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FWIW i do not remember having issues like that, i had mIRC practically always open, a web browser, email application, etc and i do not remember ever having networking issues.

Internet was slow but that was largely because for the most part of the 90s i was stuck with a very slow 2400 baud modem - i got to appreciate the option that browsers had to not download images by default :-P.

But in general i do not remember being unable to run multiple programs at the same time, even when i was using Windows 3.1 (though with Win3.1 things were a bit more unstable mainly due to the cooperative multitasking).

Me neither, I'm not going to lie and say that I had 40 applications opened, but I DID have 5-10 apps using the web with 0 issues (A browser+IRC App + Email Client+MICQ+MSN Messenger+Kazaam/Napster+Winamp in stream mode).

Very very few of the web and desktop applications of today are as snappy and user-friendly as classic Winamp.

It really whipped the llamas ass.

It still does! https://www.winamp.com/

And yet, people stopped using it.

I used to use it all the time. Now I use Spotify instead. I'm not sure I want to go back to curating my own collection of mp3's again.

In a better world, you really wouldn't need to. Winamp was great - The weak point was always the playlist editor, but winamp's interface for simply playing music and seeing what was up next was wonderful. Spotify could provide you with a playlist plugin that simply gave a list of URLs, or let you download one that lasted X hours.

Mobile phones happened. Tiny memories while always being connected.

Sure, but if you could have Spotify as is, or a light weight player, like WinAMP, both with equal access to the Spotify service, which would you pick?

People aren't using Spotify because the player is fantastic, they use it because Spotify has a huge library, is reasonable price and the player is sort of okay.

Totally agree. But the DRM monster rears its head. Everyone is afraid you'll steal their choons if you're allowed to play them on whatever player you like sigh

Still, all iTunes content can be de-DRM-ed in 500 lines of C code, so it's not like "the industry" actually requires it to be secure.

Like everything these days, it's barely good enough. And why bother implementing your DRM as a 1KB C++ library when you can use a 5MB Objective C framework instead?

Spotify is a case in point: it used to have a fantastic, small and fast native desktop app. It replaced it with the bloated web-based one we see today.

That's an artifact of IP laws. The reason you don't have to curate your own mp3s again is because some service managed to find a way to give you a searchable, streamable collection of music that's also legal. But that in no way implies Spotify needs to be so bloated.

I still use Winamp for offline music. Nothing else is faster.

Try AIMP 3. It's amazing and is an improvement over Winamp.

I did use foobar2000 for a while and it was quite snappy.

Same here. About the only time when by browser + mIRC + WinAMP + IM + Visual C++ 6.0 combo slowed down was when the VC++ was compiling the game I was working on. I would then close the IM, because doing so would speed up the compile times by 1.5x.

> Very very few of the web and desktop applications of today are as snappy and user-friendly as classic Winamp.

foobar2000?

IRC, SMTP, IMAP are protocols from back when desktop operating systems didn’t even come with TCP/IP. They would use a single connection for unlimited messages. I was using a “modern” chat program, AOL Instant Messenger.

Alright, the missing part of my story was that I was also using a proxy program to share a single connection with my brothers. NAT wasn’t widely available yet, and Winmodems were much easier to find than hardware modems. (And I hadn’t discovered Linux and the free Unixes yet.)

So, every TCP connection that AIM made was 2 connections in the proxy program. We quickly discovered that AIM on more than one computer at a time made the entire Internet unusable.

Every generation of developers decries the next generation for bloat, but Windows 95 had preemptive multitasking that made the computer so much snappier (plus other features), at the cost of multiple times more RAM needed than Windows 3.1. (16 MB was the unofficial minimum, and often painfully small. Microsoft’s official minimum was impractical back then.) Windows XP had protected memory that made it more feasible to run multiple applications, because they were much less likely to crash each other (plus other features, including a TCP/IP stack featuring NAT and a useful connection limit), at another several multiples more RAM needed.

There have always been tradeoffs. Back in the day, programs were small and developers focused more on making sure they did not crash, because they didn’t have lots of RAM and crashing would often require the computer to reboot. That developer focus meant less focus on delivering features to users. (Also, security has often meant bloat.) Now, you barely need to know anything about computer science, and you can deliver applications to users, at the cost of ginormous runtime requirements.

It may be true that people are partially looking back in rose-tinted glasses, but there's more than just an inkling of truth to their side. Casey Muratori (game developer for the Witness) has a really good rant [1] about bloat in Visual Studio specifically, where he demonstrates load times & the debugger UI updating today vs on an Pentium 4 running XP. Whether or not you attribute the performance difference to new features in Win10/VS, it's worth considering the fact that workflows are still being impacted so significantly on modern hardware. We were able to extract 100s of times more out of hardware and gave it up for ???

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GC-0tCy4P1U

The Visual Studio 6 on Pentium 4 demonstration starts around 36th minute.

I used Visual Studio 6 for years, and yes, I can confirm, it was really that fast.

It's also not true that there were problems with more applications running etc as "Decade" claims. Or to be more precise, there were no problems if one used Windows NT, and I've used NT 3.51, NT 4 and 2000 for development, starting with Windows development even before they were available. And before that, Windows 3.x was indeed less stable, but it is the time before 1995. Note that the first useful web browser was made in 1993, internet as we know it today practically didn't exist. There were networks, but not web.

Maybe it’s possible for opposite things to be true if they happen to different people. I wasn’t a developer back then.

Windows NT required a multiple more RAM to run than the consumer versions of Windows (oh no, bloat!), and was much more picky about what hardware it ran on. Starting with XP, the professional and consumer versions of Windows have merged. We are so lucky.

> I wasn’t a developer back then.

That explains your inaccurate perspective.

> Windows NT required a multiple more RAM to run than the consumer versions of Windows (oh no, bloat!), and was much more picky about what hardware it ran on.

Allow me to claim that that is also not true, in the form you state it. Again, I've lived through all this, and I can tell you what that was about. The "pickiness" of NT was even at these times not about the motherboards and the chipsets. It was about the hardware consumer devices. Many things that probably don't even exist as the products today, like a black-and-white hand-scanner that scanned as you moved your hand over the paper and had only Windows 3.x drivers on the floppy with it. There was never a problem of having a developer machine running NT in any reasonable price range, with a reasonable graphic card, monitor, keyboard and mouse. And, at the start, a phone line modem transmitting some kilobytes per second!

The RAM needs did exist, but again not such as they are made to be believed by later distortions. If I remember correctly (it changed relatively fast), at the time NT was published, Microsoft had to deliver it claiming that it will run on 4 MB, the OS and the programs and the graphics, all had to fit. Let me repeat, 4 MB. It run, but not comfortably for bigger programs. But the point is -- as soon as you at that time had 8 MB you haven't had a problem. A little later, for comfortable work, 16 MB were more than a good choice. It was a hundred, two or three of $ more than the cheapest possible offer (yes, that were the prices then), but that was it. RAM was the only thing you had to care about to have NT running.

The point is, at that time there were enough those who didn't want to use Windows NT at all, clutching to 3.x and then 95 and these are those who promoted the horror stories about OS problems. But it was just their ignorance. 95 was also reasonably stable, unless you used, like many, some "utility" programs that were more malware than of real use (the "cleaning", "protection" or even "ram expander" snake oils were used by some even then -- no to mention that a lot of people believed they had to try any program that happens to access them).

The good development tools were good and stable, especially command line (in GUI areas, there were some snake oils among them too). But Word did crash even under NT, and even during the first half of 2000-s decade, and that's completely different story, that was intentional at that time for these products.

> That explains your inaccurate perspective.

Yep, you really succeeded at empathy, there. /s

> reasonable price range

The word “reasonable” is doing a lot of work, here.

Most Pentium II systems were not running Windows NT. They were running Windows 95 or 98, which had arbitrarily severe limitations and lacked memory protections.

So, while it was technically possible to run lots of applications simultaneously on 256 MB of RAM, for most people it was a fun adventure in whether some buggy program has destabilized the system into needing to reboot to run properly again. Or whether it’s still usable with degraded functionality. In my case, that’s without using the cleaning, protection, RAM expander programs.

And even on professional operating systems, web browsers crashed a lot, and any other program that had to deal with untrusted input, which is basically anything that can open files or connect to the network, has gradually bloated as they learn security or add features.

> Most Pentium II systems were not running Windows NT. They were running Windows 95 or 98

Once again: only somebody using a computer not selected for serious development used Windows 95 and 98. No developer who knew what he was doing was using Windows 95 and 98 as his primary development machine. So if you complain about that, you used the wrong tool for your work. Like I've said, it was easy to install Windows NT, and I don't know any computer which wasn't able to run it, if it had reasonably enough RAM.

> on 256 MB of RAM

To illustrate "reasonably" once again, that changed at these times: I remember buying an AMD-based notebook in 2002 with 256 MB and running absolutely without problems Windows 2000 on it for a few years, before upgrading to 512 MB, which was the maximum for that notebook. And that was the time of Pentium III and IV, not Pentium II, and like I've said, I've run Windows NT on 8 MB computers, all with compilers, resource editors, debuggers and even IDE. And even before, I've run Windows 3.11 on 2 MB computer and used that for development too (the development tools being in text mode, of course).

> some buggy program has destabilized the system into needing to reboot to run properly again

Only on non-NT systems, and surely not developer tools. I used Windows 3.x and Windows 9x, and never had to reboot due to the developer tools "making system unstable." Not even on a 4 MB or a 16 MB machine.

> web browsers crashed a lot

I've used both Mosaic and Netscape, and before 2000 my main problem was surely not them crashing. Surfing mostly worked (only the pages loaded slowly, there were no CDNs then). Again, on a NT system.

I think we’re losing the plot. The ggp post was about doing all sorts of Internet programs at the same time on Pentium II era computers, and now you’re talking about developer tools on a Pentium 4.

Maybe it’s simultaneously true, that you could run many developer tools at the same time on Windows NT with hundreds of dollars of RAM, and attempting to run a bunch of consumer network programs at the same time (especially on consumer Windows) was asking for trouble.

I remember one of the attractions of IE 5 back in the day was how each newly launched window was its own process (not windows opened by the open link in new window menu option), so unlike Mosaic and Netscape, a crash in one copy of IE did not necessarily bring down all the other windows. Multiple windows being useful because surfing with a modem was slow regardless of CDN. Remember when Yahoo was scandalous, because banner ads took so much bandwidth?

> on Pentium II

> and now you’re talking about developer tools on a Pentium 4.

It's to illustrate that arguments are wrong: it's Decade who uses "256 MB" as an argument which is not "small memory" for Pentium II, and I illustrate that it was common in 2002 for notebooks, the time when Pentium IV was common for developer machines.

> The ggp post was about doing all sorts of Internet programs at the same time on Pentium II era computers

Let me check again:

"For example, IM, video/audio calls, and working with email shouldn't take hundreds of MB of RAM, a GHz-level many-core processor, and GBs of disk space. All of that was comfortably possible --- simultaneously --- with 256MB of RAM and a single-core 400MHz Pentium II."

OK. That is also obviously a bit off. 256 MB with Pentium II is quite a lot, as I showed 256 MB was normal even in 2002 for notebooks, as Pentium III was already common on notebooks and IV on desktops. Working with email -- at that time e-mail clients, if they used html at all, were limited to html formats of that time so "using email" completely worked, no crashes of system on NT (Outlook did have a limit of single PST having to be less than N GB, I remember that). IM too just worked, and also without crashes on NT.

That leaves "video/audio calls". Video calls were surely not common at that time, and I personally also haven't used audio calls.

But the "stability" problems you claim to have been common definitely didn't exist the way you claimed, as soon as one used NT, that is, since around 1994, or later on Windows 2000 or even later on XP or Server 2003, all NT-based. And as I've said, it was not that "too much" RAM was needed, as I've run NT on 8 MB with no problem.

So I still don't understand why you continue to stick to the narration that was simply not true. No, it was not that bad like you claim. Computers were quite stable even then for those who knew what they were doing. On NT, almost nothing crashed the system, except for failed hardware. Like I've said, it was that some apps were indeed less stable, like Word crashing or saving the invalid DOC file. But Excel, for example, while being in the same "suite" I don't remember to have ever crashed. I also don't remember browsers actually crashing, just the pages downloading very, very slowly.

The 256 MB number came from the ggp post. At the beginning of the Pentium II era, that was very expensive, but it was not the only issue with running multiple programs at the same time.

But clearly you want to have the last word, so I guess I should let you have it.

We gave it up for slightly higher profit margins enabled by hiring slightly less qualified programmers at a slightly lower rate.

In a similar vein, Industrial Light and Magic used to have a few highly talented people crafting incredibly intelligent solutions to make their movies possible: https://youtu.be/AtPA6nIBs5g

By now, most of those effects would instead be done using CGI and outsourced to Asia.

There's probably a long rant waiting to be written on this topic. Myself, I've observed how over the last four decades, CGI effects went from worthless, through novelty, through increasingly awesome, all the way to "cheapest garbage that can be made that looks convincing enough when the camera is moving very fast".

A Pentium II could barely process DVD-resolution MPEG-2 in realtime.

According to http://www.vogons.org/viewtopic.php?p=423016#p423016 a 350MHz PII would've been enough for DVD, and that's 720x480@30fps; videoconferencing would more commonly use 320x240 or 352x288 which has 1/4 the pixels, and H261 or H263 instead as the codec.

Being able to Zoom call and see up to 16 live video feeds simultaneously is an amazing advance in technology.

I'm not familiar with Zoom as I don't use it, but it's very likely you're not actually receiving and decoding 16 separate video streams; instead a MCU or "mux box" is used to combine the streams from all the other participants into one stream, and they do it with dedicated hardware.

That said, video is one of the cases where increased computing power has actually yielded proportional returns.

Don’t think it can be an MCU box. You can select an individual stream from the grid to make it larger almost instantly. The individual feeds can display both as grid and a horizontal row. I’m assuming they send individual feeds and the client can ask for feeds at different predefined resolutions.

Without having used Zoom much I can't definitively say how it works, but I've used BlueJeans quite a bit and noticed compression artifacts in various parts of the UI (e.g. text underneath each video source). That means BlueJeans is definitely muxing video sources and it really does not have a noticeable delay when changing the view. Since each video is already so compressed I think they can get away with sending you really low bitrate streams during the transition and you'll barely notice.

Mixed plus whichever feed you request to enlarge sounds more reasonable.

I have an iMac G4 from 2003 (the sunflower things) on which I installed Debian PPC and it is able to stream 720p content from my local network and play it back smoothly on VLC

> videoconferencing would more commonly use 320x240 or 352x288 which has 1/4 the pixels, and H261 or H263 instead as the codec.

Modern videoconferencing solutions (WebRTC) usually use 1280x720 and either H264 or VP8. Some apparently use HEVC. Also most modern processors and SoCs come with hardware-accelerated codecs built in, so most of the work related to compression isn't even done by the CPU itself.

> I'm not familiar with Zoom as I don't use it, but it's very likely you're not actually receiving and decoding 16 separate video streams

Yes you are receiving separate streams.

With Skype you're definitely able to receive separate streams from each participant, as I can access them individually via NDI and pipe them into OBS to do live multi-party interviews. You can see the resolution of individual feeds change when their bandwidth drops, and you can choose high/low bandwidth and latency modes for each feed. I would guess Zoom does the same but doesn't provide an NDI feed (yet).

I could see Street View-like vistas under a Pentium3/Amd Athlon. On power, I did the same you can do today but with an Athlon XP and Kopete. On video, since BeOS and Mplayer I could multitask perfectly XVid movies good enough for its era.

To be fair, 10-20 years ago was the age of Windows XP and Windows 7, not Windows 95. There barely was anything good about Windows 95, and there are likely not many people missing it, but it was also a complete different era from the later "modern" desktops, hardware as also software-wise. If anything I would call that era the alpha-version, problems included.

Most of those have nothing to do with OP's point, which is that some software uses way too much processing power than it should.

While on the topic, let's remember the speech recognition software available for Windows (and some for Android 2.x) that was completely offline and could be voice activated with, gasp, any command!

Google with its massive data centers can only do "OK/Hey Google". Riiight. I can't believe there are actually apologists for this bs.

What was the software name, if I may ask? I remember speech recognition pre-CNN to be quite terrible.

Microsoft had speech recognition since WinXP. And also Dragon Naturally Speaking. Both needed a couple of hours of training, but worked really well, completely offline, it was amazing for me at the time. It did have a very high processor usage, but that was on freaking single core Athlon and Pentium. I'm not even a native English speaker, though dare I say my English is on par with any American.

Do you mean Dragon Speech or how it was called?

Anyway, old speech recognition software was quite horrible. Most did not even worked without prior training. And Google does have now offline-speech recognition too. But true, the ability to trigger with any desired phrase is something still missing.

The ability to trigger with any desired phrase is easy, but not done for privacy reasons, to reduce the chance of it accidentally listening to irrelevant conversations.

The inability to change it from Hey google is done for marketing / usability reasons.

Nuance Dragon NaturallySpeaking

You're talking about different concepts.

Voice recognition used by things like Google Assistant, Siri, Cortana, and Alexa usually relies on a "wake word", where it's always listening to you, but only starts processing when it is confident you're talking to it.

Older speech recognition systems were either always listening and processing speech, or only started listening after you pressed a button.

The obvious downside of the older systems is that you can't have them switched on all the time.

I think it would be really easy to create an app that would also listen to a very specific phrase (like "Hey Merlin", simple pattern match, with a few minutes of training for your own voice) and then start Google Assistant.

It's so embarrassing saying Hey Google all the time, and for me, it just feels like I'm a corporate bitch, tbh. It's true, which just makes me feel worse :D

There were always idiots writing buggy code. The issues you mention are about “old software” on “old hardware”. GP is only talking about “old style of software development”. Granted Qt, X, Win API is unnecessarily complicated.