because of software bloat and resource waste these days. When I was a teenager, I wanted to see what was the maximum resolution my monitor supported. It was a Samsung Syncmaster 14" entirely analog, no OSD, with analog adjustment knobs on the bottom. The video card was a Matrox Millennium II 8MB VRAM and the OS was Windows 3.10. The maximum resolution that I could get was 1600x1200 @ 41Hz interlaced. That's almost 2K (1.92K to be more precise). 41Hz interlaced hurt my eyes like hell but everything worked on the software side.
- nightski 3y agoThere's a lot more to it than just increasing the resolution. Graphics, animations, font rendering quality, huge images, the list goes on.
- userbinator 3y agoMost of that is GPU-accelerated anyway so the OS / CPU doesn't need to do much beyond telling the GPU what to do.
- bluetomcat 3y agoThe core OS APIs still allow writing fast and snappy applications, but most apps nowadays are not written this way. Apps are using generic libraries that bring "the gorilla and the jungle" with them, browsers are relying on a JIT to draw their own UI, etc.
- steve1977 3y agoThis. I’m still using a couple of MFC or Win32 apps and using them is pure joy on a modern computer.
- reddalo 3y agoI agree. I love native Win32 apps, they're so light and quick. But nowadays everyone is using shitty solutions such as Electron.
- delta_p_delta_x 3y agoTheir binary sizes are also tiny. A full-fledged GUI app in a few hundred kB or less, that runs completely native code—truly a wonder.
- gosub100 3y agoyou can see this if you emerge (gentoo) or build from ports (*bsd). You try to compile vim and suddenly you're in the config page for CUPS (printer support) which then wants to know if you need Unicode support for a language you've never heard of (and if so, which font packages do you want to show it on).
- projektfu 3y agoEven a lot of the new APIs are quite fast. I feel that slowness creeps into frameworks two ways. 1. Bad abstraction, causing the moral equivalent of N+1 queries in UI code. For example, modify one thing, causing layout, moving something else, causing layout, moving something else, causing layout, etc., etc., until it is all recalculated and re-laid out, and then allowing the paint. 2. Hidden serialization of asynchronous processes, essentially causing tiny pauses throughout the main thread. I think this is one reason why people are so impressed with IMGUI. They imagine that the UI code must be doing an incredible amount of work to feel so slow, but then they watch a similar IMGUI app build and display the whole UI every frame 60-120 times per second, with plenty processing power left over. But if the other frameworks weren't wasting clock time, they could feel plenty fast. You can get a good feel for what is really slow by using a very slow computer. The original Macintosh feels snappy, but it is doing one process in black and white. It's not hard to reach 30fps. When you take System 7, and put it on a 16MHz 68020 with half a memory bus (Mac LC), and run it at 16-bit color, painting those windows takes a long time. Our trick back then was to jump to black and white when we needed to get things done quickly, then back to higher bit depths when we wanted color or eye candy. Now we have a situation where we can output full screen 24bit color in a millisecond or less, we are waiting on other things.
- revskill 3y agoBecause when you add more functionalities, the efficiency will eventually break.
- sebtron 3y agoWe software engineers took Moore's law as a free pass to make our software twice as shitty every 18 months.
- charles_f 3y agoThis! Oh, this! And look at the size as well. A fresh install of 11 is over 10gb. It's something of a Parkinson's law of optimization. The more computing power there is, the more clutter and less optimization will be had until we fill the computing power. When your hardware is a big limiting factor, performance becomes a primary concern. I think there is also something to be said about the size of the project. Win98 was in the hundreds, 11 is in the thousands. I have found much harder to get the fundamentals right on a larger project than a smaller one. Responsibility is diluted, architecture creates more seams and redundancies, and coordinating people is more complex. On top of that, slap a product culture that favors form over function, and cramming in the largest feature list possible, and you've got yourself a modern OS.
- ravenstine 3y agoThere was once a time where shitty software couldn't just ride on the back of good hardware.
- juunpp 3y agoYou're right, it's not an apples-to-apples comparison. The comparison is unfair to Windows 11 running on bare metal. You'd have to emulate 10 browser stacks recursively and then put Windows 98 on that to get a reasonable baseline.