10 ms·

What's old is new again. Microsoft introduced the "Office Startup Assistant" or "Office Startup Application" (osa.exe) in Office 97, it sat in the system tray

What's old is new again. Microsoft introduced the "Office Startup Assistant" or "Office Startup Application" (osa.exe) in Office 97, it sat in the system tray and loaded the main office DLLs at startup: https://web.archive.org/web/20041214010329/http://support.microsoft.com:80/kb/165071 https://web.archive.org/web/20041214010329/http://support.mi... OpenOffice.org (predecessor of LibreOffice) copied this feature, which they called "QuickStarter", I don't know exactly when, but no later than 2003: https://www.openoffice.org/documentation/setup_guide2/1.1.x/en/SETUP_GUIDE.html https://www.openoffice.org/documentation/setup_guide2/1.1.x/... Microsoft made OSA made non-default in Office 2007, and _removed_ it from Office 2010: https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/previous-versions/office/office-2010/cc178954(v=office.14)#office-startup-assistant https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/previous-versions/office/o... Are they now bringing it back?

barrkel 2y ago
I came here looking for this. It's an old idea, from the days when spinning rust was the limiting factor - precache the binaries. If you ever tried Office 97 on a PC of 10+ years later, it's amazing how fast and lightweight it was. Instant startup, super snappy. And those apps were not lacking in features. 95% of what you need out of a desktop word processor was in Word 97.
- alliao 2y ago
  some of the modern software is slower because someone made a poor decision to fetch something from the network on the critical path of main functionality... kills me
  - amiga386 2y ago
    Example: https://old.reddit.com/r/libreoffice/comments/upf8nw/fixed_opening_documents_too_slow/ https://old.reddit.com/r/libreoffice/comments/upf8nw/fixed_o... Opening a spreadsheet, even if you don't want to print it, will hang for 30 seconds doing nothing, because LibreOffice will load the printer settings for the document, which means asking the printer, which if the printer is network-based and turned off, means a 30 second wait for a timeout. Reported in 2011, still not fixed: https://bugs.documentfoundation.org/show_bug.cgi?id=42673 https://bugs.documentfoundation.org/show_bug.cgi?id=42673
    - ramshanker 2y ago
      This... 100 times. Everyday wastes my few minutes. 5 figure commercial application, state of art in it's domain, but somehow It has to wait for that unresponsive network printer and hang the startup UI.
    - HideousKojima 2y ago
      Best workaround (still ridiculous that it hasn't been fixed) is to set a PDF printer as your default printer.
      - hedora 2y ago
        I frequently have to do this for a different reason on MacOS/iOS. Printing directly sends bad PCL to my printer and makes it spew garbage pages. "Print to PDF -> print the PDF" is much more reliable. sigh
    - Twirrim 2y ago
      I don't recall spreadsheets ever having any visible printer formatting until the point at which you print them? So surely it's not even a case of "even if you don't want to print it"?
    - buovjaga 2y ago
      > Reported in 2011, still not fixed: https://bugs.documentfoundation.org/show_bug.cgi?id=42673 https://bugs.documentfoundation.org/show_bug.cgi?id=42673 Perhaps spurred by this comment, there was new discussion in the report and it turned out Microsoft has fixed the issue in Windows 11: https://bugs.documentfoundation.org/show_bug.cgi?id=42673#c88 https://bugs.documentfoundation.org/show_bug.cgi?id=42673#c8... Quote: "I was one of the many who reported this problem in one from or another. The problem is Windows-specific. I have found out that the problem actually comes from the Windows print system. There is no way to check that a printer is actually active or working or even present without incurring a long time-out in case the printer is not present or powered. Trying to check the defualt printer will incur the same time-out. Calc apparently wants to check the printer to know how to construct its layout, and has to wait for the time-out to continue. Some of the comments that claim that Calc hangs and never returns have probably not waited long enough for the timeout. On my new Windows 11 computer, this printer system behavior has been changed and I no longer experience a delay while opening Calc."
  - sgarland 2y ago
    It’s because modern devs by and large have zero concept of latency differences. I had to explain to people yesterday why an on-disk temporary table in MySQL was slower than an in-memory one. “But the disk is an SSD,” was an actual rebuttal I got. Never mind the fact that this was Aurora, so the “disk” is a slice of (multiple) SSDs exposed over a SAN…
    - jonhohle 2y ago
      https://gist.github.com/jboner/2841832 https://gist.github.com/jboner/2841832
      - hedora 2y ago
        That really should include "sync write 4KB to an SSD". People don't realize it's purely in-RAM on the disk these days (you pay a PCIe round trip, and that's about it).
    - 101008 2y ago
      That is what happens when your dev learnt it from an online course instead of going to college or through proper education. "Anyone can code!"
      - dns_snek 2y ago
        And I thought we were past this sort of gatekeeping and elitism. I've worked with people who had a master's degree in CS who couldn't code their way out of a wet paper bag. In my experience there's very little correlation between how someone learned programming and how deep their understanding of the entire stack is.
        bsrkf 2y ago
        Hope this doesn't come off as disrespectful, as in that I don't believe you, but out of personal interest, would you consider expanding on that? I'd love to hear about the particular example you were thinking of, or in what ways self-taught coders surprised you over academically-taught ones, if you've had experience working with both over a meaningful span of time. Also, if the case, in what ways self-taught coders were/are maybe lacking on average. If you've ever given answers to that in another comments on HN or elsewhere, feel free to link.
  - deeThrow94 2y ago
    This is also a classic emacs mistake, so I wouldn't put it all on age.
  - mjmas 2y ago
    Opening any ms office app with the network disconnected opens up almost instantly...
  - qwerty456127 2y ago
    What I am glad to leave behind and forget like a nightmare is Windows local networking with shared folders etc - these never worked nice and the last time anybody I know used these was pre-2010. Today we just use NextCloud, Matrix, email and Git for all our collaboration needs.
    - vladvasiliu 2y ago
      Who's "we"? I work for a company who drank the MS cool-aid, so running Windows on laptops, using Office365 for e-mail, word processing, spreadsheets, teams for chat, sharepoint / onedrive for shared ressources. Have you tried launching a local app by typing in the start menu on a default win11 install with limited / slow internet access? Good times. How about doing some operation (say delete an e-mail) in one window of "new" outlook and having the others refresh? I have never understood how some otherwise reasonable people are able to consider this absolute shitshow of a work environment good enough.
- Cthulhu_ 2y ago
  I wish companies would go back to building fast apps, but alas. Everything is feature-packed and requires you to download half the internet. My intellij license just expired so today I'm back using Sublime Text, and honestly it's a breath of fresh air / relief - and it's not even the fastest editor, iirc it uses Python under the hood. I've installed Zed but getting plugins and keyboard shortcuts all lined up is always challenging. That one took ~2-3 seconds to cold start.
  - tremon 2y ago
    I don't think these apps were ever built to be fast, they were built with the resource constraints of the time. Moore's law is what's making these apps fast.
    - deleted 2y ago
      [deleted]
    - formerly_proven 2y ago
      Word 2000 definitely was not very quick on a contemporary office PC (Pentium II or III), though I'm pretty certain it was much, much faster than desktop O365 is on a contemporary office PC today, despite those being >100x faster. So Fermi would estimate modern office to probably require at least 1000x more resources than Office 2000.
    - deleted 2y ago
      [deleted]
    - rollcat 2y ago
      Intel giveth, Microsoft taketh. This is even more sad with Apple. My M1 Mac felt incredibly snappy with Big Sur, but is getting ever so slightly slower with each update. My iPhone SE2 is a complete disaster.
    - mleo 2y ago
      They used no networking services either. Now, I open a shared PowerPoint and am stuck waiting for a couple of minutes while it is syncing or doing who knows what. People have no sense of what templates they copy from other documents causing the size of the file and load times to bloat.
- gymbeaux 2y ago
  Man you can still get by with Photoshop CS3 as far as features go.
  - erkt 2y ago
    Lightroom 5 is miles better than what they offer today. Lightroom Creative Cloud is steaming dog shit. Adobe seriously gets to extort over $120 a year out of me simply for the privilege of reading raw files from a new camera. They provide zero positive contribution these days. All of these incumbent tech companies extract rents on algorithms written decades ago. This needs to end. I am very excited for AI to get advanced enough to whip up replacement programs for everything these companies maintain monopolies over.
    - mrguyorama 2y ago
      > I am very excited for AI to get advanced enough to whip up replacement programs for everything these companies maintain monopolies over. You are wildly off base. The algorithms aren't difficult or special. They were written by people reading text books for the most part. They are able to sit on an on old algorithm for decades because the DMCA made interoperability and selling cheaper tools like that basically illegal. Because of the DMCA, the work that was done to make IBM PC clones would have been close enough to illegal to kill all the businesses that tried it. They still tried with the liberal IP laws at the time.
      - erkt 2y ago
        Well that's a bit disappointing but i am aware that their are gaps in my knowledge. I had assumed it was the feasibility of competing with an entrenched firm, not lack of access to research texts. I will chat with Chat to learn more about how DMCA applies, thank you.
  - deleted 2y ago
    [deleted]
- SoftTalker 2y ago
  Yeah that era of Office, pre-ribbon, was pretty nice as Office goes.
  - Illotus 2y ago
    Ribbon was better for most people who didn't have all the shortcuts in muscle memory. It is much more discoverable.
    - hedora 2y ago
      That might have been true for the first five minutes of using the software (assuming the person had not yet used a CUA application before the first time they used office). After that, it was strictly worse. CUA ~= "standard menus + keyboard shortcuts for dos and windows": https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IBM_Common_User_Access https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IBM_Common_User_Access
      - Illotus 2y ago
        Not really, it is much more discoverable for most people. If interested, MS UI lead has a blog about lot of the reasons for ribbon and on the research backing it https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/archive/blogs/jensenh https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/archive/blogs/jensenh
        hedora 2y ago
        The problem with it was that it constantly moved the buttons around. So, you had to constantly rediscover it.
        hedora 2y ago
        Sadly, none of the links I tried work anymore. (Though the conversation in the comments where they have to explain how to open a ppt in powerpoint is internet gold!) I was hoping to figure out what led to design incompetence so spectacular that people would still be discussing it after 17 years. I think there’s a clue in the abstract: The author claims they made 25,000 mock UI screenshots, but doesn’t mention user studies or even internally prototyping some of the concepts to see how they feel.
- MisterTea 2y ago
  > from the days when spinning rust was the limiting factor How did we get back to this though? We have gigabytes/sec with NVMe and stupid fast CPU's with at least 4 cores in even low end models. Yet a text editor takes so long to load we need to load it up on boot... Such a frustrating field to work in.
  - bigmattystyles 2y ago
    Telemetry, syncing to the cloud by default…
    - dagmx 2y ago
      Neither of which contribute significantly to size though. The size aspect is what these new preloaders would help with.
  - deleted 2y ago
    [deleted]
  - afavour 2y ago
    I know this is such a stereotypical "get off my lawn" statement but we've lost the art of software engineering. It's all about stuffing as many features in as quickly as we can and pushing it out to as many people as possible. Performance is always secondary. Not that I'm that nostalgic for the old days, we would have been doing the exact same thing if we were able to get away with it. But performance restrictions meant you had no choice but to care. Modern tech has "freed" us from that concern.
    - trealira 2y ago
      Niklaus Wirth wrote about this in 1995, in his essay A Plea for Lean Software. About 25 years ago, an interactive text editor could be designed with as little as 8,000 bytes of storage. (Modern program editors request 100 times that much). An operating system had to manage with 8,000 bytes, and a compiler had to fit into 32 Kbytes, whereas their modern descendants require megabytes. Has all this inflated software become any faster? On the contrary, were it not for a thousand times faster hardware, modern software would be utterly unusable. https://www.computer.org/csdl/magazine/co/1995/02/r2064/13rRUwInv7E https://www.computer.org/csdl/magazine/co/1995/02/r2064/13rR... That said, as someone fairly young, I still don't think that makes it wrong or something only an old man would think. Software seems to perform exactly as well as it needs to and no more, which is why hardware advances don't make our computers run software much faster.
- jonhohle 2y ago
  I always think the same thing. 486s could run real-time spell check and do wisiwig layouts and came on floppy disks. Now we have screen recording apps that require 256MB downloads every 5 minutes (yesterday’s story). I have a small utility app that I sell and make great pains to keep it small and resource light. I really appreciate when other devs do the same.
  - donny2018 2y ago
    Where is that guy who coded RollerCoaster Tycoon in Assembly?
  - hedora 2y ago
    486's were way past when that became practical. I remember using Prodigy on a 286. Screenshots are rare, since you can't fire it up in an emulator unless you have a modem that can make phone calls to the 1980's. Also, machines from back then didn't really have room to store screenshots: https://www.vintagecomputing.com/index.php/archives/1063 https://www.vintagecomputing.com/index.php/archives/1063 Their service used vector art to render interactive pages like that over <= 2400 baud modems. Other than it being proprietary and stuff, I'm guessing the web would be a much cooler place if HTML hadn't eaten their lunch. SVG is a decent consolation prize, I guess.
    - ralphc 2y ago
      Let me point you to Prodigy Reloaded, https://github.com/ProdigyReloaded https://github.com/ProdigyReloaded. We're reviving the Prodigy server and as many cache files as we can find, using Elixir as the backend language. It's not merged yet but I've written an Elixir library that writes graphics files in Prodigy's graphics format, NAPLPS. I'm using it to get current weather and creating weather maps that are displayed in Prodigy. https://github.com/rrcook/naplps_writer https://github.com/rrcook/naplps_writer You can run Prodigy in DOSBox and get screenshots.
- bluedino 2y ago
  A lifetime ago when I was doing MSP work, our law office clients were using the DOS versions of WordPerfect because the Windows version was too slow. They refused to store files in directories and use good file names (although they were limited to 8.3), so they just scrolled through all their files until they found the right one. But they could open them so fast they didn't care. In windows you had to use the mouse, click three times, wait for the document to load and render....it was instant under DOS character mode.
  - layer8 2y ago
    I agree with the point about the immediacy of TUIs, but I use MS Office (and Windows in general) almost exclusively by keyboard, so the point about having to use a mouse isn’t completely accurate.
    - bluedino 2y ago
      Right, but you could just hit up/down to scroll through the files in the directory listing. Very simple
      - layer8 2y ago
        You can still do that? I mean, there are certainly places where the interaction happens to be more cumbersome than it is in a TUI, because the relevant piece was designed mouse-first. However, one reason I prefer Windows as a desktop UI is that it was designed to be fully operable by keyboard as well.
        bluedino 2y ago
        You could see the files as you scrolled through them. I don't think you understood how it works, I didn't do a great job explaining it. You can see the content of the files instantly on the screen as you go through them. Similar to how preview works on Mac
        2y ago
- josephernest 2y ago
  I still use Office 2007 on my computer. Super super snappy, I think Word or Excel starts and finishes loading in 0.5 second after clicking the icon. It has 99% of the features I need compared to the newest Office version.
  - benjiro 2y ago
    Same ... Office 2007 for the win. Frankly, i do not even use 90% of Office 2007 feature, so why do i even need more? For AI ... no. And funny thing, barely uses any memory! Makes todays apps look like monsters. Even my music player uses 5x more memory while paused, then freaking Excel with multiple pages open.
    - ajolly 2y ago
      Do you have a good way to run multiple versions of office? I do sometimes need some of the newer features but I'd like to default to using the older versions.
- mcswell 2y ago
  And 100% of what you don't need--the Ribbon--was not in Word 97.
- lizknope 2y ago
  I remember a laptop in the early 1990's that had Microsoft Office in ROM to load faster. I can't find a reference to it right now.
  - Lammy 2y ago
    HP Omnibook 300? https://www.hpmuseum.net/display_item.php?hw=123 https://www.hpmuseum.net/display_item.php?hw=123 `Omnibook300Intro-5091-6270-6pages-May93.pdf` https://www.hpmuseum.net/exhibit.php?hwdoc=123 https://www.hpmuseum.net/exhibit.php?hwdoc=123 sez: > Built-in ROM applications don't use up disk space - Microsoft Windows - Microsoft Word for Windows - Microsoft Excel - Appointment Book - Phone Book - HP Calculator - Microsoft File Manager - LapLink Remote Access™
    - lizknope 2y ago
      That looks like it. I didn't have one but I remember the magazine ads for it.
- psunavy03 2y ago
  The worst thing Office ever did was effectively kill WordPerfect, and I will die on this hill. Reveal Codes was an order of magnitude more useful than whatever crap MS continues to pass off as formatting notation to this day 20+ years later, and that's before we even get into Word being over-helpful and getting ahead of you by doing things with autoformat you never wanted to have happen. Yes, I know WordPerfect is still around, but fat chance being able to conveniently use it anymore.
- sh34r 1y ago
  Ignoring the serious memory safety and security problems that were exploited to get acceptable performance on contemporary hardware, I’d point to shared document editing, automatic backups via OneDrive, and version history as rather significant features in that missing 5%. I think rosy recollection is tainting your memory here. How often docs would get corrupted due to those aforementioned memory safety issues, even if that Win95/98 box was never connected to the internet. Of course it’s gonna be super snappy. It was designed to run on any Doom-compatible hardware. Which includes some toasters now. Edit: it’s also worth noting that 1997 was right around the time where Moore’s law succumbed to the laws of physics for improving single-core CPU performance via clock speed alone.
lolinder 2y ago
Yeah, I'm honestly trying to figure out why this is getting so much attention. Applications setting themselves to start up at login in order to avoid doing a bunch of work when they're asked for later is one of the oldest patterns in Windows. It's annoying to regularly have to go in and clear out new startup applications, but it's been part of maintaining a Windows machine for decades, and Microsoft Office is hardly the worst offender. Why is HN suddenly so interested in Microsoft doing the same thing that has always been done by large, bloated app suites?
- raincole 2y ago
  You're honestly trying to figure out why people want performant apps...?
  - lolinder 2y ago
    That's not at all what I asked.
- fredoliveira 2y ago
  > Why is HN suddenly so interested in Microsoft doing the same thing that has always been done by large, bloated app suites? Probably because it is horrible? It's indicative of how we spend less time optimizing code than we do coming up with computationally expensive, inefficient workarounds. Let's say a hypothetical Windows user spends 2% of their day using Office (I made that number up). Why should Office be partially loaded the other 98% of the time? How is it acceptable to use those resources? When are we actually going to start using the new compute capabilities in our machines, rather than letting them get consumed by unoptimized, barely decent code?
  - vladvasiliu 2y ago
    > Let's say a hypothetical Windows user spends 2% of their day using Office I don't know about a "hypothetical" user, but I'd bet a "mean" (corporate) user probably uses office all day long. Hell, I've lost count of the number of e-mails I've seen having a screenshot which is inside a word document for some reason, or the number of excel files which are just a 5x4 table.
qwerty456127 2y ago
> OpenOffice.org (predecessor of LibreOffice) copied this feature, which they called "QuickStarter" It still does. Neither LibreOffice itself nor it's installation process with its components choice have changed seriously since the old days and I'm very grateful for this. The QuickStarter isn't as relevant anymore as we have fast SSDs now but some slow computers are still around and that's great we still have the option.
gymbeaux 2y ago
Back in those days it took 15 minutes for Windows to “finish” booting. You’d hit the desktop but the HDD was still going ham loading a dozen programs, each with their own splash screen to remind you of their existence.
- Grazester 2y ago
  Ah the ole slash screen. I remember in high school days writing programs in VB and of course it had to have some "Cool" splash screen.
  - amiga386 2y ago
    "I bet somebody got a really nice bonus for that feature" https://devblogs.microsoft.com/oldnewthing/20061101-03/?p=29153 https://devblogs.microsoft.com/oldnewthing/20061101-03/?p=29... > The thing is, all of these bad features were probably justified by some manager somewhere because it’s the only way their feature would get noticed. They have to justify their salary by pushing all these stupid ideas in the user’s faces. “Hey, look at me! I’m so cool!” After all, when the boss asks, “So, what did you accomplish in the past six months,” a manager can’t say, “Um, a bunch of stuff you can’t see. It just works better.” They have to say, “Oh, check out this feature, and that icon, and this dialog box.” Even if it’s a stupid feature. On the other hand, I very much enjoyed going to Excel 97 cell X97:L97, pressing tab, holding Ctrl+Shift and clicking on the chart icon, because then you could play Excel's built in flight simulator
- toast0 2y ago
  If you've had the priviledge of running Windows 10 on a spinning drive, it never gets to disk idle. Who knows what it's doing, but by that metric it never finishes. It probably never gets to disk idle on an SSD either, but SSDs have so much more io capacity it isn't noticed.
d_tr 2y ago
I thought Windows had a generic subsystem for "warming up" frequently used apps for faster launches.
- xquce 2y ago
  People don't use Office frequently, and then when they do it's slow and a bad look. So they will cheat in a way that prioritize their own software, and then every one else will then that feature loses all value, as all programs launch on startup as not to be "slow"
- layer8 2y ago
  Only for OS components, I think?
  - mrguyorama 2y ago
    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Windows_Vista_I/O_technologies#SuperFetch https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Windows_Vista_I/O_technologies... SuperFetch was supposed to work with any app. It never seemed to have much effect IMO.
agilob 2y ago
This has always been the problem with Microsoft. Here is a rant from 2020 about Visual Studio https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GC-0tCy4P1U https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GC-0tCy4P1U and live comparison of performance degradation while loading the same project.
- silon42 2y ago
  I remember about 15 years ago running Windows + VS in VMWare because I could skip installing Office inside the VM and the system would run noticeably faster.
plorg 2y ago
Huh. Maybe it's because I haven't installed Office since the 2010 version, I assumed OSA was still a thing. My work computer has O365 managed by IT and I could swear I've seen resident daemons (besides, say, Teams) running in the background.
araes 2y ago
Equivalently useless back in 2004. Notably, a solution to the current issues with modern office is to use a copy of Office 97. 20+ page XLS uses ~7MB and loads effectively instantly (on a frankly horribly performing laptop that can usually barely run demos on HN)
infinet 2y ago
My workplace has two Windows 10 machines, one in daily use, and the other is mostly idle. Both are extremely slow. The one in daily use takes at least 15 minutes to become usable after boot. The other is not much better. They are domain-controlled so not much we can do to improve. In contrast, we still have a 20+ years computer, which has an IDE hard drive, running Windows 2000 with MS Office to operate an instrument, and it is much more responsive.

barrkel 2y ago

I came here looking for this. It's an old idea, from the days when spinning rust was the limiting factor - precache the binaries. If you ever tried Office 97 on a PC of 10+ years later, it's amazing how fast and lightweight it was. Instant startup, super snappy. And those apps were not lacking in features. 95% of what you need out of a desktop word processor was in Word 97.

alliao 2y ago
some of the modern software is slower because someone made a poor decision to fetch something from the network on the critical path of main functionality... kills me
- amiga386 2y ago
  Example: https://old.reddit.com/r/libreoffice/comments/upf8nw/fixed_opening_documents_too_slow/ https://old.reddit.com/r/libreoffice/comments/upf8nw/fixed_o... Opening a spreadsheet, even if you don't want to print it, will hang for 30 seconds doing nothing, because LibreOffice will load the printer settings for the document, which means asking the printer, which if the printer is network-based and turned off, means a 30 second wait for a timeout. Reported in 2011, still not fixed: https://bugs.documentfoundation.org/show_bug.cgi?id=42673 https://bugs.documentfoundation.org/show_bug.cgi?id=42673
  - ramshanker 2y ago
    This... 100 times. Everyday wastes my few minutes. 5 figure commercial application, state of art in it's domain, but somehow It has to wait for that unresponsive network printer and hang the startup UI.
  - HideousKojima 2y ago
    Best workaround (still ridiculous that it hasn't been fixed) is to set a PDF printer as your default printer.
    - hedora 2y ago
      I frequently have to do this for a different reason on MacOS/iOS. Printing directly sends bad PCL to my printer and makes it spew garbage pages. "Print to PDF -> print the PDF" is much more reliable. sigh
  - Twirrim 2y ago
    I don't recall spreadsheets ever having any visible printer formatting until the point at which you print them? So surely it's not even a case of "even if you don't want to print it"?
  - buovjaga 2y ago
    > Reported in 2011, still not fixed: https://bugs.documentfoundation.org/show_bug.cgi?id=42673 https://bugs.documentfoundation.org/show_bug.cgi?id=42673 Perhaps spurred by this comment, there was new discussion in the report and it turned out Microsoft has fixed the issue in Windows 11: https://bugs.documentfoundation.org/show_bug.cgi?id=42673#c88 https://bugs.documentfoundation.org/show_bug.cgi?id=42673#c8... Quote: "I was one of the many who reported this problem in one from or another. The problem is Windows-specific. I have found out that the problem actually comes from the Windows print system. There is no way to check that a printer is actually active or working or even present without incurring a long time-out in case the printer is not present or powered. Trying to check the defualt printer will incur the same time-out. Calc apparently wants to check the printer to know how to construct its layout, and has to wait for the time-out to continue. Some of the comments that claim that Calc hangs and never returns have probably not waited long enough for the timeout. On my new Windows 11 computer, this printer system behavior has been changed and I no longer experience a delay while opening Calc."
- sgarland 2y ago
  It’s because modern devs by and large have zero concept of latency differences. I had to explain to people yesterday why an on-disk temporary table in MySQL was slower than an in-memory one. “But the disk is an SSD,” was an actual rebuttal I got. Never mind the fact that this was Aurora, so the “disk” is a slice of (multiple) SSDs exposed over a SAN…
  - jonhohle 2y ago
    https://gist.github.com/jboner/2841832 https://gist.github.com/jboner/2841832
    - hedora 2y ago
      That really should include "sync write 4KB to an SSD". People don't realize it's purely in-RAM on the disk these days (you pay a PCIe round trip, and that's about it).
  - 101008 2y ago
    That is what happens when your dev learnt it from an online course instead of going to college or through proper education. "Anyone can code!"
    - dns_snek 2y ago
      And I thought we were past this sort of gatekeeping and elitism. I've worked with people who had a master's degree in CS who couldn't code their way out of a wet paper bag. In my experience there's very little correlation between how someone learned programming and how deep their understanding of the entire stack is.
      - bsrkf 2y ago
        Hope this doesn't come off as disrespectful, as in that I don't believe you, but out of personal interest, would you consider expanding on that? I'd love to hear about the particular example you were thinking of, or in what ways self-taught coders surprised you over academically-taught ones, if you've had experience working with both over a meaningful span of time. Also, if the case, in what ways self-taught coders were/are maybe lacking on average. If you've ever given answers to that in another comments on HN or elsewhere, feel free to link.
- deeThrow94 2y ago
  This is also a classic emacs mistake, so I wouldn't put it all on age.
- mjmas 2y ago
  Opening any ms office app with the network disconnected opens up almost instantly...
- qwerty456127 2y ago
  What I am glad to leave behind and forget like a nightmare is Windows local networking with shared folders etc - these never worked nice and the last time anybody I know used these was pre-2010. Today we just use NextCloud, Matrix, email and Git for all our collaboration needs.
  - vladvasiliu 2y ago
    Who's "we"? I work for a company who drank the MS cool-aid, so running Windows on laptops, using Office365 for e-mail, word processing, spreadsheets, teams for chat, sharepoint / onedrive for shared ressources. Have you tried launching a local app by typing in the start menu on a default win11 install with limited / slow internet access? Good times. How about doing some operation (say delete an e-mail) in one window of "new" outlook and having the others refresh? I have never understood how some otherwise reasonable people are able to consider this absolute shitshow of a work environment good enough.
Cthulhu_ 2y ago
I wish companies would go back to building fast apps, but alas. Everything is feature-packed and requires you to download half the internet. My intellij license just expired so today I'm back using Sublime Text, and honestly it's a breath of fresh air / relief - and it's not even the fastest editor, iirc it uses Python under the hood. I've installed Zed but getting plugins and keyboard shortcuts all lined up is always challenging. That one took ~2-3 seconds to cold start.
- tremon 2y ago
  I don't think these apps were ever built to be fast, they were built with the resource constraints of the time. Moore's law is what's making these apps fast.
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  - formerly_proven 2y ago
    Word 2000 definitely was not very quick on a contemporary office PC (Pentium II or III), though I'm pretty certain it was much, much faster than desktop O365 is on a contemporary office PC today, despite those being >100x faster. So Fermi would estimate modern office to probably require at least 1000x more resources than Office 2000.
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  - rollcat 2y ago
    Intel giveth, Microsoft taketh. This is even more sad with Apple. My M1 Mac felt incredibly snappy with Big Sur, but is getting ever so slightly slower with each update. My iPhone SE2 is a complete disaster.
  - mleo 2y ago
    They used no networking services either. Now, I open a shared PowerPoint and am stuck waiting for a couple of minutes while it is syncing or doing who knows what. People have no sense of what templates they copy from other documents causing the size of the file and load times to bloat.
gymbeaux 2y ago
Man you can still get by with Photoshop CS3 as far as features go.
- erkt 2y ago
  Lightroom 5 is miles better than what they offer today. Lightroom Creative Cloud is steaming dog shit. Adobe seriously gets to extort over $120 a year out of me simply for the privilege of reading raw files from a new camera. They provide zero positive contribution these days. All of these incumbent tech companies extract rents on algorithms written decades ago. This needs to end. I am very excited for AI to get advanced enough to whip up replacement programs for everything these companies maintain monopolies over.
  - mrguyorama 2y ago
    > I am very excited for AI to get advanced enough to whip up replacement programs for everything these companies maintain monopolies over. You are wildly off base. The algorithms aren't difficult or special. They were written by people reading text books for the most part. They are able to sit on an on old algorithm for decades because the DMCA made interoperability and selling cheaper tools like that basically illegal. Because of the DMCA, the work that was done to make IBM PC clones would have been close enough to illegal to kill all the businesses that tried it. They still tried with the liberal IP laws at the time.
    - erkt 2y ago
      Well that's a bit disappointing but i am aware that their are gaps in my knowledge. I had assumed it was the feasibility of competing with an entrenched firm, not lack of access to research texts. I will chat with Chat to learn more about how DMCA applies, thank you.
- deleted 2y ago
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SoftTalker 2y ago
Yeah that era of Office, pre-ribbon, was pretty nice as Office goes.
- Illotus 2y ago
  Ribbon was better for most people who didn't have all the shortcuts in muscle memory. It is much more discoverable.
  - hedora 2y ago
    That might have been true for the first five minutes of using the software (assuming the person had not yet used a CUA application before the first time they used office). After that, it was strictly worse. CUA ~= "standard menus + keyboard shortcuts for dos and windows": https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IBM_Common_User_Access https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IBM_Common_User_Access
    - Illotus 2y ago
      Not really, it is much more discoverable for most people. If interested, MS UI lead has a blog about lot of the reasons for ribbon and on the research backing it https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/archive/blogs/jensenh https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/archive/blogs/jensenh
      - hedora 2y ago
        The problem with it was that it constantly moved the buttons around. So, you had to constantly rediscover it.
        hedora 2y ago
        Sadly, none of the links I tried work anymore. (Though the conversation in the comments where they have to explain how to open a ppt in powerpoint is internet gold!) I was hoping to figure out what led to design incompetence so spectacular that people would still be discussing it after 17 years. I think there’s a clue in the abstract: The author claims they made 25,000 mock UI screenshots, but doesn’t mention user studies or even internally prototyping some of the concepts to see how they feel.
MisterTea 2y ago
> from the days when spinning rust was the limiting factor How did we get back to this though? We have gigabytes/sec with NVMe and stupid fast CPU's with at least 4 cores in even low end models. Yet a text editor takes so long to load we need to load it up on boot... Such a frustrating field to work in.
- bigmattystyles 2y ago
  Telemetry, syncing to the cloud by default…
  - dagmx 2y ago
    Neither of which contribute significantly to size though. The size aspect is what these new preloaders would help with.
- deleted 2y ago
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- afavour 2y ago
  I know this is such a stereotypical "get off my lawn" statement but we've lost the art of software engineering. It's all about stuffing as many features in as quickly as we can and pushing it out to as many people as possible. Performance is always secondary. Not that I'm that nostalgic for the old days, we would have been doing the exact same thing if we were able to get away with it. But performance restrictions meant you had no choice but to care. Modern tech has "freed" us from that concern.
  - trealira 2y ago
    Niklaus Wirth wrote about this in 1995, in his essay A Plea for Lean Software. About 25 years ago, an interactive text editor could be designed with as little as 8,000 bytes of storage. (Modern program editors request 100 times that much). An operating system had to manage with 8,000 bytes, and a compiler had to fit into 32 Kbytes, whereas their modern descendants require megabytes. Has all this inflated software become any faster? On the contrary, were it not for a thousand times faster hardware, modern software would be utterly unusable. https://www.computer.org/csdl/magazine/co/1995/02/r2064/13rRUwInv7E https://www.computer.org/csdl/magazine/co/1995/02/r2064/13rR... That said, as someone fairly young, I still don't think that makes it wrong or something only an old man would think. Software seems to perform exactly as well as it needs to and no more, which is why hardware advances don't make our computers run software much faster.
jonhohle 2y ago
I always think the same thing. 486s could run real-time spell check and do wisiwig layouts and came on floppy disks. Now we have screen recording apps that require 256MB downloads every 5 minutes (yesterday’s story). I have a small utility app that I sell and make great pains to keep it small and resource light. I really appreciate when other devs do the same.
- donny2018 2y ago
  Where is that guy who coded RollerCoaster Tycoon in Assembly?
- hedora 2y ago
  486's were way past when that became practical. I remember using Prodigy on a 286. Screenshots are rare, since you can't fire it up in an emulator unless you have a modem that can make phone calls to the 1980's. Also, machines from back then didn't really have room to store screenshots: https://www.vintagecomputing.com/index.php/archives/1063 https://www.vintagecomputing.com/index.php/archives/1063 Their service used vector art to render interactive pages like that over <= 2400 baud modems. Other than it being proprietary and stuff, I'm guessing the web would be a much cooler place if HTML hadn't eaten their lunch. SVG is a decent consolation prize, I guess.
  - ralphc 2y ago
    Let me point you to Prodigy Reloaded, https://github.com/ProdigyReloaded https://github.com/ProdigyReloaded. We're reviving the Prodigy server and as many cache files as we can find, using Elixir as the backend language. It's not merged yet but I've written an Elixir library that writes graphics files in Prodigy's graphics format, NAPLPS. I'm using it to get current weather and creating weather maps that are displayed in Prodigy. https://github.com/rrcook/naplps_writer https://github.com/rrcook/naplps_writer You can run Prodigy in DOSBox and get screenshots.
bluedino 2y ago
A lifetime ago when I was doing MSP work, our law office clients were using the DOS versions of WordPerfect because the Windows version was too slow. They refused to store files in directories and use good file names (although they were limited to 8.3), so they just scrolled through all their files until they found the right one. But they could open them so fast they didn't care. In windows you had to use the mouse, click three times, wait for the document to load and render....it was instant under DOS character mode.
- layer8 2y ago
  I agree with the point about the immediacy of TUIs, but I use MS Office (and Windows in general) almost exclusively by keyboard, so the point about having to use a mouse isn’t completely accurate.
  - bluedino 2y ago
    Right, but you could just hit up/down to scroll through the files in the directory listing. Very simple
    - layer8 2y ago
      You can still do that? I mean, there are certainly places where the interaction happens to be more cumbersome than it is in a TUI, because the relevant piece was designed mouse-first. However, one reason I prefer Windows as a desktop UI is that it was designed to be fully operable by keyboard as well.
      - bluedino 2y ago
        You could see the files as you scrolled through them. I don't think you understood how it works, I didn't do a great job explaining it. You can see the content of the files instantly on the screen as you go through them. Similar to how preview works on Mac
        2y ago
josephernest 2y ago
I still use Office 2007 on my computer. Super super snappy, I think Word or Excel starts and finishes loading in 0.5 second after clicking the icon. It has 99% of the features I need compared to the newest Office version.
- benjiro 2y ago
  Same ... Office 2007 for the win. Frankly, i do not even use 90% of Office 2007 feature, so why do i even need more? For AI ... no. And funny thing, barely uses any memory! Makes todays apps look like monsters. Even my music player uses 5x more memory while paused, then freaking Excel with multiple pages open.
  - ajolly 2y ago
    Do you have a good way to run multiple versions of office? I do sometimes need some of the newer features but I'd like to default to using the older versions.
mcswell 2y ago
And 100% of what you don't need--the Ribbon--was not in Word 97.
lizknope 2y ago
I remember a laptop in the early 1990's that had Microsoft Office in ROM to load faster. I can't find a reference to it right now.
- Lammy 2y ago
  HP Omnibook 300? https://www.hpmuseum.net/display_item.php?hw=123 https://www.hpmuseum.net/display_item.php?hw=123 `Omnibook300Intro-5091-6270-6pages-May93.pdf` https://www.hpmuseum.net/exhibit.php?hwdoc=123 https://www.hpmuseum.net/exhibit.php?hwdoc=123 sez: > Built-in ROM applications don't use up disk space - Microsoft Windows - Microsoft Word for Windows - Microsoft Excel - Appointment Book - Phone Book - HP Calculator - Microsoft File Manager - LapLink Remote Access™
  - lizknope 2y ago
    That looks like it. I didn't have one but I remember the magazine ads for it.
psunavy03 2y ago
The worst thing Office ever did was effectively kill WordPerfect, and I will die on this hill. Reveal Codes was an order of magnitude more useful than whatever crap MS continues to pass off as formatting notation to this day 20+ years later, and that's before we even get into Word being over-helpful and getting ahead of you by doing things with autoformat you never wanted to have happen. Yes, I know WordPerfect is still around, but fat chance being able to conveniently use it anymore.
sh34r 1y ago
Ignoring the serious memory safety and security problems that were exploited to get acceptable performance on contemporary hardware, I’d point to shared document editing, automatic backups via OneDrive, and version history as rather significant features in that missing 5%. I think rosy recollection is tainting your memory here. How often docs would get corrupted due to those aforementioned memory safety issues, even if that Win95/98 box was never connected to the internet. Of course it’s gonna be super snappy. It was designed to run on any Doom-compatible hardware. Which includes some toasters now. Edit: it’s also worth noting that 1997 was right around the time where Moore’s law succumbed to the laws of physics for improving single-core CPU performance via clock speed alone.

lolinder 2y ago

Yeah, I'm honestly trying to figure out why this is getting so much attention. Applications setting themselves to start up at login in order to avoid doing a bunch of work when they're asked for later is one of the oldest patterns in Windows. It's annoying to regularly have to go in and clear out new startup applications, but it's been part of maintaining a Windows machine for decades, and Microsoft Office is hardly the worst offender. Why is HN suddenly so interested in Microsoft doing the same thing that has always been done by large, bloated app suites?

raincole 2y ago
You're honestly trying to figure out why people want performant apps...?
- lolinder 2y ago
  That's not at all what I asked.
fredoliveira 2y ago
> Why is HN suddenly so interested in Microsoft doing the same thing that has always been done by large, bloated app suites? Probably because it is horrible? It's indicative of how we spend less time optimizing code than we do coming up with computationally expensive, inefficient workarounds. Let's say a hypothetical Windows user spends 2% of their day using Office (I made that number up). Why should Office be partially loaded the other 98% of the time? How is it acceptable to use those resources? When are we actually going to start using the new compute capabilities in our machines, rather than letting them get consumed by unoptimized, barely decent code?
- vladvasiliu 2y ago
  > Let's say a hypothetical Windows user spends 2% of their day using Office I don't know about a "hypothetical" user, but I'd bet a "mean" (corporate) user probably uses office all day long. Hell, I've lost count of the number of e-mails I've seen having a screenshot which is inside a word document for some reason, or the number of excel files which are just a 5x4 table.

qwerty456127 2y ago

> OpenOffice.org (predecessor of LibreOffice) copied this feature, which they called "QuickStarter" It still does. Neither LibreOffice itself nor it's installation process with its components choice have changed seriously since the old days and I'm very grateful for this. The QuickStarter isn't as relevant anymore as we have fast SSDs now but some slow computers are still around and that's great we still have the option.

gymbeaux 2y ago

Back in those days it took 15 minutes for Windows to “finish” booting. You’d hit the desktop but the HDD was still going ham loading a dozen programs, each with their own splash screen to remind you of their existence.

Grazester 2y ago
Ah the ole slash screen. I remember in high school days writing programs in VB and of course it had to have some "Cool" splash screen.
- amiga386 2y ago
  "I bet somebody got a really nice bonus for that feature" https://devblogs.microsoft.com/oldnewthing/20061101-03/?p=29153 https://devblogs.microsoft.com/oldnewthing/20061101-03/?p=29... > The thing is, all of these bad features were probably justified by some manager somewhere because it’s the only way their feature would get noticed. They have to justify their salary by pushing all these stupid ideas in the user’s faces. “Hey, look at me! I’m so cool!” After all, when the boss asks, “So, what did you accomplish in the past six months,” a manager can’t say, “Um, a bunch of stuff you can’t see. It just works better.” They have to say, “Oh, check out this feature, and that icon, and this dialog box.” Even if it’s a stupid feature. On the other hand, I very much enjoyed going to Excel 97 cell X97:L97, pressing tab, holding Ctrl+Shift and clicking on the chart icon, because then you could play Excel's built in flight simulator
toast0 2y ago
If you've had the priviledge of running Windows 10 on a spinning drive, it never gets to disk idle. Who knows what it's doing, but by that metric it never finishes. It probably never gets to disk idle on an SSD either, but SSDs have so much more io capacity it isn't noticed.

d_tr 2y ago

I thought Windows had a generic subsystem for "warming up" frequently used apps for faster launches.

xquce 2y ago
People don't use Office frequently, and then when they do it's slow and a bad look. So they will cheat in a way that prioritize their own software, and then every one else will then that feature loses all value, as all programs launch on startup as not to be "slow"
layer8 2y ago
Only for OS components, I think?
- mrguyorama 2y ago
  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Windows_Vista_I/O_technologies#SuperFetch https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Windows_Vista_I/O_technologies... SuperFetch was supposed to work with any app. It never seemed to have much effect IMO.

agilob 2y ago

This has always been the problem with Microsoft. Here is a rant from 2020 about Visual Studio https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GC-0tCy4P1U https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GC-0tCy4P1U and live comparison of performance degradation while loading the same project.

silon42 2y ago
I remember about 15 years ago running Windows + VS in VMWare because I could skip installing Office inside the VM and the system would run noticeably faster.

plorg 2y ago

Huh. Maybe it's because I haven't installed Office since the 2010 version, I assumed OSA was still a thing. My work computer has O365 managed by IT and I could swear I've seen resident daemons (besides, say, Teams) running in the background.

araes 2y ago

Equivalently useless back in 2004. Notably, a solution to the current issues with modern office is to use a copy of Office 97. 20+ page XLS uses ~7MB and loads effectively instantly (on a frankly horribly performing laptop that can usually barely run demos on HN)

infinet 2y ago

My workplace has two Windows 10 machines, one in daily use, and the other is mostly idle. Both are extremely slow. The one in daily use takes at least 15 minutes to become usable after boot. The other is not much better. They are domain-controlled so not much we can do to improve. In contrast, we still have a 20+ years computer, which has an IDE hard drive, running Windows 2000 with MS Office to operate an instrument, and it is much more responsive.