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Comment by j_leboulanger | Hacker News Reader

I would tend to disagree. In the 1990s System 7 would start in a few seconds from hard disk on a Mac SE/30.

Word would start in less than a second (not sure which version it was), and most features we use today were available. Adobe Photoshop 3.0 would start in less than 3 seconds, and same with Premiere 1.0.

Of course you lacked some memory protection features which could make the whole computer crash because of a single program failure, but daily experience was much better on old systems. They felt way faster because they have less input lag and because UI was less bloated.

I'm not saying 1990s computer and software were better, but they were way faster than what we use today.

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I'm pretty sure you're exaggerating quite a bit.

Anyone can watch this video [1] to see how long it actually took to boot up or launch Word. But bootup seems to take 20 seconds, and launching Word took 7 seconds. Which roughly matches my memory.

So about an order of magnitude slower than you're describing. (The SE/30 had a clock speed twice that of the SE, but launching things is mostly bound by the hard drive speed.)

Other things like saving a 3-line Word document took 6 seconds. Quitting Word took 6 seconds. Basically, everything was pretty slow back then.

In contrast, I just tried launching Word on my M1 MacBook, and it took about three quarters of a second. While saving a file is simply instantaneous, as is quitting. And launching Photoshop takes 7 seconds.

Edit: here's another video [2] opening Photoshop 2 which takes a full 28 seconds.

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=g0O7heFHA-k

[2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LP_JNatS2Sg

>but launching things is mostly bound by the hard drive speed.

which got slower and slower taking swap speed with it, which slowed down everything you were actually using. You'd defrag the drive regularly and that wouldn't do it so you'd have to wipe and reinstall from scratch. And that was some hours of work but like having a brand new machine again when you were done. You couldn't believe how bad it had degraded to. The good old days or selective memories?

Oh man, I forgot about defragging. There was something quite satisfying about knowing your computer was “tidying things up” behind the scenes.

As recently as 2015 I was advising people that if you finish your work too early to go home, you should spend your time on updating our docs, defragging your hard drive, and reading the docs for your tools (eg, learning keyboard shortcuts or optional flags).

Defragging is one of those clear cases for time shifting things from your high value time to your low value time.

Oh, when I was younger I was mesmerized by watching all of the little squares in the defrag tool change color and move around. It was like someone tidying your room for you!

Windows reinstall every few years still gives a performance bump IME, nvme SSD be damned. It’s hard to keep a windows installation clean with all the startup junk that worms its way in over time.

On the video you sent Photoshop takes 6 seconds to start and it seems like it is stored on an external disk which could explain why it's slower.

I'll try to make a video on real hardware once I have time to show that I'm not exaggerating. And remember that the SE/30 is a computer from 89, so not even early 90s.

I checked again. He double-clicks the icon at 16:28 and the watch cursor ends at 16:55. That's 27 seconds. I might be off by a second or two, it's hard to measure exactly.

But this matches my memory as well -- Photoshop was by far the slowest program I had at the time to start up. I remember being bored waiting because it just took forever to load. While applications like Word definitely took several seconds to load, but that wasn't such a big deal.

Of course, all of this was a vast improvement over the several minutes it would take loading programs on my Commodore 64 a few years prior... from cassette tape! ;)

Bootup taking 20 seconds is consistent with my memory as well. It's a bit of a stretch to say that's "a few seconds," but it's not wildly off. 20 seconds is pretty fast, especially considering the anemic HDD speeds of the time.

I used an SE/30 well into the late 90s as a kind of boutique writing appliance. I never used Word, I used BBEdit, which opened rather quickly. I always felt getting the machine up and going was faster than a standard Windows desktop.

The SE/30 was a hell of a machine. I set up an SE for a friend in the mid-90s for her to write papers on, and she really liked using it and never complained about the speed (and she did use Word). Which is saying something, because the SE was kind of a dog.

> In the 1990s System 7 would start in a few seconds from hard disk on a Mac SE/30.

A fresh System 7 install on an SE/30 would boot from a hard drive in ~20 seconds. Adding system extensions could double this pretty easily.

On a not so fresh install it boots in 13 seconds here : https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LgltFQss3yU Pretty sure mine would boot even faster

How many wireless networks was System 7 trying to connect to?

I mean, we all know the answer was 0. Hell, the systems you're talking about were likely not networked at all. I have a feeling that if we took all the 'slow' software we're talking about and cut out all the pieces reaching for the network in one place or another that we'd gain about an order of magnitude of speed back. Of course we'd lose about that much in functionality.

I mean, it's also possible that that's because the SE/30 was running software designed to also support slower machines like the Mac Plus, Mac SE, or Mac II? The SE/30 was kind of a beast when it came out.

In fact, I'm going to directly relate this to Wirth's Law. I think there was a brief span of years where software didn't get slower as quickly as hardware got faster. My experience of the early 90s was that my computer was slow as hell, and those of my more well-heeled friends were incredibly fast.

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