3 ms·

>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

>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 ago
Basic 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 ago
  Sure, 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 ago
    OP 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 ago
    What 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.
    - candiodari 3y ago
      You'd especially expect latency to have gone down. Instead, latency went up.
      - mijamo 3y ago
        Latency of what? Starting the OS is definitely faster. Launching software is also orders of magnitude faster. HDD don't requires hours of defragmentation to avoid slowing down to a halt. I was only a teenager in the windows 98 era but I remember I was just always waiting for the computer. This is not something I have experienced in a long time now.
        Publius_Enigma 3y ago
        Latency of text entry, as one example. In an application like Teams, the delay between striking a key on the keyboard and the corresponding glyph appearing on screen is comically bad - two orders of magnitude higher than performing the equivalent action on a computer from the early 1980s.
  - numpad0 3y ago
    Surprise is modern OS runs slower in comparison without much perceptible improvements, inviting such a conclusion through rosy glasses that purported improvements since "then" must be nothing more than extreme amount of software bloat.
  - jstanley 3y ago
    The surprising part isn't that near-30-year-old software runs faster now than it did then. The surprising part is that in the intervening near-30-years of development, we have made software slower instead of faster.
  - moron4hire 3y ago
    I think the big question everyone has in mind when they make comments about old OSes running fast on modern hardware is, "what is the juice that we are getting for the squeeze?" It's not just that Win98 runs faster on modern hardware. It's that it does the same--or at least similar, as far as the user is concerned--tasks as Win11, but faster. That leaves a gaping hole of "what was so important to add to the OS that it warrants slower interactions at every turn". I opened the settings app on my work computer running Win10 the other day and it took a good 5 seconds before it showed up and painted. On Win-anything-less-than-or-equal-to-7, the settings window opened immediately and navigating to different settings was also immediate. So what is Win10/11 doing? And Linux isn't immune to the bloat. It is still smaller/faster than Windows, but it has managed to stay within a constant factor of Windows all this time. Modern Linux is significantly fatter than 20, even 10 year old Windows. If the answer were "corpos gonna bloat", what's Linux's excuse? Operating systems across the board have gotten bigger and slower over time, for little visible benefit, and nobody has a coherent answer for why.
    - creshal 3y ago
      Some of the causes for bloat apply to both commercial and floss projects: - heavier use of serialized I/O means much lower risk of pointer corruption or related threats, but adds overhead - so do simple safety/sanity/security checks - each by itself is harmless, but over 10-20 years they add up - more abstraction layers and more bookkeeping to handle much more complicated hardware setups, or just the passage of time (a Y2K secure date field takes two more bytes, a 64-bit time_t takes 4 more bytes than a 32-bit one, etc.) - userspace devs are as lazy as they can be. Gnome these days is mostly Javascript to make the constant pointless rewrites faster, something that would've been unheard of 20 years ago. (The *box WMs meanwhile are still as fast as before.)
jraph 3y ago
I tried XP on a PII 333 MHz laptop with 96 MB of RAM. This laptop came with Windows 95 or 98. It still works by the way. It ran, but it was quite slow. Windows 2000 managed better. Windows 98 even more, but internet on Windows 98, maybe not the best thing to do. Linux even more. I can't see 233 MHz and 64 MB being reasonable minima, more like very bare minima as in "it boots". (of course, this does not contradict anything essential from your comment)
- FirmwareBurner 3y ago
  >It ran, but it was quite slow. That's how minimum specifications work. They're the minimum to run the OS, but nothing else. Win11 has minimum requirements of 4GB of RAM but I doubt it can run anything with that.
  - deleted 3y ago
    [deleted]
blowski 3y ago
Things I didn't use my 1998 PC for: * realtime collaborative spreadsheet editing * 28 inch high definition monitor * watching movies in HD * playing almost lifelike games * browsing an extremely hostile internet * live backing up all my files * Running large complex scripts on the same machine I can easily carry in one hand * Running an IDE like JetBrains I could go on. We are only doing the "same tasks" if you ignore a lot of the details.
- rafram 3y ago
  Even the software that existed then has become an order of magnitude more capable. Try running 2023 Emacs or Microsoft Word on a 90s PC…
  - pjmlp 3y ago
    As I watch many people using their UNIX like computers, as if time has stood still in 1980's terminals, I would say it that 2023 Emacs would do just fine. Really, entering in some coffe shop coding sessions, is hardly any different from an IBM X Windows terminal into a DG/UX session in the university computer lab, now they are using a laptop and something else instead of twm or an ambar based text terminal.
    - rafram 3y ago
      My point is that the software we run now is significantly more resource intensive, even if its name hasn't changed. Emacs is slow on 2023 hardware. It would likely be unusable on 90s hardware.
      - pjmlp 3y ago
        Emacs means eight megabytes and constantly swapping for a reason.
- FirmwareBurner 3y ago
  Add to that that Windows XP had no antivirus built in, heck it didn't eve ship with a bloody firewall to block incomign connections, so you got immediately pwned the moment you plugged into the internet or a USB drive from school. Then you installed a third party firewall and anti-virus solution and performance went to shit. Yeah, it felt faster than today's equivalent at similar task, but at what cost. If I strip out the catalyst, locks, interior and seats form my car, it will also go faster and give me better fuel economy but that doesn't really make it usable for me now.
AshamedCaptain 3y ago
> How would anyone expect that not to be much faster on a modern quad+ core, 4GHz system with 8GB+ RAM? It's not a given. For example, Windows XP may boot faster than 98 or 2K on the same hardware, because XP parallelizes and shortens some hardware initialization steps. (e.g. anything related to the network). Win98 with file sharing spends almost a minute during boot (even from an SSD) just squeaking netbios frames.
- M95D 3y ago
  > Win98 with file sharing spends almost a minute during boot (even from an SSD) just squeaking netbios frames. You have a config error in TCP/IP.
  - AshamedCaptain 3y ago
    It has been a long time since you last sniffed 9x Windows, right? It will speak NBFs even if you _don't have TCP/IP whatsoever_, NBTs otherwise, but they will delay the boot process by about a minute or so.

creshal 3y ago

Basic 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 ago
Sure, 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 ago
  OP 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 ago
  What 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.
  - candiodari 3y ago
    You'd especially expect latency to have gone down. Instead, latency went up.
    - mijamo 3y ago
      Latency of what? Starting the OS is definitely faster. Launching software is also orders of magnitude faster. HDD don't requires hours of defragmentation to avoid slowing down to a halt. I was only a teenager in the windows 98 era but I remember I was just always waiting for the computer. This is not something I have experienced in a long time now.
      - Publius_Enigma 3y ago
        Latency of text entry, as one example. In an application like Teams, the delay between striking a key on the keyboard and the corresponding glyph appearing on screen is comically bad - two orders of magnitude higher than performing the equivalent action on a computer from the early 1980s.
- numpad0 3y ago
  Surprise is modern OS runs slower in comparison without much perceptible improvements, inviting such a conclusion through rosy glasses that purported improvements since "then" must be nothing more than extreme amount of software bloat.
- jstanley 3y ago
  The surprising part isn't that near-30-year-old software runs faster now than it did then. The surprising part is that in the intervening near-30-years of development, we have made software slower instead of faster.
- moron4hire 3y ago
  I think the big question everyone has in mind when they make comments about old OSes running fast on modern hardware is, "what is the juice that we are getting for the squeeze?" It's not just that Win98 runs faster on modern hardware. It's that it does the same--or at least similar, as far as the user is concerned--tasks as Win11, but faster. That leaves a gaping hole of "what was so important to add to the OS that it warrants slower interactions at every turn". I opened the settings app on my work computer running Win10 the other day and it took a good 5 seconds before it showed up and painted. On Win-anything-less-than-or-equal-to-7, the settings window opened immediately and navigating to different settings was also immediate. So what is Win10/11 doing? And Linux isn't immune to the bloat. It is still smaller/faster than Windows, but it has managed to stay within a constant factor of Windows all this time. Modern Linux is significantly fatter than 20, even 10 year old Windows. If the answer were "corpos gonna bloat", what's Linux's excuse? Operating systems across the board have gotten bigger and slower over time, for little visible benefit, and nobody has a coherent answer for why.
  - creshal 3y ago
    Some of the causes for bloat apply to both commercial and floss projects: - heavier use of serialized I/O means much lower risk of pointer corruption or related threats, but adds overhead - so do simple safety/sanity/security checks - each by itself is harmless, but over 10-20 years they add up - more abstraction layers and more bookkeeping to handle much more complicated hardware setups, or just the passage of time (a Y2K secure date field takes two more bytes, a 64-bit time_t takes 4 more bytes than a 32-bit one, etc.) - userspace devs are as lazy as they can be. Gnome these days is mostly Javascript to make the constant pointless rewrites faster, something that would've been unheard of 20 years ago. (The *box WMs meanwhile are still as fast as before.)

jraph 3y ago

I tried XP on a PII 333 MHz laptop with 96 MB of RAM. This laptop came with Windows 95 or 98. It still works by the way. It ran, but it was quite slow. Windows 2000 managed better. Windows 98 even more, but internet on Windows 98, maybe not the best thing to do. Linux even more. I can't see 233 MHz and 64 MB being reasonable minima, more like very bare minima as in "it boots". (of course, this does not contradict anything essential from your comment)

FirmwareBurner 3y ago
>It ran, but it was quite slow. That's how minimum specifications work. They're the minimum to run the OS, but nothing else. Win11 has minimum requirements of 4GB of RAM but I doubt it can run anything with that.
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]

blowski 3y ago

Things I didn't use my 1998 PC for: * realtime collaborative spreadsheet editing * 28 inch high definition monitor * watching movies in HD * playing almost lifelike games * browsing an extremely hostile internet * live backing up all my files * Running large complex scripts on the same machine I can easily carry in one hand * Running an IDE like JetBrains I could go on. We are only doing the "same tasks" if you ignore a lot of the details.

rafram 3y ago
Even the software that existed then has become an order of magnitude more capable. Try running 2023 Emacs or Microsoft Word on a 90s PC…
- pjmlp 3y ago
  As I watch many people using their UNIX like computers, as if time has stood still in 1980's terminals, I would say it that 2023 Emacs would do just fine. Really, entering in some coffe shop coding sessions, is hardly any different from an IBM X Windows terminal into a DG/UX session in the university computer lab, now they are using a laptop and something else instead of twm or an ambar based text terminal.
  - rafram 3y ago
    My point is that the software we run now is significantly more resource intensive, even if its name hasn't changed. Emacs is slow on 2023 hardware. It would likely be unusable on 90s hardware.
    - pjmlp 3y ago
      Emacs means eight megabytes and constantly swapping for a reason.
FirmwareBurner 3y ago
Add to that that Windows XP had no antivirus built in, heck it didn't eve ship with a bloody firewall to block incomign connections, so you got immediately pwned the moment you plugged into the internet or a USB drive from school. Then you installed a third party firewall and anti-virus solution and performance went to shit. Yeah, it felt faster than today's equivalent at similar task, but at what cost. If I strip out the catalyst, locks, interior and seats form my car, it will also go faster and give me better fuel economy but that doesn't really make it usable for me now.

AshamedCaptain 3y ago

> How would anyone expect that not to be much faster on a modern quad+ core, 4GHz system with 8GB+ RAM? It's not a given. For example, Windows XP may boot faster than 98 or 2K on the same hardware, because XP parallelizes and shortens some hardware initialization steps. (e.g. anything related to the network). Win98 with file sharing spends almost a minute during boot (even from an SSD) just squeaking netbios frames.

M95D 3y ago
> Win98 with file sharing spends almost a minute during boot (even from an SSD) just squeaking netbios frames. You have a config error in TCP/IP.
- AshamedCaptain 3y ago
  It has been a long time since you last sniffed 9x Windows, right? It will speak NBFs even if you _don't have TCP/IP whatsoever_, NBTs otherwise, but they will delay the boot process by about a minute or so.