It blows my mind how unresponsive modern tech is, and it frustrates me constantly. What makes it even worse is how unpredictable the lags are so you can't even train yourself around it.

I was watching Halt and Catch Fire and in the first season the engineering team makes a great effort to meet something called the "Doherty Threshold" to keep the responsiveness of the machine so the user doesn't get frustrated and lose interest. I guess that is lost to time!

Some additional things to note:

Windows NT 3.51 minimum hardware requirements were a i386 or i486 processor at 25MHz or better and 12MB of RAM for the workstation version. So the 600MHz machine with 128MB RAM is exceeding the minimum requirement by (conservatively) 24x in CPU speed and 10x in RAM, along with all the architectural improvements from going from the i386 to what's presumably a Pentium III-class machine.

If that's actually a Surface Go 2 running Windows 11 - well, it doesn't have a quad-core i5 as the tweet claims - the Surface Go 2 came with a Pentium Gold or a Core m3; both with only two cores and of those is an ultra-low power variant.

As such, that exactly meets the minimum CPU specification for Windows 11 and only doubles the minimum 4GB RAM requirement.

I'm not trying to apologize for the difference here, but it's not an entirely like-for-like comparison.

A lot of people are bringing up Wirth's law or other things, but I want to get more specific.

Has anyone else noticed how bad sign-on redirect flows have gotten in the past ~5 years?

It used to be you clicked sign in, and then you were redirected to a login page. Now I typically see my browser go through 4+ redirects, stuck at a white screen for 10-60 seconds.

I'm a systems C++ developer and I know nothing about webdev. Can someone _please_ fill me in on what's going on here and how every single website has this new slowness?

I'm gonna guess here that the biggest chunk is the antivirus. Turning off Windows Defender's protection(s) should give the first visible speed boost, if that's what you prefer.

Another big chunk of this likely happened when they hardened the graphics subsystem for security. Win32 user calls are unbelievably expensive nowadays. SendMessage etc. have a ton of overhead.

Another chunk is likely the sheer number of expensive DLLs that need to be loaded and initialized with most apps. For example, IIRC, the moment you load COM or WinSock DLLs, your app stops loading snappily. Pretty much anything will load COM even without intending to.

Another chunk is IMM - the ctfmon process you love, for multi-language/keyboard support. ImmDisable(0) can make loading a bit snappier, but then good luck with keyboard switching and the like. It uses window hooks, which are slow Win32 calls as mentioned.

People think it's just a matter of writing plain Win32, but that's not the whole story, although it certainly helps compared to more heavyweight frameworks.

We just rely on layers and layers of cruft. We then demand improvements when things get too bad, but we're only operating on the very top layer where even dramatic improvements and magic are irrelevant.

Windows is especially bad at this due to so much legacy reliance, which is also kind of why people still bother with Windows. Not to claim that Linux or MacOS don't have similar problems (ahem, Catalyst) but it's not as overt.

A lot of the blame gets placed on easy to see things like an Electron app, but really the problem is so substantial that even native apps perform slower, use more resources, and aren't doing a whole lot more than they used to. Windows Terminal is a great example of this.

Combine this with the fact that most teams aren't given the space to actually maintain (because maintaining doesn't result in direct profits), and you've got a winning combination!

I have been saying this for a decade. Technology is getting worse as a whole. Hardware is continuing to improve, but the software is getting worse at a faster rate, making the overall product suck more.

One of the reasons is the whole "software is a gas" thing. As long as there is faster hardware, more memory, more storage, software will get slower, more bloated, and take up more space, just because a gas always fills its container.

But another reason is there's more people in tech who don't know what they're doing. More people who took a bootcamp and jumped into a job, or came from some other career and barely know how to use a computer, never used Linux/UNIX. Some newer roles have very specific niches, where they don't know much about tech, and then they're asked to write code, which they have almost no idea how to do. I've recently worked with colleagues who were contributing code, and getting in the way of building the product, who shouldn't have been within 10 miles of an IDE. And when the senior developers don't know how environment variables work, I weep.

Things Windows 10 has to content with when executing a new binary, that Windows 3.51 didn't

1. Windows Defender anti-virus checking the binary and contacting MS' server for binary signing/black list

2. Kernel32 trampolines

3. All sorts of security mitigation techniques such as stack cookies setup etc.

4. Telemetry

5. Hardware accelerated GUI initiation vs 'dump everything to frame buffer in kernel GUI32 library'

6. Load fonts, graphics etc. that can work well beyond 640x480

7. Deal with the scheduler juggling hundreds of processes that let you from accessing winsock2 lib immediately, to have multiplex sound mixing, to system restore, all in the background.

Not gonna lie, my memory serves me well. I remember using Windows 98 on an old PC, and it was hot garbage. It took generations to boot up, and applications took generations to open. My story is anecdata, but so it this twitter post. These days I have an infinitely snappy experience with desktop linux on an SSD.

Well of course it does.

WinNT 3.51 was released in 1995 - the fastest PC in 1995 was either a Pentium or Pentium Pro at ~100 MHz - in 2000 a 600 MHz machine is likely a Coppermine PIII.

A fairly common amount of RAM in 1995 to Run WinNT would have been around 32 megs of ram, 64 megs would be especially generous. 128 megs is a high end workstation amount of memory.

The ATA interface also doubled in performance between 1995 and 2000.

There were significant security and stability improvements between NT 3.51 and Windows 2000 - particularly with changes to the driver model that increased stability. (even more so between 2000 and Windows 10/11)

I am always frustrated with the usual answer to these kinds of demonstrations: “Yes, but these new apps are doing so much more. Also, security.”

Except, that they are not, not at the time they are launched at least. And even if they were, we have a hundred-fold more compute power, with a hundredth of the latency for memory and storage.

Regarding security, it should have negligible effect in most cases. At least, effects should not be perceptible to the human mind.

It really is just a consequence of the way we develop software nowadays. We do not need to optimize programs to make them work at all, so we just do not. We work on new features, and we hire people who can churn new features.

And we decided to optimize for developer time, instead of user time. So, instead of painstakingly developing a Web site, a native application, an Android app, and an iOS app, we just push Web apps everywhere.

Wirth's law: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wirth's_law

See also "input lag" by dan luu: https://danluu.com/input-lag/

It is not the main thing going on in this twitter post, but it does show a way modern computers feel slower than older machines.

I'm of the opinion that the Windows NT family went downhill after Microsoft moved Dave Cutler from running Windows NT development to running other projects (Windows x64, XBox, Azure).

Dave's no excuses attitude towards performance and stability is sorely missed.

I know people who ran Windows Server 2003 as a client OS, which was the last version of NT that Dave was in charge of.

Opening Notepad, a DOS prompt, and Paint do not faithfully represent the app load speed experience on that hardware. Try Microsoft Office, or CorelDraw, etc.

It is such a pain to write Win32 code that you didn't have time to add all the features that would slow down program launch.

Misunderstood or intentionally misapplied "wisdom" like "premature optimisation is the root of all evil".

Programmer comfort, unified frameworks, higher level languages over user experience.

Focus on end users instead of professional users.

Stupider programmers and programming through "good enough", "everyone can code" and "salaries are too high, hire someone cheaper".

Computers getting cheaper, therefore users buying new machines to run software faster, instead of programmers trying to get stuff running fast on current hardware.

As others have pointed out, Windows 2000 would probably be a better comparison than NT 3.51. Apps did not open instantly on most computers in ~2000, and larger apps like Word could take a few seconds.

On the other hand, a large part of the delay was due to the slow seek time of the magnetic hard drive (milliseconds). The CPUs only had one core, and RAM was both smaller and much slower. Modern SSDs make seek time negligible, ancient PassMark scores suggest a >10x improvement in single-core CPU performance, and there's been a >20x improvement in RAM transfer rate and a >40x improvement in RAM size. Residential internet bandwidth has seem something like a 100x improvement.

None of that hardware improvement seems visible in modern PCs, except for nicer graphics and (especially) higher-resolution displays. But comparing video games from ~2000 to video games today reveals just how small that graphical difference is in the OS/application space. MS Office was a lot more responsive in the early 2000s, too.

In the early days of Firefox, the developers bragged that every new release was smaller than the previous one. Maybe one day there will be a fad for more responsive software in general.

Because we cannot accept a certain piece of software as finished. It doesn't mean there aren't any updates. However, in the iOS store I can update some apps every week.

On the other hand, I very much like the F-Droid store. There are so many useful and user-friendly apps. They work and stay like this for a long time.

I suspect the underlying topic here is money. Open source apps don't get much funding. So the developers need to focus on the essentials and get them right. On the other hand, subscription-based apps have a steady inflow of money. For some reason, they need to constantly work on these and add new features with marginal utility. I regret having updated some iOS apps. They were working perfectly fine in 2018 but have added bloat and bugs since then.

I have a related issue to report: high power usage at idle(or should I say: no user interaction).

In the past it was understandable, because those primitive 130nm, single-core CPUs had to keep spinning since performance scaling was still a relatively new thing back then.

Despite all the advancements in the field it seems like more often than not each of those cores is up to something at all times.

First thing I do with a new Android device is to limit the number of background processes. This causes occasional crashes of some apps, but the difference in general smoothness is noticeable.

Meanwhile my laptop draws 30W seemingly doing nothing in particular.

Launching HWiNFO halves that number which, if actually true, is properly insane.

Reminds me of finding an old laptop in the attic (IBM ThinkPad 760LD). 90MHz Pentium, 8MB of RAM, 810MB of HDD, with Win98 installed. I could boot it and start Excel 4 times in the time it took for my workstation to even get to the desktop. Really nice and snappy usage experience.

Sidenote, look up the ThinkPad 760 series, it had some really cool features. Raise-able keyboard so you could have it at an angle, physical sliders for sound and backlight, easy access to the internals and hot-swappable battery.

At the speed of light, photons travel about 1 foot per nanosecond.

In other words, a modern 2 GHz processor would have time to execute at least one instruction between the time photons leave the screen, and the moment they reach your retina. Probably more than one, with multicore pipelined processors.

And yet today we wait and wait and wait for Windows to open a simple program.

Indeed... what happened?

This reminds me of [this](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pW-SOdj4Kkk) talk by Jonathan Blow. He compared the startup time of an older and newer version of Photoshop. The newer one was several times slower despite basically being the same program.

Every developer for the past two decades has been banking on Moore to save them from the consequences of poorly written code and importing a boatload of 3rd party dependencies but Moore is running out of funds and the bill is coming due.

That's what happened.

I remember those days, Win 3 was never that snappy. You had to wait and it was really happy to crash if more than a couple of programs were running.

Win9x was better, you could run a few more apps without too many issues. But blue screens were super common. But it was fairly responsive if you didn't have too much running.

Win2000, yeah it could be that responsive.

What stands out to me, is Windows is very responsive the less stuff that is running, even today. Once those older machines had to do anything else you had to wait.

Those old apps sat much closer to the metal. I can't imagine how many layers sit between windows apps today, worse if they off Electron.

I use WinMerge[1] a lot, and it's always impressed me how it immediately opens to a useable state. So it's absolutely still possible to write Windows software that can open instantly. I think the biggest issue, which multiple other comments have identified, is that people just don't care. Apps open fast enough these days, and no one is pushing back on developers to improve their app's startup performance.

[1]: https://winmerge.org

What disgusts me the most is on the modern system every single window either animates in a glitched empty then flickers to redraw properly or animates in an interface but then flashes as it redraws to show what it’s supposed to be.

Resizing makes the windows flicker disgustingly. Even the mouse cursor changing to the resize widget often draws a large glitched cursor for a single frame on every windows machine I’ve used sometimes.

If someone ever fixed this trash and made the OS feel solid and not a flickering glitchy mess I’d be in their debt.

I am currently using Windows 10 LTSC (the newest version) and after some basic configuration it is INSANE how responsive it is. It boots basically instantly and apps launch instantaneously. I hand the laptop to random people and they are always amazed and how well it works. This is on a decently fast Dell XPS laptop but nothing insane. All the crap has been stripped out.

Seriously recommend trying it out - more responsive than any OS I have ever used - even a lean running Ubuntu or OSX

Electron is probably the biggest culprit. There are still a few native apps that I use like mIRC, foobar2000 and they always feel very snappy.

And yesterday I was mercilessly downvoted for saying VSCode is slow compared to software from decades ago.

I upgraded my system less than 24 months ago, up from 8gb to 16gb of RAM. My main reason for that was gaming, but I also expected a speed-up on the usual OS tasks.

A month ago I realized that my RAM was topping at 95% capacity when running the usual suspects (vscode, edge, etc). I bought an additional 16Gb, and I'm already at 55%.

Now, RAM optimizations aside, what the hell...

I blame us, or the current generation of us. Performance (CPU and RAM) is so cheap that I feel we don't optimize anything anymore. Many of my colleagues don't have a clue on how to run a profiler, let alone actually optimize a system.

And we are always turning to more productive yet less performant platforms such as nodejs etc. It's a valuable trade off, but maybe we have gone all to an extreme...

I think a lot of that could be brought back to something closer to resembling immediacy if you go and take the time to remove all the stuff they introduced along with vista (The fadein/fadeout animations especially)

They're loading the toy applications that came with Windows 3.51 an operating system developed when 486's were common and first generation Pentiums were the bleeding edge, so around 100 MHz. (Also, using clock speed alone discounts any generational bumps in efficiency.) Of course it will be fast.

I recently watched a junior dev casually add this hideously bloated and slow library so he could save an hour or so of programming. Part of his reasoning was that "everybody else does it that way".

And that's why modern hardware keeps getting faster while modern software stays the same speed (or slower).

The next generation of devs became focused on their tools. Explosion of programming languages and frameworks. Cloud and all its vendor lock in. Agile. CI/CD pipelines. K8. Constant re-invention of the wheel just because. Lunatics are running the asylum. It's embarrassing, frankly.

I'll share a memory circa 2010 from my time at BlackBerry that comes to mind when people point out performance problems like this.

Around that time, whenever a new BlackBerry device was rebooted, it would take about 45 seconds for the OS to fully boot and become usable. I'm making up the actual times in this story because I can't remember the exact details now. Like in this video, the oldest devices would start up nearly instantly, but the boot sequence for modern devices was agonizing. Especially when you were an engineer trying to run a test that required rebooting the device!

One day, a pair of engineers finally became annoyed and curious enough to look into it and profile the problem. They found that a substantial portion of the boot time was spent parsing XML files that contained descriptions for device themes - that is, information about colors, icons, and text styles that users could choose from to customize their device. Something like a full 15 seconds was spent just on this one feature as part of the boot sequence!

So what happened? I suppose that no other engineers felt they had the responsibility or the time available to look into the long boot times until that point. But imagine being an engineer at a company like Microsoft, and one day saying to your manager or product manager: "Hey, can I spend a week on understanding why it takes a full second for Terminal to boot on Windows and see if we can speed that up?" How many managers are going to be enthusiastic about that when they're staring down a kanban board with enough tasks to fill 4 quarters?

The only reason these engineers at BlackBerry were able to look into the bootup times was because they didn't have to answer to anyone responsible for product. The team lead for this team at the time was "Engineer #2" at BlackBerry who had written all the apps for the first devices. His team was given permission to pursue whatever ideas or prototypes interested them, so they had the breathing room to chase leads like this that wouldn't necessarily pay off.

So part of the answer is that I don't think we as an industry are prioritizing performance. Once the performance is good enough, it's time to ship and move on to the next feature. But the other side is that we're building in more dynamic behaviour to our software. More customization, more flexibility, more behaviour that's defined at run-time. And this all probably makes software more useful and makes it easier for engineers to build more complex software. I think it's a similar kind of trade-off to choosing between python or Rust for a tool you're working on. What kind of performance do you need, and what kind of developer experience do you want?

Wait’ll you hear about changing TV channels in 1985.

Back in the day I had a Windows NT 3.51 machine sitting on my desk, right next to a HP 9000 workstation (PA-RISC) running HP-UX; I do not remember the NT machine being this responsive. It wasn't terrible but I did most of my work on the 9000 because it felt faster than the NT machine.

I wonder if the 600MHz machine in this video is fitted with an SSD of some sort, this would load applications far faster than the average hard drive from 1998.

Eh... a bit inaccurate, I think.

First, he's probably running those OSes on a monster of a machine, relatively speaking. Stuff is snappy on my desktop too, which has a PCIe4 NVMe drive and 128 GB RAM. Chromium, which is a huge and very complex application starts up in maybe a second or less.

When you're doing old school computing today it's easy to max out the specs to a point that would be unrealistic in that time. You can put 128MB RAM into a machine when most people in the day might have had 16MB. NT4 is from 1996, and that machine is from 2000, so seems likely. I remember computers back in the day. Windows 2000 ran slowly on the hardware I had.

Second, modern software does way more in the name of convenience. Eg, nobody really uses notepad. We use VS Code for instance, which is an enormous application, the sort that would have seriously challenged a computer back then.

And really everything grew in the same manner. Discord is big, but Discord draws its own widgets and includes a web browser. If you did Discord with native widgets, plain text and without all the fancy stuff like animated emoji and special effects, it'd be much lighter and faster to start too.

I would never use Windows again for my own computer. It loads shit like candy crush in the background and keeps it in memory 24/7. You cannot disable that. Candy crush… I don’t know how people work at microsoft unironically.

Compare that to Mint which looks exactly the same as Windows and now runs 100% of Windows games and it’s just unfair. It’s like running candy crush in a barrel.

Good question.

Linux also opens apps instantly, at least for me and if you ignore that some app after being opened instantly don't get instantly ready to work.

But that isn't fault of the OS.

Through some OSes used some tricks to hide this loading time.

A good example is cold starting a web browser. Modern web browsers have to handle so much that just loading the amount of code they have all at once can lead to a noticeable delay. I mean e.g. the network code your browser runs is likely a few hounded to thousand times more complicated then what you put into a simple HTTP server. There is also the rule of thumb that the difference between something working in your use-case and it working in as many situations as possible for as many people as possible might look small from an external POV but in general comes with an explosion in complexity and code. And for browsers that is not just the case for networking but also rendering HTML+CSS, executing JS, storage handling, window handling, handling boundaries and security, extensions, caching, input handling etc.

In France in conforama stores salesman use a ascii terminal GUI connected to AIX shells. Fast as hell to take your order. I’m always amazed at how marketing BS lead us to vastly sub optimal solution.

New software is written cheap. I know what you think, when you hear it, but it's much cheaper to create some functionalities that backdays. We have c# in Windows and Java on servers. This is an abstraction layer which makes things working very slow. We have JavaScript applications each running in it's own Electron sandbox. This is huge help and huge cost of performance. And it's a huge help for developer. Entry level is much lower, one does not need winapi anymore (at least in most cases), animations, rendering, typesafety for free, no coredumps, no segfaults, no guru meditation. It's different world now. And a single hello world application weights 200MB...

And another thing: security. Security on old Windows was poor. There are many things that need to be taken care of, but they used to not exist or were simply unsafe. This is another thing, one need to keep in mind, if one wants to just install windows 7 or XP and play games (as I did)

Also blame OS vendors refusal to standardize on the graphical GUI equivalent of stdio/ascii. All I want is bare-minimal GUI support (pixel placement and "pointer" events. That's all.

Instead we get apple, google, microsoft, and gnome/qt all doing their incompatible thing.

So until they do, expect the beatings to continue. /shrugs

Same with MacOS 10.6.x

Snow leopard with a intel dual core 4 gigs of ram and a SSD performs as well as a MacBook 2019 i7 running 11.x Monterrey.

So much unnecessary processes in the background IMO

Keep it simple stupid whenever possible

Simple answer: It's abstractions all the way down.

With an old machine, you can feel the "slowness" doing a similar test with something coded in assembly vs compiled.

The reality is, to be fast, do less.

There's always a brief window in time with any new technology where it's new enough that the suits haven't entirely gotten their hooks into it, so it's broadly made to be as effective as possible at doing what it's supposed to do. We unfortunately now live well down the enshitification curve of computing and now most everything is made not simply to be as good as possible at it's intended purpose, but rather to make the companies that make it is as much money as possible while performing it's intender purpose at whatever minimum standard will annoy users ever so slightly less than the amount it would require them to stop paying money for it.

Apps got a lot larger?

Also they added desktop compositing animations.

Opening a command prompt or mspaint is not exactly demanding and opens instantly on modern computers too when all desktop compositing animations are turned off.

There was a marked difference between Windows 2000 and XP.

Windows 2000: Everything opens instantly, no delays. Felt nice.

Windows XP: Noticably more sluggish than Windows 2000.

They've never recovered.

How much of that latency is down to DWM (the compositor) doing fancy transitions? It seems like there's at least a 1/4 second dedicated to the grow/fade in.

If you search the startmenu for "advanced system settings" it will pull up a control panel era System Properties app with an Advanced > Performance option. Turning off visual effects there dramatically increases responsiveness.

I'd love to see it booting and then cold starting the apps, for comparison.

Software is slow because being slow isn't fatal.

600 mhz is quite the machine for NT. I remember running NT4 on a 233 mhz pentium II with 128 MB RAM and everything felt instant and limitless.

Windows 2000 was quite the hog compared to NT4 and all it added that I had a use for was USB support. I think by that point Dave Cutler was no longer running the show and windows performance slowly started degrading.

Completely agree with the key point here. An example that blows my mind is the incredibly unresponsive UI built in to my $2,000 television. How does a very expensive device like that end up with a series of clickable boxes that lag so much I frequently wonder if it’s working or not.

For those who were not around, or forgot: A fresh install was indeed glorious. Fast, clean, snappy, but everything invariably slowed down to a crawl within a few months and you had to reinstall and reformat about once a year go get your shit under control because it became unbearable.

Hey folks, author of the Twitter thread here.

It's pretty funny how a pair of crappy videos I recorded in 5 minutes have gone viral and landed here. I obviously did not expect that this would happen and is why I didn't give a second thought to the comparison. There are many wrong things in there (including inaccuracies, as some have reported), and Twitter really doesn't give room to nuance. (Plus my notifications are now unusable so I can't even reply where necessary.)

I don't want to defend the "computers of 20 years ago" because they sucked in many aspects. Things have indeed gotten better in many ways: faster I/O, better graphics and insanely fast networks are a few of them, which have allowed many new types of apps to surface. Better languages and the pervasiveness of virtual machines have also allowed for new types of development and deployment environments, which can make things safer. Faster CPUs do enable things we couldn't do, like on-the-fly video transcoding and the like. The existence of GPUs gives us graphics animations for free. And the list goes on.

BUT. That still doesn't mean everything is better. UIs have generally gotten slower as you can see. There is visible lag even in fast computers: I noticed it on a ~2021 Z4 workstation I had at work, I noticed it on an i7 Surface Laptop 3 I had, and I still notice it on the Mac Pro I'm running Windows 11 on (my primary machine). It's mind-blowing to me that we need super-fast multi-core systems and GBs of RAM to approach, but not reach, the responsiveness we used to have in native desktop apps before. And this is really my pet peeve and what prompted the tweets.

Other random thoughts:

* Some massive wins we got in the past, like the switch from HDDs to SSDs, have been eaten away and now SSDs are a requirement.

* Lag is less visible on macOS and Linux desktops as they still feature mostly-native apps (unscientific claim as well).

* The Surface Go 2 isn't a very performant machine indeed, but note it ships with Windows 11 and the lag exists out of the box, so that makes it enough to qualify as a fair comparison. The specs I quoted were wrong though because I misread them from whichever website returned them to me. I don't care though because this is the experience I get on all reasonably-modern machines.

* Yes, I had opened the apps in both computers before running the video, so they were all cached in memory (which puts the newer system in a worse light?).

* One specific thing that illustrates the problem is Notepad: the app was recently "rewritten" (can't recall exactly what the changes were). It used to open instantaneously on the Go 2, but not any more.

* NT 3.51 wasn't truly fair game because it was years-older than the machine. But if you scroll down the thread you'll see the same "test" rerun on Windows 2000 (released same year as the hardware).

I might come back to extend the list of random thoughts. A proper follow-up blog post would be nice, but I'm not going to have time to write one right away.

Yep. I used to run NT 4 on a P3 550 with 128MB of Ram with an Adaptec 80MB/s SCSI hard disk and A Matrox Millennium video card. Adobe apps even launched almost instantly. Browsing the web with Netscape on our University LAN was super fast too.

When I was running a windows machine, I kept reinstalling MS Office 2000. Why? It was snappy and did everything I need it to do. MS Office is now a 2GB install, when 20 years ago it was 100MB.

Of course there are plenty of new features, but I don't use them.

People bring up cruft and lack of optimization, but leave out the user demand for features.

My old Windows 98SE box on a 200Mhz MMX processor was perfect responsiveness.

We say that today, and remember the best part of the experience... but we do forget, it was all at the mercy of your (maybe if you're lucky) UltraATA/33mhz bus.

It's cheaper to beef up the hardware than to fine-tune the software. Fine-tuning may be excruciating because it hinders all other activities related to the software development.

This isn't exactly a fair comparison. When Windows 3.1 was released, that machine would have seemed like an absolute monster. (Remember when Moore's Law actually got us speed improvements, not just more cores?)

Regardless, to answer "what happened?", people started demanding more from apps (dark mode, UI parity with web editions, rapid prototyping, simple development, cross-platform) and it became cheaper to use Electron (or Qt, or WinForms) than simple win32 calls.

What happened? Ads, surveillance, virus scanners. And webshit.

This wasn’t my experience back in ~2002 running my Windows NT variant of choice, Windows 2000.

Especially due to the mechanical disk, everything seemed to take 2 to 10 times longer than it does today the first time it had to be done after a reboot, and if physical memory was exhausted and the OS started swapping, forget it, you might be staring at an hour glass for multiple minutes to open a web browser or something of the sort.

I love SSDs and multicore machines of today.

I'd like to see them open Photoshop or something chunky. That's what I recall taking much longer on my G3 Macs than it does on my M1 Pro Macbook.

They should probably run some sort of antivirus too; this is built-in for Windows now, ya? That'd be my first guess for the small programs. My memory of those days doesn't feel any faster than today, but I never had anything as top-of-the-line as a 600Mhz chip in 1999, more like half of that.

I'm convinced that most closed source software made by big companies has sleep() everywhere. Theres just no other explanation. Maybe synchronous animations.

That OS is five years old when that computer was made.

Here's a much more apt comparison (still really snappy):

https://twitter.com/jmmv/status/1672073678102872065/mediaVie...

Telemetry happened.

Running notepad is easy. I still shiver remembering running Visual Age for Java as my IDE with Windows 2000. it felt like molasses.

Smart really, they cannot make things too fast or there is no reason for us to upgrade every year to reach that unobtainable top.

With the apps shown - paint, explorer, cmd and notepad, it's still instant today. Web and electron stuff, on the other hand ..

Applications and operating systems can be a lot faster when there is no layered security and everything runs with admin privileges.

Can someone recommend a modern Linux DM/WM and maybe a set of applications which would be as responsive?

I have been running a bare XMonad for a couple of years with `xset r rate 300 40`, and it's okay but far from perfect. The WM seems to process its mouse events with a delay sometimes, and often focuses the wrong window whenever the mouse pointer moves.

Not just that, the transition from spinners to SSD brought a dramatic speed in the OSs of that day but the speed gain has since been rolled back by the garbage layers in the OS. A prime example is macOS which gets slower with each release and it's a tragic level of neglect that there are no mandatory equivalent tests to the last OS release.

In 2000, I would turn on my Pentium MMX 233Mhz machine running Windows 95, and then go and make popcorn while it started up.

I'm curious what's on that system for storage. Is it using the original hard drive, or does he have some kind of solid state medium hooked up? Because I do not recall things loading that fast.

Yes, input latency back then was far better. But actually launching things came with appreciable pauses. Because disks back then _sucked_.

TBF I have been using a Windows 10 machine on a 2017 lenovo laptop for a couple of years and I like the experience. Once I managed to turn off all those widgets Windows 10 brought with it the experience improved a lot.

Of course I'm not using any heavy duty applications, and I only play classic games for which even a Pentium is a bit of overkill.

Network call are incredibly slow compared to a processor call to L1, L2 (damn even L3 cache, an ssd or ram!), so I assume that every telemetry option is putting this computer in a state of "I will waste billions of cycles waiting for an answer from a server for something I could launch right away if I wanted to".

There's pretty clearly a law of conserved latency, that users will gladly suffer x latency for y capability, with capability complexifying until things are too slow, requiring then hw/sw stack upgrades to make it all fast again, while overall capability utilization decreases

That hardware is a few generations ahead of even high-end server hardware when Windows NT 3.51 dropped. Of course, any OS is going to be snappy when running on much faster hardware with much more RAM than it was designed for.

Put Windows 2000 on that thing and see if it runs just as well.

Windows 11 is doing all these desktop effects (transparency, animations, rounded corners etc) in the compositor. You can disable all those and it will improve things. Also the security related stuff that Windows 11 does is something that was not there in the past.

I remember when I was asking people why my computer was slow with a HDD as it was not slow before. People got annoyed with my question (and told I did not have the knowledge), it was a weird experience I will never forget.

NEVER FORGET Wirth's Law:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wirth's_law

Wirth's law is an adage on computer performance which states that software is getting slower more rapidly than hardware is becoming faster.

My main suspicion is that OS have some kind of agreement with hardware vendors under the excuse of "it's new innovation which requires more CPU power". It's a hand in hand system where you need new software for the new hardware AND VICE VERSA.

It is veeeery hard to prove it, but it's similar to house appliances using designs and parts that wear out easily. Capitalism and growth DICTATES that it must sell, so it's impossible for a company to survive if it produces durable stuff. It's economically impossible to compete.

It's how the whole industry works (part manufacturing, etc), so it's not possible for a company to go against it. Capitalism cannot allow it.

Ok, so the NT machine has no opening animations. The W11 machine has opening animations. Those things have a fixed running time. They're used so that the opening isn't so jarring to the eye, but yes, it slows shit waaaay down.

I recently fired up a windows 7 VM to interface with some old hardware. Everything opens in less than 500ms,just like I remembered it was like once I got an SSD.

Using windows 10+ is infuriating with all the ui latency.

I am using xfce with a minimal set of services and all the system apps and most others open instantly. Alt+tab is also always instant. It is an MS, Apple, Gnome/KDE problem, not modern computers one.

I just reloaded Big Sur on a 10 year old Macbook (the last OS version it supports), and it runs like that video.

My 2 year old HP laptop running Windows, on the other hand, runs the way we're thinking about.

On my work machine it’s all the ‘helpful’ software IT have added for info sec and asset management and god knows what, they just love to pile this crap on until the machine runs like a dog!

What happened? Apps got huge. OSes got huge. More and more security checks are needed now that every computer is connected 24/7.

But yeah responsiveness does not seem to be a design goal anymore these days.

I agree with the post. My first computer had worse specs than this and was a perfectly usable experience. I actually used it to edit videos. It had 128mb RAM and shipped with Windows 98.

My system pops up a terminal pretty much instantaneously, maybe he just needs to turn off transparency or something? I mean I’m on Linux but I’m sure Windows can be configured somehow…

"the same apps" are not the same. Totally different binaries that load different compiled programs with different features and code and linked libraries.

For contrast, my daily driver is Debian/KDE on a typical 9-year-old laptop and opening/interacting with absolutely everything is immediate and snappy.

Where's the sound of the HDD spinning to read the executables? Has he opened them before and are cached or is he using an SSD (would that be possible?)?

Cargo cult happened. 99% of 'improvements' and 'revolutionary new ideas' are hype and horseshit logic.

You could play SNES games with zero loading screens. And it was awesome.

Now, loading screens are everywhere. Like the Atari + cassette era.

I have never worked on modern Mac. Does they have same UI lag as UI in modern Windows or UI on modern Mac reacts instantly?

Windows has a lot more telemetry and spyware and advertising code in it now that is constantly running. There's probably 10x the number of running processes on a modern Microsoft OS, most of them useless to you.

Also all of the support APIs and libraries for text editing and image display are orders of magnitude more complex now: eg Notepad supports unicode and emoji.

forget Windows NT on a 600Mhz CPU. My Amiga A1200 runs AmigaOS and launch programs from his old rust harddrive, faster that Windows 10 or 11. Everything feels more faster and fluid. And is a machine running at 20MHz with a few megabytes of ram

We all know what happened as programmers. there's layers and layers of abstraction.

Have we tried running the old Windows NT apps on the new Windows system?

Windows NT 3.51 min specs: 25MHz CPU, 16MB memory (for the server edition), 90MB disk space

Windows 11 min specs: 1GHz 64-bit CPU, 4 GB RAM, 64GB disk space.

This is a horribly unfair comparison. We were complaining about systems being slow AF back then too. (Insert _turbo button_ meme here)

What happened? Normal hyperbloat between os, libraries and network.

Only Windows has this issue. There's nothing about my Mac or my Chromebook that is anything less than immediate. You can quibble about whether the compositor introducing an extra frame of latency was worth the tradeoff, but that is on the margins.

Shoe-horned and duct-taped "security."

This has nothing to do with snappy apps and everything to the complication of graphics sublayers, along with the difference of VGA vs HDMI, etc.

Is this even true?

How many applications were tested?

“What Andy giveth, Bill taketh”

Windoes NT on a machine from the day was incredibly slow. I remember opening Netscape Navigator and took minutes.

iOS is pretty fast though.

But the worst part: people contributing on this site are contributing to this hell too.

Open the task manager n00b.

This is hard to understand, windows is slow, and you are complaining that windows is what, slower than it used to be?

Why not use something faster? I get no lag with xfce