8 ms·

Yes, even during my career computers became faster by a factor of ~100 or so, yet computers don't feel much faster if at all. Yes, they're much more _capable_,

Yes, even during my career computers became faster by a factor of ~100 or so, yet computers don't feel much faster if at all. Yes, they're much more _capable_, but usually even less responsive than e.g. in Windows 95 days. I think just having the intuition of how fast computers can work is what the industry is sorely lacking. I am usually able to achieve very good performance for the stuff that I'm working on, despite the fact that it often requires a stupid amount of computation, just because I know how much a computer can actually do in a given amount of time when it's tuned correctly.

JTyQZSnP3cQGa8B 2y ago
I can only agree to this. 500 times faster and still slower than Windows 3.1 for almost the same set of features.
Semaphor 2y ago
It's hard to say after all this time, but I think I was frequently waiting on everything in the win 95 days, while now even a small delay is annoying and standing out. Pressing a key to start a launcher, typing and using enter within a second does not seem to have been possible back then.
- endgame 2y ago
  But back in those days, you had confidence that the event loop didn't randomly drop things, and you could type ahead of what was on screen with confidence.
- arp242 2y ago
  My computer boots in about 10 seconds. That's probably about average? In the Windows 95 days that would have seemed almost impossible. Most applications and games launch in single-digit seconds. I don't recall this being the norm in the Windows 95 days either.
  - dylan604 2y ago
    Just the spinning rust turning at 5400rpm seems like that would have been all but impossible. With modern NVMe devices, waiting for data to load isn't really a bottle neck. At 1200MBps+ speeds, we had to span 16 7200rpm drives in RAID-0 to get close to that speed. With all of that, it does feel wrong to have to wait for apps to load. How much of that is the calling home to validate the app has been signed?
    - djur 2y ago
      Why not find out by turning off your wifi and starting the app?
- nasretdinov 2y ago
  That's true, loading times improved drastically with SSDs. The responsiveness isn't just about the loading times though. E.g. if you're typing text some web sites (thankfully not this one) manage to introduce a measurable delay between a key press and when letters appear. Computers in Win95 era were quite slow to be able to do anything complicated on each key press, so usually there was no extra processing and thus no extra delay. Also, few remember, but CRTs weren't limited to 60 Hz, and I remember using e.g. 100 Hz normally (with lower resolution), and the difference was quite noticeable.
  - hansvm 2y ago
    If there's just a measurable delay then it's usually tolerable. I _hate_ when the broken JS causing that delay also skips characters if you type too fast, has a setting to wipe the form "on-load" (after you've half filled it out because the site is too slow), or otherwise mangles legitimate text input.
- deleted 2y ago
  [deleted]
diarrhea 2y ago
> having the intuition of how fast computers can work I wish I never developed it. It turned what used to be mild annoyances into questioning my career choices.
globular-toast 2y ago
My GNU/Linux system using sway window manager feels at least as fast as Windows 95. I actually have been able to appreciate speed increases with computer upgrades. That is, until I open a web browser...
- mrob 2y ago
  My GNU/Linux system using LXQt feels faster than I remember Windows 95 being. I attribute this mostly to higher refresh rate on the monitor, and optical switches and faster polling on the keyboard and mouse. Modern gaming hardware is good even if you don't use it for games.
bruce511 2y ago
I'm old enough to remember when speed was the defining factor for everything. Benchmarks were a critical part if selling, everyone knew the mhz of their cpu, speed was the most important thing, it was the only thing. And I'm not talking about techies, I'm talking about the man in the street. Today, all computers, all programs are "fast enough". Most people can't name a benchmark, much less use it for comparison. Computer sales seldom focus on mhz. Your phone is either fast or slow. But actual measures are not what phone users care about. These days it's all about capability. Most of which is assumed to exist as table stakes, and which didn't even exist in Windows 95 days. Maybe people under-estimate how fast their PC is, but equally they grossly underestimate how much work it -is- doing. Some, but not huge, amounts of time are spent on making things "as fast as they can be". Because customers are paying for more capability, not more speed.
- lazide 2y ago
  UI latency has gotten horrendous, both desktop and web. That is what people are experiencing - 500ms-3000ms delays for basic UI interactions (or more), frozen UI’s, jerky/laggy autocomplete and UI renders. Like the classic ‘button is a different button by the time you see the old button and click on it’. On incredibly lightly loaded and overpowered hardware. Everyone has been focused on some core algorithm, and completely ignoring the user experience. IMO.
  - lucasmullens 2y ago
    I remember learning that you get about 100ms for a basic UI interaction before a user perceives it as slow. And you get about 1s for a "full page navigation", even if it's a SPA, users are a bit more understanding if you're loading something that feels like new page. Getting under 100ms really shouldn't be hard for most things. At the very least it should be easy to get the ripple (or whatever button animation) to trigger within the first 100ms.
    - lazide 2y ago
      Usually these issues are caused by doing work in the UI thread (easy, when it’s ‘cheap’) synchronously. All UI thread frameworks end up doing the UI interactions on a single thread, or everything becomes impossible to manage, and especially if not careful, it’s easy to not properly setup an async callout or the like with the correct callbacks. It is easy to make a responsive, < 100 ms UI, it’s often harder to keep it that way.
dtx1 2y ago
Honestly we ALL know that the reason modern computing sucks is Javascript. And until we replace it with something fundamentally less awful, it'll eat every last CPU Second we have.
- dylan604 2y ago
  The fact that we took Javascript out of the browser and started to allow it to be used server side was a sad day to me. Like who let the patients run the sanitarium with that decision?
TheAceOfHearts 2y ago
Recently I've been playing around with Dear ImGui and it's so fast that now all other pieces of software feel sluggish in comparison. It starts up near instantly and it's incredibly snappy. Even using Python bindings is still incredibly fast. Meanwhile I find it very challenging to build performant web apps without digging myself into a framework-shaped hole, even when the app shouldn't be doing anything particularly complicated. Maybe part of it is a skill issue on my end, but it really feels like a team of smart engineers could help bridge the performance gap between native and web. Or maybe create an island that sits in the middle.
- freeone3000 2y ago
  The performance hole is the javascript. Drop back to rendered HTML and some simple CSS rules for display, avoiding redraws and never having a single reflow, use system fonts, and host resources on the same domain as your HTML. You will be amazed at the speed!
  - whstl 2y ago
    But pure Javascript in itself is rarely the problem, there’s plenty of CPU-demanding websites that are responsive and performant. IMO the problem is what JS enables: making lots of very slow Ajax calls for every small interaction. Which works great in development machines but sucks when a real network is involved. But your point stands, dropping to server-rendered HTML makes it fast again.
    - ileonichwiesz 2y ago
      [flagged]
  - oDot 2y ago
    It's not only the language itself, but also the way it lends itself to the developer. I've been using Gleam in Vue[0] for my task app Netful[1] and it surprisingly reduced a lot of the jank, because... it's sync. Awaits are used very often for things that shouldn't be used for and have compounding overhead. [0] https://github.com/vleam/vleam https://github.com/vleam/vleam [1] https://nestful.app/ https://nestful.app/
wudangmonk 2y ago
Its easy to see how people would become used to expect everything to be slow. Python is the most popular programming langauge both in schools and in general. I can't think of a slower language. Then all your IPC is done through json as if everything was a website hundreds or thousands of miles away instead of something more sensible such as a shared memory.
- userbinator 2y ago
  Java? Its speed, or the lack thereof, was a common joke in the 90s and 00s.
  - Yoric 2y ago
    But that changed a long time ago. Now, the main bottleneck with Java is memory usage, but 20 years of JITing have turned Java into a language more than fast enough for most tasks. Won't beat Rust on most benchmarks, of course.
    - kllrnohj 2y ago
      The gap between Java and [C++,Rust,Obj-C,Zig?,D?] is approximately equivalent to 5-8 years of CPU hardware improvements these days. Software engineer time is still often the primary cost metric, but Java didn't ever get actually fast - things like constant pointer chasing and poor cache utilization still hurt it significantly in "regular" code. So, too, does the complete lack of compile time optimizations and limited JIT thoroughness & comprehensiveness.
      - userbinator 2y ago
        The culture around Java doesn't help either, with its love for insane amounts of abstraction and overengineering.
        kllrnohj 2y ago
        Culture definitely hurts it a lot. It seems like any question involving Java and anything performance related is "you don't, you're stupid, the JIT fixes everything, never measure, never benchmark, premature optimization is the root of all evil which means never, ever attempt to optimize anything ever" There's pockets of people doing Java + performance, but they are far & away the exception and they are frustratingly insular about what they do & why they do it. And yeah it tends to often go against every bit of guidance from things like Effective Java & similar.
duxup 2y ago
I dunno man, after we moved to SSDs I felt like things sped up dramatically.
AndrewKemendo 2y ago
Because they got smaller at the same time as they got faster. We pretty much locked in a latency pattern (eg, acceptable upper bound for user path completion speed) such that we’re happy with the speed you can go. Much faster and it feels weird. We just want to continue to shrink it down.
trunc8 2y ago
I had a Dell 333p from 1992 running Windows 3.11 via DOS 6. For many years I would dig it out and see it beat newer PCs from boot-up into editing a Word document. And Word 2.0 had a lot of the features I suspect most people still only use these days.
agumonkey 2y ago
Another aspect of it is that a lot of the enhancements bought by insane hardware speed is not that crucial to my mind when I use a computer. When booting NT5 .. I realize that just a bit of fading or slide-in once in a while is just about right. Even limited UI framework, with some flicker .. doesn't bother me, and there's a strange feeling of being bare-metal / lean / primitive that felt good the last time I used it.
rayiner 2y ago
They’re even less capable. Lots of basic consumer software, like email and word processors is less functional than the corresponding applications 25 years ago.
epolanski 2y ago
I think some of us see the past through distorted lenses. Anything, from booting the computer to any random application is much faster in my Win 11 than on my old Win 2000 (with good hardware for the time). I still remember the hourglass on the icon when opening so many applications (let alone together..).
- speed_spread 2y ago
  You are right, power usage concerns and SSDs have done wonders in making some operations seem instant. But on the other hand, there's much to complain about how invasive web tech has become as online apps replace native ones. You don't launch office anymore, you connect to it, making a lot of local optimizations moot.
hnlmorg 2y ago
Things were pretty slow in the Windows 95 era too. It’s easy to look back on that era with rose tinted glasses but even back then people were constantly moaning that software bloat outpaced computer specifications. After more than 3 decades of writing software, I can confidently say that computer specifications are a lot like a persons house or flat. The more space you have, the more ways you find to fill that space. And the less space you have, the more ways you find to optimise for that space.
sho_hn 2y ago
I think some of this is rose-tinted nostalgia. For many people, Win 95 was paired with 486s with 8 MB RAM or early underpowered Pentiums with hardly any more. Opening the start menu would sometimes take seconds, like the computer had to ponder for a while. Applications frequently had to sit in waiting as the spinning rust slowly volunteered some data. Things are much better now.
- a_random_canuck 2y ago
  100%. Even just loading files off the old spinning disks took ages. Loading screens for a game could take 5-10 minutes. Even just booting into my Linux box took 3-5 minutes and optimizing the boot time was a whole thing you spent a lot of time on. I remember the day I received my first SSD and installed it in my computer, it was like Christmas morning. Things are way faster now.
  - SkipperCat 2y ago
    I had a friend who supported a Windows desktop environment in the 90's. He would constantly complain about how rebooting a workstation would take over 20 minutes. The amount of scripts and other tooling was nutz. My Macbook goes off when I shut the lid and right back on when I open it up. Try doing that on my early 90's Toshiba Satellite. We live in a magical world now of high speed, multi-core and NVMe hardware. I have no desire to ever go back.
    - kaydub 2y ago
      It honestly gives me a warm fuzzy feeling thinking about how blazing fast personal computers are these days. It's instantaneous compared to the 90s and even the 2000s. It wasn't until 2010-2012 that I remember switching to SSD, which is when I feel the turning point was.
      - oxidant 2y ago
        I had a netbook around this time and putting an SSD in it was a HUGE upgrade (similarly the upgrade from 2 to 4GB RAM). I still have it, and when I put an 32bit version of Debian on it a couple years ago, it was molasses. Somehow I used it for years with no complaints.
magpi3 2y ago
Making OS's more secure definitely slowed them down. I remember that there was a noticeable difference between a fresh install of Windows XP and an installation that had been uploaded with the latest service packs after everyone became aware of just how vulnerable the OS was to attacks.
- booi 2y ago
  AFAIK this isn’t because of the security updates but because the filesystem becomes fragmented and spinning disk is awful at random seek. Defrag helps a little but nothing like having big files laid out contiguously.
deleted 2y ago
[deleted]
cma 2y ago
Memory latency hasn't improved much since Windows 95 and lots of stuff pointer chases, though L3 caches now are bigger than all the ram they had and L2 is matching or close.
deleted 2y ago
[deleted]
stkdump 2y ago
Sorry, but I seem to have lived in a fundamentally different universe than you. I remember that my 386 took longer to boot to DOS (which is not even an operating system by today's standards) than my current laptop to come up. When Windows 95 was introduced it took so long to boot that it wasn't even worth it for me. I remember that a popular magazine did an aprils fools joke that the new Intel CPU was so fast it could boot Windows within few seconds.
ilrwbwrkhv 2y ago
Casey muratori's performance aware programming is one of the few courses spreading this message today. We definitely need more of this. Js devs coming in to the industry would think Slack's 7 seconds channel switch is the norm and not due to poor architecture.
sangnoir 2y ago
> Yes, they're much more _capable_, but usually even less responsive than e.g. in Windows 95 days Hard disagree: all applications back then needed splash screens to reassure the user something was happening while the application was loading components on into RAM. Today, most applications load within seconds. I booted an old computer from 2009 just the other day, and everything felt sluggish from boot to launching applications.
Gigachad 2y ago
This is just windows tbh. Clicking around my iPhone and everything loads essentially instantly.

JTyQZSnP3cQGa8B 2y ago

I can only agree to this. 500 times faster and still slower than Windows 3.1 for almost the same set of features.

Semaphor 2y ago

It's hard to say after all this time, but I think I was frequently waiting on everything in the win 95 days, while now even a small delay is annoying and standing out. Pressing a key to start a launcher, typing and using enter within a second does not seem to have been possible back then.

endgame 2y ago
But back in those days, you had confidence that the event loop didn't randomly drop things, and you could type ahead of what was on screen with confidence.
arp242 2y ago
My computer boots in about 10 seconds. That's probably about average? In the Windows 95 days that would have seemed almost impossible. Most applications and games launch in single-digit seconds. I don't recall this being the norm in the Windows 95 days either.
- dylan604 2y ago
  Just the spinning rust turning at 5400rpm seems like that would have been all but impossible. With modern NVMe devices, waiting for data to load isn't really a bottle neck. At 1200MBps+ speeds, we had to span 16 7200rpm drives in RAID-0 to get close to that speed. With all of that, it does feel wrong to have to wait for apps to load. How much of that is the calling home to validate the app has been signed?
  - djur 2y ago
    Why not find out by turning off your wifi and starting the app?
nasretdinov 2y ago
That's true, loading times improved drastically with SSDs. The responsiveness isn't just about the loading times though. E.g. if you're typing text some web sites (thankfully not this one) manage to introduce a measurable delay between a key press and when letters appear. Computers in Win95 era were quite slow to be able to do anything complicated on each key press, so usually there was no extra processing and thus no extra delay. Also, few remember, but CRTs weren't limited to 60 Hz, and I remember using e.g. 100 Hz normally (with lower resolution), and the difference was quite noticeable.
- hansvm 2y ago
  If there's just a measurable delay then it's usually tolerable. I _hate_ when the broken JS causing that delay also skips characters if you type too fast, has a setting to wipe the form "on-load" (after you've half filled it out because the site is too slow), or otherwise mangles legitimate text input.
deleted 2y ago
[deleted]

diarrhea 2y ago

> having the intuition of how fast computers can work I wish I never developed it. It turned what used to be mild annoyances into questioning my career choices.

globular-toast 2y ago

My GNU/Linux system using sway window manager feels at least as fast as Windows 95. I actually have been able to appreciate speed increases with computer upgrades. That is, until I open a web browser...

mrob 2y ago
My GNU/Linux system using LXQt feels faster than I remember Windows 95 being. I attribute this mostly to higher refresh rate on the monitor, and optical switches and faster polling on the keyboard and mouse. Modern gaming hardware is good even if you don't use it for games.

bruce511 2y ago

I'm old enough to remember when speed was the defining factor for everything. Benchmarks were a critical part if selling, everyone knew the mhz of their cpu, speed was the most important thing, it was the only thing. And I'm not talking about techies, I'm talking about the man in the street. Today, all computers, all programs are "fast enough". Most people can't name a benchmark, much less use it for comparison. Computer sales seldom focus on mhz. Your phone is either fast or slow. But actual measures are not what phone users care about. These days it's all about capability. Most of which is assumed to exist as table stakes, and which didn't even exist in Windows 95 days. Maybe people under-estimate how fast their PC is, but equally they grossly underestimate how much work it -is- doing. Some, but not huge, amounts of time are spent on making things "as fast as they can be". Because customers are paying for more capability, not more speed.

lazide 2y ago
UI latency has gotten horrendous, both desktop and web. That is what people are experiencing - 500ms-3000ms delays for basic UI interactions (or more), frozen UI’s, jerky/laggy autocomplete and UI renders. Like the classic ‘button is a different button by the time you see the old button and click on it’. On incredibly lightly loaded and overpowered hardware. Everyone has been focused on some core algorithm, and completely ignoring the user experience. IMO.
- lucasmullens 2y ago
  I remember learning that you get about 100ms for a basic UI interaction before a user perceives it as slow. And you get about 1s for a "full page navigation", even if it's a SPA, users are a bit more understanding if you're loading something that feels like new page. Getting under 100ms really shouldn't be hard for most things. At the very least it should be easy to get the ripple (or whatever button animation) to trigger within the first 100ms.
  - lazide 2y ago
    Usually these issues are caused by doing work in the UI thread (easy, when it’s ‘cheap’) synchronously. All UI thread frameworks end up doing the UI interactions on a single thread, or everything becomes impossible to manage, and especially if not careful, it’s easy to not properly setup an async callout or the like with the correct callbacks. It is easy to make a responsive, < 100 ms UI, it’s often harder to keep it that way.

dtx1 2y ago

Honestly we ALL know that the reason modern computing sucks is Javascript. And until we replace it with something fundamentally less awful, it'll eat every last CPU Second we have.

dylan604 2y ago
The fact that we took Javascript out of the browser and started to allow it to be used server side was a sad day to me. Like who let the patients run the sanitarium with that decision?

TheAceOfHearts 2y ago

Recently I've been playing around with Dear ImGui and it's so fast that now all other pieces of software feel sluggish in comparison. It starts up near instantly and it's incredibly snappy. Even using Python bindings is still incredibly fast. Meanwhile I find it very challenging to build performant web apps without digging myself into a framework-shaped hole, even when the app shouldn't be doing anything particularly complicated. Maybe part of it is a skill issue on my end, but it really feels like a team of smart engineers could help bridge the performance gap between native and web. Or maybe create an island that sits in the middle.

freeone3000 2y ago
The performance hole is the javascript. Drop back to rendered HTML and some simple CSS rules for display, avoiding redraws and never having a single reflow, use system fonts, and host resources on the same domain as your HTML. You will be amazed at the speed!
- whstl 2y ago
  But pure Javascript in itself is rarely the problem, there’s plenty of CPU-demanding websites that are responsive and performant. IMO the problem is what JS enables: making lots of very slow Ajax calls for every small interaction. Which works great in development machines but sucks when a real network is involved. But your point stands, dropping to server-rendered HTML makes it fast again.
  - ileonichwiesz 2y ago
    [flagged]
- oDot 2y ago
  It's not only the language itself, but also the way it lends itself to the developer. I've been using Gleam in Vue[0] for my task app Netful[1] and it surprisingly reduced a lot of the jank, because... it's sync. Awaits are used very often for things that shouldn't be used for and have compounding overhead. [0] https://github.com/vleam/vleam https://github.com/vleam/vleam [1] https://nestful.app/ https://nestful.app/

wudangmonk 2y ago

Its easy to see how people would become used to expect everything to be slow. Python is the most popular programming langauge both in schools and in general. I can't think of a slower language. Then all your IPC is done through json as if everything was a website hundreds or thousands of miles away instead of something more sensible such as a shared memory.

userbinator 2y ago
Java? Its speed, or the lack thereof, was a common joke in the 90s and 00s.
- Yoric 2y ago
  But that changed a long time ago. Now, the main bottleneck with Java is memory usage, but 20 years of JITing have turned Java into a language more than fast enough for most tasks. Won't beat Rust on most benchmarks, of course.
  - kllrnohj 2y ago
    The gap between Java and [C++,Rust,Obj-C,Zig?,D?] is approximately equivalent to 5-8 years of CPU hardware improvements these days. Software engineer time is still often the primary cost metric, but Java didn't ever get actually fast - things like constant pointer chasing and poor cache utilization still hurt it significantly in "regular" code. So, too, does the complete lack of compile time optimizations and limited JIT thoroughness & comprehensiveness.
    - userbinator 2y ago
      The culture around Java doesn't help either, with its love for insane amounts of abstraction and overengineering.
      - kllrnohj 2y ago
        Culture definitely hurts it a lot. It seems like any question involving Java and anything performance related is "you don't, you're stupid, the JIT fixes everything, never measure, never benchmark, premature optimization is the root of all evil which means never, ever attempt to optimize anything ever" There's pockets of people doing Java + performance, but they are far & away the exception and they are frustratingly insular about what they do & why they do it. And yeah it tends to often go against every bit of guidance from things like Effective Java & similar.

duxup 2y ago

I dunno man, after we moved to SSDs I felt like things sped up dramatically.

AndrewKemendo 2y ago

Because they got smaller at the same time as they got faster. We pretty much locked in a latency pattern (eg, acceptable upper bound for user path completion speed) such that we’re happy with the speed you can go. Much faster and it feels weird. We just want to continue to shrink it down.

trunc8 2y ago

I had a Dell 333p from 1992 running Windows 3.11 via DOS 6. For many years I would dig it out and see it beat newer PCs from boot-up into editing a Word document. And Word 2.0 had a lot of the features I suspect most people still only use these days.

agumonkey 2y ago

Another aspect of it is that a lot of the enhancements bought by insane hardware speed is not that crucial to my mind when I use a computer. When booting NT5 .. I realize that just a bit of fading or slide-in once in a while is just about right. Even limited UI framework, with some flicker .. doesn't bother me, and there's a strange feeling of being bare-metal / lean / primitive that felt good the last time I used it.

rayiner 2y ago

They’re even less capable. Lots of basic consumer software, like email and word processors is less functional than the corresponding applications 25 years ago.

epolanski 2y ago

I think some of us see the past through distorted lenses. Anything, from booting the computer to any random application is much faster in my Win 11 than on my old Win 2000 (with good hardware for the time). I still remember the hourglass on the icon when opening so many applications (let alone together..).

speed_spread 2y ago
You are right, power usage concerns and SSDs have done wonders in making some operations seem instant. But on the other hand, there's much to complain about how invasive web tech has become as online apps replace native ones. You don't launch office anymore, you connect to it, making a lot of local optimizations moot.

hnlmorg 2y ago

Things were pretty slow in the Windows 95 era too. It’s easy to look back on that era with rose tinted glasses but even back then people were constantly moaning that software bloat outpaced computer specifications. After more than 3 decades of writing software, I can confidently say that computer specifications are a lot like a persons house or flat. The more space you have, the more ways you find to fill that space. And the less space you have, the more ways you find to optimise for that space.

sho_hn 2y ago

I think some of this is rose-tinted nostalgia. For many people, Win 95 was paired with 486s with 8 MB RAM or early underpowered Pentiums with hardly any more. Opening the start menu would sometimes take seconds, like the computer had to ponder for a while. Applications frequently had to sit in waiting as the spinning rust slowly volunteered some data. Things are much better now.

a_random_canuck 2y ago
100%. Even just loading files off the old spinning disks took ages. Loading screens for a game could take 5-10 minutes. Even just booting into my Linux box took 3-5 minutes and optimizing the boot time was a whole thing you spent a lot of time on. I remember the day I received my first SSD and installed it in my computer, it was like Christmas morning. Things are way faster now.
- SkipperCat 2y ago
  I had a friend who supported a Windows desktop environment in the 90's. He would constantly complain about how rebooting a workstation would take over 20 minutes. The amount of scripts and other tooling was nutz. My Macbook goes off when I shut the lid and right back on when I open it up. Try doing that on my early 90's Toshiba Satellite. We live in a magical world now of high speed, multi-core and NVMe hardware. I have no desire to ever go back.
  - kaydub 2y ago
    It honestly gives me a warm fuzzy feeling thinking about how blazing fast personal computers are these days. It's instantaneous compared to the 90s and even the 2000s. It wasn't until 2010-2012 that I remember switching to SSD, which is when I feel the turning point was.
    - oxidant 2y ago
      I had a netbook around this time and putting an SSD in it was a HUGE upgrade (similarly the upgrade from 2 to 4GB RAM). I still have it, and when I put an 32bit version of Debian on it a couple years ago, it was molasses. Somehow I used it for years with no complaints.

magpi3 2y ago

Making OS's more secure definitely slowed them down. I remember that there was a noticeable difference between a fresh install of Windows XP and an installation that had been uploaded with the latest service packs after everyone became aware of just how vulnerable the OS was to attacks.

booi 2y ago
AFAIK this isn’t because of the security updates but because the filesystem becomes fragmented and spinning disk is awful at random seek. Defrag helps a little but nothing like having big files laid out contiguously.

deleted 2y ago

[deleted]

cma 2y ago

Memory latency hasn't improved much since Windows 95 and lots of stuff pointer chases, though L3 caches now are bigger than all the ram they had and L2 is matching or close.

deleted 2y ago

[deleted]

stkdump 2y ago

Sorry, but I seem to have lived in a fundamentally different universe than you. I remember that my 386 took longer to boot to DOS (which is not even an operating system by today's standards) than my current laptop to come up. When Windows 95 was introduced it took so long to boot that it wasn't even worth it for me. I remember that a popular magazine did an aprils fools joke that the new Intel CPU was so fast it could boot Windows within few seconds.

ilrwbwrkhv 2y ago

Casey muratori's performance aware programming is one of the few courses spreading this message today. We definitely need more of this. Js devs coming in to the industry would think Slack's 7 seconds channel switch is the norm and not due to poor architecture.

sangnoir 2y ago

> Yes, they're much more _capable_, but usually even less responsive than e.g. in Windows 95 days Hard disagree: all applications back then needed splash screens to reassure the user something was happening while the application was loading components on into RAM. Today, most applications load within seconds. I booted an old computer from 2009 just the other day, and everything felt sluggish from boot to launching applications.

Gigachad 2y ago

This is just windows tbh. Clicking around my iPhone and everything loads essentially instantly.